Have you ever hidden text on a web page to manipulate search engine results? Is there a network of blogs that you belong to, constantly trading links back and forth for the greater “good?” Are there pages on your site with keyword densities approaching the 50% mark? If so, most marketers would claim that you’re performing unethical affiliate marketing. While ethics sometimes seems to play an understated role in marketing, there are many among us that are very concerned about how ethical our affiliate marketing campaigns are. It’s not even a question of “doing the right thing” most of the time. Instead, many ethical affiliate marketers are simply looking for long term solutions – not short term spam designed to make a quick buck before the Google ban hammer nails their sites into the ground.

Ethical Affiliate Marketing Explained

Ever since the idea of Internet marketing took hold, marketers have been divided into two major camps – white hats and black hats (take a guess which one is considered unethical). Let’s consider some of the characteristics that divide these categories:

White Hat (Ethical)

1. Telling the truth, all the time
2. Avoiding spam (articles that are spun for mass distribution, for example)
3. Honest reviews
4. Focusing on natural SEO
5. Creating valuable, link-worthy content

Black Hat (Unethical)

1. Relying on the quickest link building methods (paid links, comment spam, etc.)
2. Lying about higher paying affiliates to make more money
3. Tricking website visitors into conversions (fake pages, misrepresented links)
4. Sabotaging competitors’ websites
5. Creating garbage content

At about this moment, you’re probably starting to wonder about a few things. You might be thinking that there’s nothing wrong with link building by actively seeking links (instead of waiting for them to come to you). You might also wonder about paid links – are they ever legitimate? Well, yes, of course they are. Do you think major offline retailers sit back and wait for people to find out about them? Absolutely not. Every business has both the right and responsibility to bring their ideas, products and services to the public in order to show customers why they need to be interested. That sounds a lot like link building to me. And what about affiliate marketers that purchase 2,000 paid directory listings to hide their important links from their competitors? What’s really wrong with this?

There are even some niches where you really don’t have much of a choice besides buying links and actively seeking link opportunities (online gambling comes to mind). You have almost no chance of catching up to the big players in those niches without some form of unnatural link building. In the marketing community, we call this the gray area, or gray hat marketing.

Ethical Product Reviews

I have a challenge for you. Try to think of one product that most people will only buy once. Leave a comment under this post if you can think of one. It’s probably pretty difficult (there are some, but not many). People tend to be multiple consumers. We buy more than one car, more than one album, more than one book, and the list goes on. So, why would you ever try to deceive a customer into purchasing one product, when you can be honest and sell multiple products at the same time? That is ethical affiliate marketing that also pays off.

Product reviews are some of the most common havens of unethical affiliate marketing. The temptation is almost always to pick the products that offer the highest conversion payouts, give them stellar (often completely made up) reviews, and hope that the uneducated saps that come to your site will buy what you tell them to buy. But ethical affiliate marketers know that building a trusted brand is important. Don’t assume that a few negative aspects of a product will turn customers off. For example, if you are writing a review about clear 4G internet, tailor it to your audience if you must be biased (would your readers value the low price tag over the connection speed, for example?).

For Whom Are We Actually Optimizing?

Ask yourself one simple question: are your SEO techniques driven more by what the robots scrape, or what the humans read? There’s an age old argument, especially with article directory submission (think Ezine and Squidoo) that the content is not meant for human eyes – its only purpose being to appease the search engine robots as they move swiftly along their daily grind. Now, it’s not that the articles you use for the purpose of article submission have to be Pulitzer prize winning pieces, but writing a single article, spinning it 100,000 times, and submitting it to 10,000 article directories isn’t helping anyone.

The Internet is (sometimes hilariously) flooded with garbage content. Unmonitored blog comment sections are littered with comments like “you do well content on your blog, but not as good done as GREAT MOVIES FOR FREE.” Article submission sites are full of articles that either give horrible advice, are remarkably poorly written (if they were written by a human), or both (usually both).

You might see some quick SERP results by spamming content all over the Internet. The SEO company J.C. Penney hired sure did. The major retailer was suddenly ranking for such competitive terms as “bed covers” and “gas grills.” That is, until Google found out about it. Don’t make the same mistake. Make every traceable link back to your site valuable, and you’ll see your hard work pay off, either because people read your content somewhere else and want more, or simply because you’re keeping your image clean.

It Pays to Be Ethical

Not just figuratively. I’m not preaching being an ethical marketer so you can sleep at night. I’ll be the first to admit a few black hat stains on my past. But being an ethical marketer really does make a difference. As Google tightens their algorithm to focus more on quality content and links, the difference will become even more obvious. Providing high quality content helps gain trust from your readers, and trusting readers tend to be more likely to click your affiliate links. Other marketers will also notice your efforts and will be more likely to link to you on pure merit.

It’s cheap to advertise online and anyone can launch a robot driven marketing campaign, complete with ads destined to only be clicked by accident. Are you willing to add to this mass betrayal of the American consumer? Or, are you ready to make a larger investment, confident in both your products and your worthiness as a marketer? If so, you truly qualify as an ethical affiliate marketer. If not, CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’RE THE 2000TH PERSON TO VISIT THIS SITE! CLICK HERE TO RECEIVE YOUR $2 BILLION CHECK!!!!