The Good Samaritan Affiliate Marketer

While the number one priority for any affiliate marketer should be making money, there are ways of combining this with aiding others, giving you that good, warm and fuzzy feeling. Scientific research has proven this to be an angle that will actually increase profitability through goodwill, as long as it is perceived as genuine. Remember that credibility is key and that blatantly egoistic "good reasons" are apt to backfire.

Charity

The most obvious way of giving something back is by charity. You can either set aside a portion of your revenue to a charity of your choice, thus increasing donations the more successful you get. Or you can find an affiliate program which in itself gives a part of its proceeds to charity. Combining them both will, of course, double your efforts and make that warm, fuzzy feeling last even longer.

Promoting the right affiliate program

When promoting an affiliate program, you can make sure the companies involved in all aspects of the process (such as manufacturers and transportation) are all conducting their business in an ethical manner, avoiding products manufactured through the use of child labor or other inhuman work environments.

In a similar way, you can try to look at the environmental aspects of the business. Though all physical products sold over the internet will be shipped and contribute to global warming, finding affiliate programs selling products manufactured nearby its target audience will make the transportation so much shorter.

The list of possible things to look closer at grows long, you can easily spend an eternity trying to find the perfect affiliate program to promote. Try to focus on the things you feel are the most important, at least you are doing something.

Helpful websites

Another way of being helpful to others is to present them with useful information about serious issues in their lives. Even though most successful websites are helpful to their audience (otherwise they wouldn?t be successful, right?), some topics may help people with far more important issues than others.

Making a helpful website about serious issues (such as diseases or similar) isn?t something to take lightly, but if you do your job right you might end up helping more people than you could imagine.

Naturally, there are many less serious issues that still pose as huge problems for people. Look at the whole phenomenon of over weight; this is clearly a market where helping people with their problem can be combined with profitability, using weight loss affiliate programs. If weight loss isn?t your niche, there are many similar niches you can try.

Hair loss, while not a life threatening disease, is a big problem for many men. Similarly the recent boom in alternative health has given affiliate marketers quite a few herbal alternatives to established diet pills and traditional health products.

Honesty

No matter how you choose to go about with your website and your affiliate programs, the single most important factor is honesty. If you say you are giving part of the proceeds to charity - make sure you do. If you are giving people weight or hair loss tips ? make sure you actually help people.

There are far too many websites exploiting peoples weight issues or similar weak spots, only trying to make as much money as possible. Do not forget the fact that if people are following your advice, you have a moral obligation to actually give them correct and useful information. And if that isn't enough for you, just transfer it into cold cash: if you give solid advice which actually helps people, they are bound to tell their friends about it, generating more profit for you. On the same token people will be angry if they perceive that you're fooling them, and you'll start experiencing a rapid decline of both visitors and money.

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