If you’re a good blogger, there actually might be some money for you in blogging on behalf of particular products. This is a common way that people do affiliate marketing these days. Advertisers engage bloggers to blog about their products or services or they post guest posts on other people’s blogs that have links to a product that they are selling. There is nothing wrong with this, there is nothing unethical about this and, in some cases, it actually helps people to find products that they need.
There is, however, a very seedy side to this. There are some blogs out there that make patently outrageous claims about products. Before you get tempted to do this for a few extra bucks, you may want to consider the risks.
You Don’t Have Insurance
This is an assumption, but it’s generally a safe one to make. If you are a blogger that blogs for promotional purposes, you probably don’t carry the type of insurance that businesses carry to protect them against being sued. You can be sued for false advertising. You can also get in other types of trouble – criminal trouble – for making false claims about products.
According to Professional Door Dealer, it is illegal to make an unsubstantiated claim in an advertisement. It is also illegal to fail to include details in an offer where you are asking someone for money. This has some serious implications for a lot of the blogs out there.
How many blogs have you run into that make outrageous claims about products? How many blogs are out there claiming that one plant or another, some New Age treatment or some other quackery will cure cancer? Those are false claims. Those claims are not backed up by evidence, they are not backed up by science and they would not meet the standards of truth that any court would hold them to, in all likelihood.
Some of the bloggers that engage in this will get away with it and, in fact, most of them will probably get away with it. The thing to keep in mind is that participating in this sort of thing can destroy your reputation as a blogger. If people already know that you’re a liar, why should they believe anything you say?
Despite the fact that the Internet is full of bad information, you shouldn’t take that to mean that it’s a free-for-all as far as information goes. In fact, being a reputable, honest and reliable blogger makes you stand out even more in light of the fact that there is so much bad information out there. Rather than going for the fast buck and promoting something with false information, consider how much being honest could help you.
An Archive of Information
Scientific American published an article that references what was being discussed above regarding the false claims sometimes made by quack remedy manufacturers. The issue aside, consider the fact that an article by Scientific American, which is likely to be cited by anybody discussing this issue, can almost completely drown out all of the false racket being made about supplements on the Internet. This is because of reputation. Scientific American has a reputation as being an accurate and reputable site, and they backup their information with citations. This gives them a reputation that is worth far more money than a cheap, dishonest blog post.
You might be able to make a few bucks as a good blogger blogging for rather deceitful purposes. Before you fall into this trap, however, consider the fact that your reputation as a reliable blogger may be worth far more money in the long run and there are good reasons to avoid being deceptive or dishonest in anything you do on your blog or on other blogs. If you’re using WordPress templates or other tools to archive your blog posts, you could end up with an archive of good, reliable information that could be worth a lot of money with the right promotion.
