I hate what trashy advertisers have done to the internet.

This way, the small percentage of people who may be concerned can download the inevitable plugin if needed, management and links to privacy and disclosure pages automated, etc. Of course, the real drivers of this may need to the actual affiliate programs – if CJ for example put this in their auto code generation tool.

As for Twitter, the major URL shorteners like BudURL could simply set up a complementary domain for affiliate/sponsored links and maintain the disclosure on their site via a link preview function. Again, it would help if Twitter then autotagged the URL.

A modest proposal, at least. And requires no one else’s permission to start!

a truly excellent post.
Internet marketing is all about relationships. And relationships are based on trust, otherwise they will not work.

About Twitter though – you can’t always post your affiliate links as they are. I’ve noticed that Twitter dislikes long and ugly affiliate links and turns them into short url-s itself – even if you tweet the original affiliate url.

Apart from that – I always promote what I believe in. If it doesn’t work for me, I don’t promote it either. And my list knows I promote the products I like. If I promoted crap, they would unsubcribe quicker than it takes me to write this comment. But with my list I have another issue with the links. Namely, I like to follow my open and click stats. And for that getresponse turns all my links into their ugly tracking links. So it doesn’t matter whether I put an affiliate link, a link to my website or blog, they all look the same ugly row of characters. But that’s a completely different issue, sorry for wandering off topic.

Keep up the good work!

Greetings from Estonia,

Margot-Helena

BUT I’m in the industry, so it’s a little different and I am biased. That blog that the quote post was on, is read by many SEO and non-affiliate types – some of whom are pretty anti-affiliate marketing to begin with. So some of them see things differently than we do.

In my opinion, if you’re providing value through your blog posts, then your readers are already benefited from your knowledge and they trust you as an expert.

So, if you’re going to put affiliate links in your posts, they’re more likely to click on that link and there is no need to let them know beforehand that it’s an affiliate link.