I’ve long felt that Affiliate programs were one of the better ways for retailers large and small to increase their reach. At the same time, affiliate programs offer a great way for content publishers to generate revenue from contextually relevant advertising.

But whenever I do a search on affiliate programs I feel like I need to take a shower afterward. While some of this stuff has merit, much of what you get looks like *make-money-fast*, too-good-to-be-true offers that don’t line up with my ethical, contextual image of affiliate programs. If you did follow that link to Google you may have been greeted (as I was) by over 85 AdWords links on the affiliate marketing page. When did Google start putting 85 ads on one results page?

So I put it to you dear reader: Should an affiliate marketing program be part of every online retailer’s toolkit or has this once great concept been taken over by hucksters.

 

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 14, 2005.