Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make money online.

But it also has some traps and there are unfortunately many that do it dishonestly.

Luckily, it is possible to do affiliate marketing honestly and still make really good money. In this article I will therefore show you how honest affiliate marketing can boost your earnings, and how you can learn to do this step-by-step.

What is honest affiliate marketing?

I just want to start making clear what I mean when I say honest affiliate marketing.

Honesty can be subjective – some people define it as being honest, as long as they do not break any laws, and people in general have their own moral compass that decides what is honest and what is dishonest.

When I first started looking into affiliate marketing, I could see it has a huge potential, but I also saw that many people were just promoting whatever product or service paid them the highest commission, without caring about giving good advice, as long as they made a sale.

In my opinion it is very dishonest to be willing to for example promote expensive programs that do not provide any value but are just making big promises to people about how easy it is to become rich online, only to end up taking their money and never making them any money. Unfortunately, there are many people willing to promote these kinds of online scams, as they can earn good commissions this way.

Luckily there are also many people that are not doing it this way and are instead focusing on giving valuable information that really helps people.

This is the route I am following, where you spend a lot of time for example testing, and then you share the information on your website. By doing this, you can save people a lot of time and give them great valuable information and help them, and make money at the same time.

In my definition this is honest affiliate marketing – you are only recommending products/services you truly recommend, you do your best to share valuable information, and you try to help people with your information. Then affiliate marketing is a win-win situation, as your readers get great and helpful information, and you earn money by providing this information, so you can keep doing it.

This is affiliate marketing at its best. And there are many reasons this honest approach is the way to go.

Why it is important to do affiliate marketing honestly

There are many good reasons to aim for doing affiliate marketing honestly and not just get seduced by the high commissions and only focus on this.

I have created a small video below that explains some of these reasons. You can also read all the details below the video, if you prefer this.

Some of these reasons you should do affiliate marketing honestly are:

You do not break the law:

If you are honestly sharing your opinion and making commissions from recommending products and services (and reveal to people you are making commissions), you are not breaking any laws.

Affiliate marketing is a legit way to make money, and it can be a great way to make it worth your time and effort to provide good information.

Some people that use unethical methods and promote scams are very vulnerable. An example of this is when the MOBE program was closed down. Many people had tried to build an income around promoting this online marketing platform – the main way to make money was to promote the very expensive upsells the platform offered to other people.

When this program was finally closed down by the Federal Trade Commission for being a scam, people that worked with promoting it suddenly had nothing to promote and a lot of people had worked hard just to see their hard work being wasted.

If you promote honestly and only promote programs that really provide value for others, and do not get seduced by high commissions and the pyramid schemes, then you have a long term solution that is legal, and will not suddenly close down from one day to the next.

So even if you do not care about the moral aspects of promoting scam products, you should be worried about the risk of them closing down and leaving you with no source of income.

Help others instead of hurting them:

Affiliate marketing is a great opportunity to make money online while helping others and making money working with something you are passionate about.

Personally, I think it is very rewarding to be able to help people and give them great information, and at the same time make money doing this.

I know some people make really good money by promoting scams, but this is unethical in my opinion.

I have heard about people that have lost thousands of dollars joining online scam programs, and some people even lose the last money they have.

I will personally not take part in promoting programs like this no matter how high the commissions are, and I think it is sad that some people are willing to promote whatever pays the most without thinking about how it affects other people.

To me the moral aspect of thinking about helping other people instead of just how you can get the most money yourself by selling them expensive stuff, is a very important reasons to focus on doing affiliate marketing honestly.

It can boost your earnings:

Honest affiliate marketing does not only make it possible for you to build a long-term income, because you will not get into legal trouble, and make it possible to make money by helping people. It actually also makes it possible to boost your affiliate earnings, when you are honest.

You probably know it from yourself – when you find helpful information online from a trustworthy person, it makes you want to visit that website again.

Maybe you will often not remember the website, but if you continuously find helpful information from a specific website, you will start trusting it and the person behind it more and more.

So if you as a website owner focus on providing honest and helpful information, people will start trusting you and will happily come back to your site and trust your recommendations.

This leads to more long-term opportunities for earning, and when you help a person and that person trust you, he/she might come back to your website often, maybe even sign up for your newsletter, and maybe also buy a lot of the products/services you recommend, because the person know you can be trusted and are telling the truth.

People will maybe even also start sharing your recommendations and your website with others, and over time building your trust like this will lead to a lot of earning opportunities, so honesty can really boost your earnings in the long run.

On the other hand, if you just focus on quick sales and on selling high commission scam programs, just to make fast money, people will at the most buy from you one time, and they will NEVER recommend you to anyone else.

I have for example for a while received newsletters from Matthew Neer from Speed Wealth System, and Jamie from IM with Jamie. I receive daily emails with get-rich-quick schemes from them, and I have never seen a product they are promoting that I would ever recommend.

I am even warning others about trusting these offers. They might still make a lot of money, but when you promote like this, people will stop trusting you.

And on top of hurting your long-term income potential, you are also hurting other people, when you are not being honest and only focus on your short-term profit.

Is it possible to make money by being honest?

I have already above mentioned that it is definitely possible to make money with affiliate marketing and still be honest – I know this from personal experience.

I however just want to expand a bit in this, as I at first did not think it was possible to make money online honestly.

When I first started looking into making money online, I kept finding one scam after another. It seemed like the only way people made money online was by promoting scams to others.

I actually started doubting that it was possible to make money online legitimately. Then I heard about affiliate marketing. This seemed like a great idea. Even though I could see there were people doing this dishonestly, I could see the potential of doing it with a different approach.

So I decided to give affiliate marketing a go – I however failed miserably with my first attempt. The biggest reason for this was that I did not understand the full process and all the steps I needed to do to make it work.

Luckily, I found a way to learn all the steps I needed, and this is now the process I am using to make money online. Below, I will share where I learned this, and how you can get started as well, if you want to learn to become a successful affiliate marketer while still being honest.

Best way to learn honest and ethical affiliate marketing

I tested and researched a lot of programs to find a way to learn an honest and effective way to make money online through affiliate marketing.

Let me just say that it was not easy to find, which you might know from your own experience as well.

However, at some point I came across the learning platform Wealthy Affiliate. It seemed a bit different from all the other programs I had found, but I was of course still skeptical.

As they have a free membership option, where you can get 10 free lessons, I did however decide to give it a go. I dived right into the training and followed every step of the free training to test, if it was a legit platform or not.

I quickly realized that the training there is very valuable. Not only does it teach you every thing to become a successful affiliate marketer step-by-step, but the owners themselves have an honest approach, and all the training is focused around how you can help people.

The platform does not promise you will get rich within a few days, you do not learn any spammy techniques, there are no hidden costs, and everything is focused on quality. This was very different from what I had found before.

I decided to stay as a member, and followed all the training there. Following the training and using the tools provided there has helped me to now be able to make a full-time income from the skills I have learned there.

It is not something that will happen overnight and without effort, but if you are serious about wanting to learn a proper and honest approach to affiliate marketing, I encourage you to read more about Wealthy Affiliate, and join for free to test the training for yourself.

Final thoughts

Affiliate marketing is a great opportunity to make money online. Unfortunately, not all people are doing it honestly, and it is difficult to find info about how to learn it with an honest approach.

Being honest will not only make you able to make money and still be able to look yourself in the mirror. It will also make it possible for you to build trust and build a long-term income based on your passion while helping others – this is the true advantage of affiliate marketing.

If you want to learn the steps I am using to make money through affiliate marketing, you can check out my full review of my top recommended training platform for this, and join for free to test the training yourself.

 

If you have any comments, questions, or have any experiences about how honest affiliate marketing can help boost your earnings, I would love to hear from you in a comment below.