Following on from my last post about Clickbank, I was asked about whether it’s better to actually purchase a product yourself before promoting and reviewing it on your own site (see comments).

When I first started to promote affiliate products, I wondered about this dilemma too. I believe the jury is still out on whether it’s really necessary to purchase a product yourself before selling it. Of course, if you do have the product, then you can give an in-depth and unbiased review and possibly make more sales because you can state that you have bought the product yourself making your review more believable.

The flip side is that if you don’t want to buy the product, you can find other affiliates who are promoting it and see what they say in their reviews. If you can find several different reviews that all give a reasonable amount of pros and cons then you can base your own review on their findings. In that case, it’s worth mentioning that your review is based on the recommendation of several reliable sources - something that newspaper reporters do all the time and get away with it!

Whatever you decide to do, one thing you should never do is try to mislead you readers.

If a product has been given the thumbs down from several reliable sources, chances are it’s a lemon and you shouldn’t promote it anyway. You’d be committing professional suicide by promoting any product that turned out to be a scam, so be careful!

A good place to find out about many different Internet Marketing products is the WhyDoWork forum, as the members are constantly digging up new products and questioning the merits of them, to which other members who have tried the products can answer truthfully. This is an excellent source of product review material and one that should be consulted on every affiliate product that you decide to promote yourself.

So you do have a choice whether to actually buy a product yourself or not before promoting it as an affiliate. Just make sure that before you do anything, you research the product first - you don’t want to promote a scam product any more than you’d want to buy one yourself.

Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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Filed under: Internet Marketing