Online marketers and people trying to make a buck off the internet are always taking advantage of easy-to-market affiliate programs, especially those being offered by Clickbank. Clickbank is a place to find easy-to-sell digital products allowing you to turn a profit without having to own a website.. If you send a buying customer to one of their pages through an “affiliate link” and a sale is made, your hyperlink makes the connection and you just pulled in usually 50% or more of the profit. Digital products, such as ebooks and software, offer their affiliates such a high profit margin because they have no overhead. They are transmitted digitally over the internet from the sales page to the buyer’s computer so there are no shipping costs. The product itself is digital and can hardly be considered tangible, so there are no associated production costs either. The high profit margin is the reason why these products sell so well. Plenty of webmasters and entrepreneurs are willing to sell them for an extra source of revenue. There are even products sold on Clickbank which teach people how to market and sell Clickbank products!
You can find these products promoted on legitimate websites owned by internet gurus as additional revenue streams. It is a great way to make an extra dollar. If a person leaves a website and doesn’t buy anything, the savvy website owner might as well give them another chance to visit an affiliate website and gain more potential for making money. But unfortunately, most people are using keyword advertising, specifically with Google Adwords, to spam the internet with affiliate product advertisements. It has become so prevalent that is has actually become a nuisance. Google supposedly puts in measures to prevent spam on their search engines results with specific algorithms, but they are allowing people to take over their paid search results and market the same products over and over and over with these affiliate product advertisements on their Adwords program. The only benefit seems to be for Google. They are making a killing. Take the top selling 20 products on Clickbank. You can find about 100 different ads for the same product on Google Adwords with certain key term searches.
First of all, the customer should be given a choice. But because these key terms are so popular, they are pushing the price of Google Adwords up and only the keyword elite can afford them. Smaller business owners are no longer able to afford the same key terms for their own legitimate products or websites on Google Adwords. The prices for small ads on Adwords has now reached a ridiculous rate for popular search terms and the conversion rates compared to cost is now at a point where they are ineffective and worthless.
There is another problem and a big one. Many of these digital products aren’t worth one pixel used to create them, despite their incredible claims on their sales’ pages. Smart customers try to find reviews before they purchase by typing in the product name and the word “review” in search engines. This simple search used to work. However, the guru keyword advertisers have found ways to make money on these searches as well. You are now unable to find one legitimate review on any digital product. All of the major search engines, especially Google, is spammed with fake affiliate product reviews.
Some of these ads will state the name of the product and the word “Review” next to it, while the description promises a real review. But the link only takes you to the product page via an affiliate hyperlink! Another tactic is to promise real reviews, but the click is only led to a splash page which states how great the product is. These pages contain fabricated reviews! Fraudulent reviews are intended to get you to think the product is great and entice you to buy. Listed on these bogus review pages are affiliate links to the product itself. It is obvious that they are fake. Real human reviews would not contain so much marketing language and who on earth would pay to have Google Adwords display their reviews unless they only had one intention? To make money. These splash pages are often created by the product owner and copies can be found on their affiliate pages specifically for keyword advertisers and for the purpose of forged review advertising.
The worst tactic I have seen so far, and which probably work the best, are the ads which promise a real review of the product while touting the word “SCAM” somewhere in the title. Anyone looking for an honest review is apt to click on this ad. Little does the average surfer know that every single one of these ads is a scam itself. They just lead you to another fake review telling you how great the product is. No one in their right mind, anyhow, would pay for a Google ad to tell you NOT to buy this product. This is just another sad method to get you to click on their ad above others and potentially buy the product through their specific affiliate link. These product reviews are the scams!!!
What the web needs is an authentic digital product review website where visitors can log in and leave honest reviews. But they also need to be able TO FIND a place such as this. Http://www.downloadreviews.org is a new website where living and breathing people can read and leave human reviews for digital products such as ebooks and software. Users can also submit items for review in case they can’t find the product they are looking for. Membership is free and is only needed to prevent product owners from leaving multiple and invented reviews on their own products. Of course Http://www.downloadreviews.org contains affiliate links of their own, but this is the only method of revenue it will be receiving. Besides, most products will surely get horrible reviews and this website will never make a penny off of them. It is a brand new website, so it needs user reviews and lots of them.
The problem still resides with Google Adwords and keyword advertising. Fake product reviews are something which should be banned. They are misleading and false. And it makes it all the more difficult for consumers to find the real product reviews. We can’t stress it enough…Google…get rid of the FAKE PRODUCT REVIEW SPAM! These fake reviews aren’t just found on search engine ads, but they are also posted on message boards and websites allowing people to leave any kind of message they want with specific meta tags as well. People utilize these website to infest the web with these fake reviews and spam a little more. It seems like there is no escaping the cloud of falsified information now found on Google. We sincerely hope Google and Yahoo! will be able to fix this problem as well as lead people to genuinely helpful review sites such as Http://www.downloadreviews.org .
