Or Why I Can’t Get Behind The Widget Marketing World

“We grow a little every time we do not take advantage of somebody’s weakness.”

- Bern Williams

There are a number of bloggers and internet marketers that make piles of money from affiliate marketing.  In each niche you’ll find someone selling someone else’s product and you can easily find entire blogs developed only to sell a certain product with content that is generic and manufactured to only drive traffic.

If you’re interested, you can find whole marketplaces devoted to finding products you can sell for other people with – ClickBank is one of the most well known.  These marketplaces include a variety of analytics on each product so you can search for the highest selling and converting products.

My problem with this: you can go about selling a product you’ve never even bothered to try or learn more about.

Play the market like a game: find the highest gravity products, tie some lean mean sales page to an article-spun blog, build an AdWords campaigns, build a list and run a few hard sells with long form copy that your program provides for you and start waiting for the money to show up in your account.

But have you seen some of these products?  Have you taken a long hard look at what you are selling?

Are you providing real value to your customers or are you just feeding them get rich quick schemes, weight loss secrets, and all-natural enhancements?

There is a prevalence of those in the lifestyle design community whose main goal it is to put themselves above the petty world of work by offloading it to underpaid VAs and selling products no one really needs to individuals who are desperate for a magic bullet.  For these people affiliate marketing endeavors with hard sell long form copy are a godsend.

It frees them from having to create something meaningful in the world.

To skip the anti-capitalist rhetoric, which I’m not entirely for or against, the real question becomes is it a conscious and mindful act in the world?

Are you selling widgets in digital form?

There’s already a glut of junk in the world, do we need to fill the digital world with garbage as well?

Or can we create a digital landscape in which value-heavy products are created by caring, sustainable businesses that act in the good will of their community?

Flickr photo by peterkaminski.