My affiliation with Fishpond and my stance on advertising

Today I have signed up to the Fishpond affiliate advertising program.

This will affect the content of my blog so in fairness I will outline my views on advertising, this program and how I intend to market products.

Advertising

In my view advertising is a necessary component of civilisation but that doesn’t mean I approve of all of it. In a civilised society (as opposed to a tribal society) people make a living producing goods and performing services for complete strangers. The advantage of this is widespread goods and information that would be extremely expensive if not impossible. A problem in implementing this however is that the customers do not immediately know how to find these goods if they even know it exist at all. The solution to this problem is called advertising.

However like most people I find most advertising annoying and view the use of emotional manipulation and deceit as evil.

The Fishpond affiliate program

Fishpond is a Australia / New Zealand based imitation of Amazon. While I try not to spend much money online this has quickly become one of my favourite websites because I can buy books, CD’s and DVD’s that I cannot find elsewhere in New Zealand at a (generally) low price. Their affiliate program allows website owners to be paid for marketing goods sold through Fishpond.

The series of steps for this are as follows:

1. I write an article on this blog that includes a specially formatted link to a product on Fishpond
2. Somebody follows this link and purchases the product within twenty-four hours
3. Fishpond takes note of this but does not act on it for a month in case the ask for his/her money back
4. Five percent of the sale price is put into my affiliate credit account
5. Once I have $20 dollars of credit it is transferred to my bank account

So for example if I convince thirty-four people to buy Deep Purple’s Machine Head album (That’s an actual affiliate link) in one day I will get $20.40 at the end of the month. Considering my readership is near zero as of this writing that is extremely unlikely.

My use of marketing on this site

I have closely considered reviewing stuff  I use and enjoy since I started this site and now that I have monetary incentive I will do so often. However I do not want this site to consist solely of advertisements.

So I have chosen some rules to enforce on myself:

1. I will only write reviews of things that I genuinely love (this is inspired by The Linux Action Show) or I believe is misleading (which won’t try to sell)
2. Affiliate links will be marked as such
3. I will try to keep the reviews to being no more than forty percent of posts.