A typical format for an affiliate page would be a review site comparing 3-10 products, with one product getting the best rating (e.g. 5 star) and another product getting a mediocre or bad rating (e.g. 2-3 stars).  Making all the products 5 stars doesn’t work because people will pick up on that.  Two-sided reviews tend to be more effective.

The product that makes the affiliate marketer the most money gets the top spot, followed by the next most profitable, etc. etc.

So do these products really work?  I don’t know because I’m not a woman or a dermatologist.  But I can tell you that you need to be very careful when it comes to these products because a lot of deceptive practices are used to market them.  Here are a few of them:

Fake comments

Some sites will add fake comments from “visitors” to add an element of social proof.  We tend to be more likely to do something if everybody else is doing it too.  If this trick didn’t work, affiliate marketers wouldn’t be using it.

The following example is from wrinkleserased.com/lifecell-skin-cream/.  In this particular case, all the commenters’ websites point to http://none/.  Clearly these aren’t real comments because real people won’t post the same broken link.  This is a case where the affiliate marketer didn’t do a good job at making the comments look realistic.

Geo-targeting

Some websites will also personalize the landing page to its visitors so that the author of the page appears to be from the same city.  For example, Suppose I go to the site riyawrinklefree.com and I am browsing the Net from Toronto, Ontario (ON).

I see the following comment on the site:

This is performed by a Javascript on that site.  (Disabling Javascript will cause that script to not work and show blanks instead.)

What a coincidence!! I'm from <b>
                          <script src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script><script type="text/javascript"><!--
document.write(geoip_city());
// --></script>, <script type="text/javascript"><!--
document.write(geoip_region());
// --></script> </b>too! How long did it take to ship?

Sneaky bastards.

Appeal to authority

A lot of these sites will post logos of major media outlets on their site (e.g. ABC, CBS, New York Times, CBS, National Post, etc.) to give their product some credibility.  But chances are, none of these media outlets talk about the specific product being sold.

Similar appeals are made to celebrities and to TV personalities such as Oprah and Dr. Oz.  Affiliate marketers will find weak excuses to claim a connection to make the product sound more credible.

Some other products in this space

• Lifecell
• Dermajuv
• Belisi RX
• Revitol
• Athene 7 minute facelift
• Alphaderma CE
• Strivectin SD
• Freeze 24/7
• Murad Resurgence
• Hydroderm
• And many more

Be careful out there!

But now Best Buy has figured out a way to take things one step further.

The fan on my friend’s laptop stopped spinning and he took it into Best Buy for repair since he bought their extended warranty.  A few days later, he receives a call and Best Buy tells him that he won’t be covered because there is physical damage to the laptop and that it will cost $600 to replace the motherboard. They also wipe out the content of his hard drive.

He doesn’t want to pay $600 so he gets me to take a look at his laptop and help him talk to HP to get it repaired.  I call up HP’s tech support line and they tell me that I should try flashing/updating the BIOS before sending it in.  I do it, and it fixes the laptop.  The motherboard did not need to be replaced, there was no need to wipe the hard drive, and the repair was rather simple (an hour of a tech’s time, tops).

What Best Buy seems to be doing is to try to weasel out of the extended warranties that it has sold.  It then tries to charge the customer an inflated price for the repair.

So please, stop buying extended warranties from Best Buy and don’t let them sucker you again by getting you to pay an inflated price for the repair.

More info

Red Flag Deals has a thread on Best Buy extended warranty nightmares.

These reviews have nothing to do with the quality of web hosting and everything to do with shilling for the hosts that pay the most.  Affiliates will tinker with their rankings to find out which order makes them the most money.  The comparison below shows two different webpages on the same domain.  In this case, the affiliate probably screwed up and did not intend for the pages to be different, as you can navigate from one page to the other.  But this clearly shows that affiliates are not very interested in providing an honest review.

A variation on this is web hosts shilling for themselves.  One web host put up a fake review site where they listed themselves as #1 (without an affiliate link because that would be superfluous), and put affiliate links for their competitors in the rest of the slots!  If they happened to drive traffic to their competitors, they still make money.

Wordpress

Wordpress is trying to make money to support itself, so it too has jumped on the affiliate marketing bandwagon.  It has a page recommending web hosts here:

http://wordpress.org/hosting/

To some degree, Wordpress gushes about its recommended hosts and vaguely discloses its affiliate relationship.

We’ve dealt with more hosts than you can imagine; in our opinion, the hosts below represent some of the best and brightest of the hosting world. If you do decide to go with one of the hosts below and click through from this page, some will donate a portion of your fee back—so you can have a great host and support WordPress at the same time.

Personally, I’ve had a site hosted with Dreamhost (one of the hosts recommended by the people behind Wordpress) and they weren’t great.  Their hosting was down for an entire day when their data center lost both power and its backup power (granted, they weren’t entirely to blame for their data center losing power).  Support also forgot to get back to me about my domain transfer problem and it took me weeks to get it resolved.  Which brings us to…

Overselling

Overselling is the practice where web hosts absurd amounts of bandwidth and disk space. Some even go so far as to offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space. However, hidden away in the terms and conditions are clauses that allow them to kick customers off for using excessive server resourches (e.g. using up too much bandwidth, CPU, memory, etc.). The web hosts have little intention of actually delivering on their advertised claims. The reason why they can get away with overselling is because 99% of customers use very, very little bandwidth and disk space. Almost all websites use <100MB of disk space and less than 5GB of bandwidth. The typical customer will not realize that overselling is false advertising.

The other downside to overselling is that it attracts the kind of customer that does use a lot of server resources (e.g. warez sites). Before a web host kicks these customers off their service, these customers will use a disproportionate amount of a server’s resources and cause all websites hosted on a particular server to be slow. When you purchase shared hosting, your website is hosted on a server that is shared with other customers. Overselling is typically a bad practice for the customer as your web server may be shared with resource pigs. Or crazy promotions like Dreamhost’s $9.99 for the first year may cause a huge surge of customers that the web host can’t adequately handle. When looking for a web host, I would like for a web host that does NOT oversell their services.

Resources

One good resource for learning about web hosting and picking a web host is Web Hosting Talk.  WHT readers tend to be savvier at spotting and outing shills, though you still need to take what you read with a grain of salt.

Wu Yi Tea / “Easy Weight Loss Tea” / Green tea

There’s nothing very special about green tea, but some marketers will try to convince you that it’s some “ancient Chinese secret”.  Unfortunately, some people have stereotypes about Chinese people and believe things that simply aren’t true.  Some of these sites play upon those stereotypes and make ridiculous claims, saying that green tea is “the reason why Chinese people don’t get fat”.  Reality check: there are A LOT of fat Chinese people.  If there are ancient Chinese secrets, clearly they weren’t in on it.

If somebody speaks English with a Chinese accent, it does not mean that they are more authentic Chinese and know ancient Chinese secrets about health and medicine.  It’s just that English is not their first language – that’s it!

Now you might be led to believe that green tea has health benefits.  That’s what people in the green tea business would like you to believe.  Many other food industries will also promote the health “benefits” of their food.  Take alcohol.  There are reports of its positive effects on health, even though we are talking about a POISON that impairs your ability to drive and causes LIVER DAMAGE.  A lot of these health effects are overrated but intentionally overpromoted.

Acai berry

Another food whose health benefits are blown out of proportion for commercial benefit.  Other foods have more antioxidants, and having an excess of antioxidants does not seem to provide health benefits.

See the blog post deconstructing an affiliate site for acai berry pills for information on how these products are promoted.

Other products that probably don’t work

Colon cleanse / colon cleansing / detox products – Some marketers might pretend like it’s endorsed by Rachel Ray, Oprah, Katie Couric, Jesus, etc.  That’s a lie.

If you simply use your common sense, you can probably figure out the products which are likely a scam.

Fitness Clubs

These are not a scam, but only if you go to the club and actually exercise.  Most people pay upfront for a membership but don’t actually go to the health club.  This is where the clubs make most of their money (especially around New Year’s resolutions).

What does work?

Honestly, I have no idea (other than exercise).  However, do watch out for sites that tell you that X is a scam but Y is not.  Y is probably a scam too.