As affiliate marketers, many of us recommend products and services in order to get a commission.

Do we always know everything about the products or services we are recommending? Do we sometimes recommend things that we know are not the best products or services?

I try to only recommend things I would buy myself, but there are lots of internet marketers who are promoting services (like acai free trial scams). With the acai offers, people are creating fake blogs where people are giving fake testimonials about how great the diet plan works.

By understanding how internet marketers can try to mislead customers into making purchases, we also need to understand that internet marketers are trying to convince other internet marketers to make bad decisions.

We all have seen the get rich quick eBooks where claims of easy money are made. Tons of testimonials are on the one page sales pages saying that people read the eBook and then made a ton of money. In addition, people get commissions if they successfully recommend the product so you get a positive review on a separate site and then get a positive pitch when you get to the actual sales page. The goal of this entire process is not to offer you good advice, it is to make a sale and get a commission.

Yesterday, I had a problem with paid recommendations. I was researching a potential affiliate program and I could only find positive reviews of the program with links to the program. I figured out that the program gave referral commissions. This means that it is very hard to find an honest review of the program.

I also had this program when a website recommended a PPC company that I considered spending some money with. I was really impressed with the money someone was making with the program and became interested in the PPC program based on the recommendation. While doing some more research, I found that the person who recommended the program was not making money by using the PPC program, but was making money by recommending it. This got me hot under the color because it turned the recommendation into a MLM scheme instead of an honest recommendation of a service I was looking for.

So enough with the venting, but I want anyone reading this to understand how marketing is done online and to be careful about believing recommendations because many of them are paid recommendations.