The first thing you should do if you want to start affiliate marketing the right way is buy the product for yourself. If you have been drawn to affiliate marketing by reading that it is possible to make money without spending any cash of your own, it will seem like a backward step to suggest that you start by spending money, but there is a good reason why you should seriously consider taking this advice.

What do you know about the product you will be promoting? If you haven't tried the product, all you will know is what other people have told you and the "other people" are probably the owner of the product and his/her marketing team. Don't you think they might be just a little bit biased? The truth is that even if the product was a complete turkey, they'd still be telling you it's an eagle. The only way you will really know what a product does, is to buy it and test it out yourself.

It is only when you have purchased and used the product that you will be in a position to promote it effectively because you will then know exactly what it can do as opposed to what the owner would like you to believe it can do. You will find there can be a huge difference between the sales pitch dreamed up by copywriters and the actual performance of a product. Being an actual user of the product means you will be in a position to write genuine reviews on the product instead of regurgitating the advertising blurb.

The following is what happened to me a few months age when I found a new product (an e-book) that looked as if it would be very helpful to many of my website visitors.

After reading the sales letter, I was already mentally composing my review and anticipating earning loads of affiliate commissions. By the time I had downloaded my copy of the book and read a couple of chapters, I had thrown out my plan to promote the book.

One of the first things to strike me was that the book contained many typographical errors and obvious spelling mistakes. Call me picky but, if a person asks me to pay for a book, I don't think I'm being unreasonable in expecting it to be free from typos and spelling errors. It got worse: I didn't have to read far before I noticed some passages that made no sense; it was obvious that something had gone wrong during a cutting and pasting operation, and this had not been detected during final proof-reading. In fact, I doubted that anyone had bothered to proof-read the book before publishing.

The content turned out to be just a rehash of old ideas plus some out of date references. One of the author's recommendations was to produce articles to be passed off as your own work by pasting together paragraphs lifted from articles by other authors. From the overall style of the book, I could tell that much of the writing had been created by using that very technique (hence the number of cut and paste errors). That, despite the so-called author's protestations to the contrary, is plagiarism and plagiarism is pure theft.

Hopefully you will never find such a huge gulf between the sales pitch and the actual content in any affiliate product you decide to promote but, if you don't buy the product and test it, you will never know whether you are promoting a turkey or an eagle. Your customers will. Your reluctance to invest in a sample of the product could cost you your credibility and recovery from that is much harder than recovering the cost of the product out of future sales.