I nearly didn’t write this post.

Like all industries, internet marketing has a public face and then a lot of things going on behind the scenes.

Some of the behind the scenes stuff is the usual boring material such as setting up websites, adding content, using autoresponders, that kind of thing.

But a thread in a forum I read reminded me of the other side (maybe even the dark side but that might be over-dramatic).

If you’re on more than a handful of internet marketing email lists, you’ll be familiar with the flurry of emails that appear as soon as the next “must have” product is launched.

Often the emails are near enough identical which means that the JV (joint venture) page has provided the text and the list owner has managed to copy & paste it and insert their affiliate link.

Chances are quite high that they haven’t seen the product or, if they have been given review access, that they’ve only really glanced at it.

Of course, there are only so many hours in the day which means you can’t necessarily expect the person sending the email to have watched several hours of videos.

Personally, if I review a video based product and it has a YouTube link or video controls, I’ll skip through each video to check that what they’re claiming to teach gets taught. And if it’s down to one or two videos after the almost obligatory “how to setup WordPress” or similar, chances are I’ll watch most if not all of the main videos.

Some of those products are good, others are average and others are – how shall I put this – not very good at all.

Distinguishing between these different quality standards can be difficult.

If the sales page is self hosted – which means it’s on the vendor’s own site – then there is often nowhere for buyers to comment. But testimonials are often included.

If the sales page is on a forum such as the Warrior Forum then there’s an option for people to leave reviews.

It’s the review/testimonial side where the waters become muddy,

Some marketers have coaching programs where they teach clients how to create products.

Nothing wrong with that – it’s something I do with several of my products and it’s a skill set that benefits from being taught by someone who knows what they’re doing.

The grey area comes from the testimonials themselves.

They’re often cookie-cutter.

And, too often for my liking, there’s almost a merry-go-round of familiar names and faces behind the testimonials.

That’s explained partly because there aren’t many marketers with reasonable size lists, so everyone clamours to get reviews from the people with large email lists.

It’s also partly explained by the “we reciprocate” claims that are on many joint venture pages. Which means that if you make enough sales of the product, they’ll promote your next product to their list.

In fact, it’s probably worth checking MunchEye to see what’s been offered to the people promoting a product to you.

It doesn’t list every product but it does list quite a few of the bigger product launches.

Warrior Plus and JVZoo will also show you the commission percentages on offer. Unlike Clickbank, those sites don’t allow you to buy through your own affiliate link so you can’t cut out the middleman promoting the product but at least you’ll know the commission they’re getting and just how many products there are in the upsell chain.

Coming back to the testimonials…

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a coach writing a testimonial for a product created by one of their students.

You’d like to think that there would be some kind of “I’ve got a material interest in the success of this launch” disclaimer in the same way that share tipsters are supposed to do when they recommend a share.

But we’re in the real world here so you have to just use your judgement.

Personally, I have a list of product creators who I’d never buy from or promote. That’s quite a short list fortunately.

And a rather longer list of product reviewers who I ignore their reviews or, sometimes, ignore the products they’re creating. Mainly because they only seem to promote products created by one of their students or the students of their friends or their friends (aka people who’ve made sales of their product).

Which is a bit too incestuous for my liking.

Is this kind of promotion fair?

Maybe, maybe not.

It’s definitely not totally transparent but then things rarely are.

Product placement happens on television and elsewhere.

Reviewers in newspapers and magazines are often supplied with products – the travel industry usually supplies complete holidays.

So in that respect internet marketing is no different. The product isn’t placed on set, it’s placed in the email instead.

It’s just one more thing to be wary of whenever you come across a review.

And, of course, it doesn’t just apply to internet marketing.

Reviews on sites like Amazon, Tripadvisor and plenty of other sites can be acquired – Fiverr and other sites offer that kind of service publicly and there will be networks hidden on the web that do the same thing but with a less detectable footprint.

One marketing lesson in all this is that reviews are getting less and less reliable.

A lot of the time, we’re going back to word of mouth. Asking friends in real life or on places like Facebook.

So if you’re able to incorporate that into your marketing mix, that could give you an edge over the competition as you’ll be more believable.

And, as always, feel free to add your comments!