Ethical Affiliate Marketing

For those of us interested in developing passive online income streams through affiliate marketing, the two most popular affiliate programs are Amazon and ebay. Both are good programs overall, but for the affiliate marketer interested in promoting products that are:

• organic
• fair trade
• ethical
• eco-friendly
• sustainable
• green
• cruelty free
• conflict free
• grassfed
• vegetarian or vegan
• shade grown
• recycled
• etc.

they are not perfect.

I believe there is a real market for a truly sustainable ebay competitor (think Costco vs. Walmart), and only regret that I lack the coding abilties to create one myself. However, in the meantime, I've started researching other ways for my affiliate marketing projects to reflect my moral principles.

If you're willing to hold your nose and go with ebay, it's relatively easy to hack a little to favor ethical products. I personally use the free ebay affiliate features here on HubPages and Squidoo and the program PHPBay on my own sites, as recommended by the excellent article Making More Money With the ebay Affiliate Program. Type "fair trade chocolate" or something and you'll bring up products that should, in theory, be fair trade. See the example to the right.

You can also use Amazon keywords or product links to highlight their growing selection of green and sustainable products, not to mention their considerable collection of radical books and DVDs:

ebay's WorldofGood, Inc. partner, which specializes in fair trade and eco-friendly products, offers its own affiliate program for the Original Good fair trade product line: Building a World of Good, and plans an affiliate program for the main WorldofGood online marketplace.

While I was wandering around looking for more ethical affiliate programs, I stumbled across NaturalAffiliates.com, which offers what looks to be a useful directory of ethical affiliate programs, though I notice many appear to go through affiliate networks such as ShareASale and LinkShare.

Other options appear to focus mainly on housewares and certain types of gourmet foods and other gift products.

Some of the options:

OrganicStyle

Organic Avenue

Global Exchange Fair Trade

Gifts With Humanity

GreenFeet

I'm Organic

Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics

In short, it appears I will continue to manipulate ebay and Amazon into listing products that meet my ethical principles, and hope that somebody comes forward with a better alternative!