Is it just me or are any of you checking whether linked products are affiliate links before clicking on them? My mental estimate of the unbiased-ness of a review reduces irrespective of article author when I observe affiliate links to products. Is that inappropriate?
I wouldn’t call it “inappropriate,” but I would be realistic about how much weight you give that data point.
If you searched Google for “usb 3.0 flash drive” and found a random page full of affiliate links, that would be one thing. Jeff has been blogging for almost a decade and has earned some level of trust from his readers.
On the other hand, some bloggers do choose to explicitly disclose where they use affiliate links. I don’t think that is a bad idea but am not offended that he did not.
The author here is very highly respected in this community and already made his big bucks with other projects. If he says that he found something cool and then uses an affiliate link, it's a 99.9% chance that there's nothing more too it.
Searching, finding, and reporting in this style are common place for him.
Of course, I've been reading Jeff's posts for some time and know his creds. My question was not really very specific to him and this post of his, but just this time I caught myself mid-thought wanting to check whether the link is an affiliate link. For another author, I might not have been surprised, but I was in this case.
Mentioning that a link is an affiliate link (as cwd71 wrote) would be enough for me to put more trust in an author.
