There are a lot of people who do affiliate marketing and earn money with the business model.
I had a Muslim friend who once asked me if affiliate marketing was halal or haram in the Islam religion.
I felt awkward when he asked me so but once I got home and opened Google, I found there were a lot of people looking for an answer to the same question!
So, I decided to write down this post for my Islamic readers who want to get into affiliate marketing or want to know more about affiliate marketing but don’t know whether it is permissible or impermissible!
You will get all of your questions answered in this article. I will be sharing with you some interesting stats, information, and my personal experience/opinions as an affiliate marketer to help you understand things easily.
Is Affiliate Marketing Halal?
Affiliate marketing is definitely halal. It’s a business model that involves advertising products or services to people to get sales and earn commissions. It is completely permissible in Islam.
Yes, that’s right! Affiliate marketing is completely legit and it’s nothing to worry about if you follow Islam.
As long as your goal is to add value to people’s lives, there’s nothing wrong with earning a living by promoting affiliate offers/products.
However, you are going to want to make sure that you won’t get into black hat affiliate marketing or in your language, haram affiliate marketing!
What changes in black hat affiliate marketing is that you no longer focus on adding value to people’s lives. When an individual simply focuses on earning money by hook or by crook, that’s not ideal and permissible.
In simple words, it’s not good if these things happen while doing affiliate marketing:
- Promoting products that don’t deliver what they promise (haram products)
- Using false cliams to get affiliate sales
- Not doing full-research before creating content (mainly reviews) about an affiliate product or service
- Charging extra money from the customers
- Cheating companies with fake traffic or invalid leads/clicks
- Using extremely salesy techniques to increase conversions
These are some of the points beginner affiliate marketers should keep in mind if they don’t want to get into the dark side of this business.
A lot of people do these shady things to make more money but that’s just completely wrong and not appreciable.
But it’s good to see that there are a lot of ‘good guys’ in the space as well. Not all affiliate marketers are using wrongful strategies.
Just to help you understand this concept of halal and haram affiliate marketing, here are two brilliant examples:
As you can see in the screenshot below, this person is promoting an affiliate product (a WordPress plugin) but is providing honest information about the product without using any kind of shady techniques.
On the other hand, this promoter here is making false claims and using haram techniques to get people to purchase the product for the money.
Therefore, you have to watch your actions before getting into affiliate marketing. There’s both the good and the bad side to this business.
If you choose great products that help people, create value for the people, don’t trick people, add value to their lives, and don’t use sketchy marketing techniques, affiliate marketing is more like a service rather than an advanced business.
It’s completely halal and a great way to generate income in the digital world. Some of the biggest companies including Apple, Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft utilize affiliate marketing to grow.
What Are Haram Affiliate Products?
I’ve talked about haram affiliate products above but what exactly are haram products? Well, here’s your answer:
Affiliate products the overpromise and underdeliver, scam people for money, and are designed to sell low-quality high-end products over and over are called haram products.
Some examples of haram products are as follows:
- A Make Money Online program promising $2000 a day with $0 investment
- A health supplement that’s dangerous for people’s health
- An MLM product that doesn’t provide any value at all
These are some examples of bad products. If you as an affiliate promote these kinds of offers, that falls under haram affiliate marketing.
Well, how can you avoid promoting these bad products? To save yourself from promoting invaluable products as an affiliate, you will have to do as much research as possible before you select a product to promote.
Make sure you read a lot of reviews, get to know the opinions of other affiliates, know what the customers are saying about the product, and create your own checklist before choosing an affiliate product.
Haram Affiliate Strategies To Avoid
Just like there are haram products you have to save yourself from, there are haram affiliate strategies as well.
As a responsible affiliate marketer, you have to avoid these kinds of strategies to make this internet marketing world a better place.
Okay…but what are the haram strategies affiliates use? Well, here you go:
1. Not Using The Products Yourself
A lot of bloggers and affiliate marketers write about products they don’t know just because a company is offering high commissions or there’s not enough competition in the market yet.
You just ask yourself if it’s any good when marketers describe products that you haven’t used in the first place!
It’s not, right? A lot of marketers still do it but from my experience, it’s not a good strategy to go after, and other than that, this strategy doesn’t get conversions as well!
The reason being is that people have become smart these days. You can just copy and paste stuff or talk the same points written on the sales page of the product and expect people to buy. That’s not going to happen!
2. Providing Invalid Discounts
You will see that a lot of times people mention discounts just because they want people to click their affiliate links and make purchases.
You will often find people using this strategy on coupon websites and on informational blogs as well.
You have to make sure that you don’t use this sketchy tactic to get people to click your affiliate links and purchase products at a higher price.
3. Underliverable Promises
I don’t think I need to explain this. You can’t make nonsense claims or promises to sell things to people. This is not how a business is done.
If you promote a product without making it look like a ‘fancy never before’ offer, you will be surprised to see that more people are going to be interested in checking that out.
4. False Enhanced Marketing
Another haram strategy that people use is false enhanced marketing. Well, what’s that?
Fale enhanced marketing refers to a practice where you use things like false scarcity (timers), fake testimonials, and unreal information to impress people for buying products.
This is another bad and not-so-effective strategy to go about doing affiliate promotions. In other words, it’s haram! I’m loving this word, by the way!
Is Amazon Affiliate Marketing Halal?
Just like affiliate marketing as a business is halal, amazon affiliate marketing is halal as well.
Amazon is the biggest online marketplace on the planet that has been popular for providing quality products to its customers and making people’s lives easier.
If you become a partner of such a company and promote products that people will want to buy, it’s definitely a great service as well as a business to do.
It might happen sometimes that the customer might not get satisfied with the end product but Amazon does take care of that! The customer can return the products if they don’t like them!
Every business out there on the planet has built on value and quality service, especially if that business is as big as Amazon’s!
You can definitely join Amazon’s affiliate program to promote products and earn commissions. It’s not haram according to Islamic standards.
By the way, if you are interested in checking out some great Amazon Associates alternatives, check out this listicle.
In case you don’t already know, this is what Amazon’s affiliate program offers:
- Up to 10% commission on products
- Commission for the whole cart
- 24-hour cookie tracking period
- Bounties on referrals of Audible, Prime Video, Amazon Business, etc.
What Are Some Halal Affiliate Programs?
There are a lot of affiliate programs Islamic affiliate marketers can join but some of the best and my personal favorite ones are as follows:
- Amazon Associates Program
- Bluehost Affiliate Program
- AWeber Affiliate Program
- ClickFunnels Affiliate Program
- Shopify Affiliate Program
- Apple Performance Partner Network
- Microsfot Affiliate Program
- Wealthy Affiliate Affiliate Program
- And many other ones
My Views On “Is Affiliate Marketing Halal?”
Well, first of all, I thank you for asking this question to Google and landing on this page. If you ask me personally, there are always halal and haram things about every business out there.
Whether it is online marketing or any other business, every business has a negative as well as a positive side.
Affiliate marketing is called the business model of the twenty-first century. Companies have served millions of people and made millions of dollars with this business.
If you are not familiar with the numbers, this industry is already worth 12 billion dollars and will grow even more with time! If it would have been a haram business, it wouldn’t have gotten this big! As simple as that!
In Conclusion
Now that you have understood what this business is all about, what is halal in the industry, and what is haram, here are some tips I have got that will make you a better marketer:
- No matter what your religion is, always create value
- Sell products with selling, sales and money are going to be by-products
- Build trust with people and never promote haram products
- Find great and exciting companies to partner with
- Respect people’s hard earned money and solve their problems
Well, I think that’s more than enough for now. I hope you found this post helpful. In case you have got anything to ask or suggest, use the comments section below to convey what you think.
sir some peoples says that digital affiliate marketing is not good to promote it because they say this is multi times commission product and multi-time commission is not halal? I am confused to promote it…
Hey, I think you’re confused between affiliate marketing and multi-level marketing. Although, both a halal but you will need to make sure that you are only promoting ‘valuable’ products. If you try to add value to people’s lives, it’s all good!
Hi, Thank you so much for doing an amazing research i want to ask question is creating or building backlinks is permisible in islam… Because i think google doesn’t allow building backlink if google dont allow then it will be also not permisible in islam?
Hi Ammad,
Building backlinks is allowed by Google but you should not try to manipulate the Google Algorithm. Think about building links as building relations with other website owners. If you do it the right way (with white hat methods), it’s just fine! 🙂