Financial journalist and successful affiliate marketer Martin Lewis told millions of GMTV viewers this morning how affiliate sites make money. Is his spilling-the-beans ruining affiliate marketing for everyone else?

Most affiliate websites don’t advertise their links (no pun intended) to the businesses they’re affiliated with. The Motley Fool, for example, while an informative and entertaining financial services website, doesn’t shout about the fact that it’s paid commission for referring customers to the companies it recommends. They probably don’t appreciate Lewis spouting off about their business model to a nationwide ITV audience.

In actual fact, Martin Lewis is an excellent role model for would-be affiliate marketers. His online behaviour is a textbook version of how most businesses should run their social marketing campaigns, if not all online marketing (in terms of general strategy, if not in the actual detail).

Firstly, in his hugely popular website, moneysavingexpert.com, Lewis is totally honest about how itgenerates money. There’s a link at the bottom of the homepage, “Site’s funding” (and if I was being really picky I’d say it was quite a small link, but it’s there nonetheless) to a page which explains in detail how, if one’s available, Lewis will always get an affiliate referral fee from a website.

His transparency doesn’t end there. Affiliate referral links on moneysavingexpert.com are always marked with a “*”, so visitors know whether Martin Lewis and his team will get payment for them clicking on them.

As he admits on the “Site’s funding” page, he makes a decent living from the website, as well as affording to pay a large staff of researchers, journalists, online copywriters and the like.

This openness is critical in any social networking site. Rather than hide things from customers, businesses need to be honest with their publics, who are increasingly sceptical of “corporate” marketing – especially online. However, people will generally accept a fair exchange – decent content like horseracing tips or (one of my favourites during the football season) the Telegraph fantasy football password – for exposure to banner ads or other marketing collateral.

The second part of Lewis’s marketing model that I like leads on from this online consumer scepticism of traditional ‘marketing’. You won’t find banner ads on moneysavingexpert.com; instead, Martin Lewis relies heavily on his journalistic background and takes the PR route.

Hence he appears on shows like GMTV; he knows that word-of-mouth carries a lot more weight than advertising nowadays. Furthermore, he knows that PR is about more than getting mentions in print and broadcast media; as well as its campaigning agenda moneysavingexpert has a charity giving fund which, to the site visitor, adds further value to the exchange they’re being asked to make.

As I said, this is textbook stuff, and a lot of businesses could learn from Martin Lewis’s online marketing strategy.