 |
| To hear some people say it, affiliate marketing is the way to get rich. The reality is much harsher than that. |
I know 2, maybe 3 people who became millionaires through affiliate marketing. They all spent 5-10 years building Websites in their spare time, getting links wherever they could, and publishing as much content as they could. Times were good, so good in fact that other people came along and bought their Websites from them. All those years of hard work paid off.
Those days are over, my friends. Everyone is now trying to make money by affiliate marketing. And they are all using the same affiliate programs. That means we're all cutting out smaller and smaller pieces of the same pie.
According to the Low Income Aid site nearly anyone can make money. That's a good Website. If you're not rich yet you should spend some time browsing their articles. They feel your pain. The last item on the page I linked to says, "Freelance work is hard: choose carefully". You know what affiliate marketing is? It's freelance work.
Now I know what you're thinking. If you're the affiliate you're getting paid a commission so it's not really freelance work. If you write a blog no one is paying you for those words. No one is paying you to put time into the site. You only get paid if someone clicks on a link and buys something.
Buds: THAT is freelance work. You are advertising for a brand. It's free advertising. They don't have to pay you for it. A million people can read your articles and if none of them buy anything you don't get paid. It's free advertising and that means you're just another replaceable part of the crowd. Startups love people like you and me.
I Made Several Thousand Dollars with Amazon
It's true. A few years back a friend of mine suggested I start a blog about a certain topic. He thought Amazon had some good products in that niche. This is one of my millionaire friends so I took his advice.
I wrote about 50 articles for that blog. After 2 years it had earned about $3,000. And then one day the sales stopped coming in. What happened? People lost interest in the products.
Not to worry, my friend said. Just write about something else and promote some different products. He unfortunately couldn't suggest anything that I could write about.
My career as an Amazon affiliate came crashing down for lack of inspiration.
Affiliate Marketing Is Hard Work
You have to write a lot of reviews and that is where I learned the hardest lesson about affiliate marketing. I can write reviews all day long. I've written reviews for my copy clients. I can write reviews about products I never use. The problem is that when you go looking for an affiliate program for yourself, all you have to go by is the reviews people write.
I would never trust a review of an affiliate program. Most of them are fake. They are obviously fake because these guys all say the same thing: you'll make hundreds of dollars a month selling some X program or product that is hot. I laughed at these clowns in 2016 when they went nuts over some affiliate marketing tool. They were affiliates who fell for the affiliate marketing. They signed up for the tool and wrote their own glowing reviews all year long.
When I checked all those sites again in 2017 they were all dead. No one was making any money. The tool is no longer available. The Website was taken down or sold off and now it redirects to something in Chinese.
So how do you pick a good affiliate program? I don't know. Amazon changed all their fees and pissed off a lot of affiliates.
Affiliate Program Managers Are Jerks
Maybe not all of them but a lot of them are. Maybe they have to be that way because they deal with so many angry affiliate marketers. I'm not sure I would want to manage someone's affiliate program because people get upset over everything. You have to keep a smile on your face and be professional all day long.
Affiliate marketing management is like a cross between customer service and sales management. Either way, you have to bring in the numbers or you lose your job. So you may take a hard line with 20,000 bloggers who want everything done their way.
One of my friends told me he signed up for an affiliate program. It was one of those higher end platforms that is hard to get into. He had the page view volume to qualify for inclusion. He spent six months testing ads and merchants in their program. No one bought anything. He barely drove any clicks to their platform. Why? He never found out.
One day out of the blue the affiliate manager emailed him to ask if he was ever going to sell anything. My friend told the guy he couldn't find anything his visitors wanted to buy. The affiliate manager removed him from the program right away, leaving all those links in a blind distribution. My friend hadn't kept a list of the sites where the ads were running so he had to go through every page to find them.
Another friend blocked a strange crawler coming from Amazon Web Services. Then he signed up for Amazon's affiliate program. Amazon started sending him messages saying they couldn't verify his site. Only thing is he had set up Amazon on 5 sites. He kept replying, "Which site?" They finally dumped him from the program. Only later did he remember that strange crawler. He figured it must have been Amazon's verification robot. It doesn't call itself something predictable like "Amazon Verification".
More People Fail at Affiliate Marketing than Succeed
If by "succeed" we mean become independently wealthy or make enough money to quit their day jobs, only a very small percentage of affiliate marketers succeed.
If by "succeed" we mean earn a few hundred dollars a month with a lot of hard work, I'd guess that 30-40% of affiliate marketers are doing okay. I see a lot of them complaining in online forums about how hard it is to make money. Some of them don't complain. Instead of complaining they ask, "Is anyone else finding it hard to get signups?"
Well, you get the point. There is no magic formula for success in affiliate marketing. I knew a few people who make thousands of dollars a month. Some of them are blackhats who cheat the system. They buy links, Websites, and do other crappy things. Some of them have enough money that they can pay people like me to write for them. As long as they can keep publishing new content they can generate more affiliate sales.
If you're just doing this by yourself and writing all the content for your 1 blog, it's going to take you a long time to build success. You can fall for the "turnkey SEO services" scams. They work for a short time until your sites are banned by Google. Or you may get lucky and find a really good product that no one else is pitching. I met a couple of guys who did that. They wouldn't tell me what the products were. Go figure.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try your hand at affiliate marketing. If you do I wish you all the success in the world. And you might want to think about moving to Costa Rica or some place where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the United States. In the meantime, be patient, keep writing, and keep looking for cool things to write about that no one else has found.
