What are the similarities between affiliate marketing biz and a house made up of cards? They can both fall anytime without warning. Yes, it may not take the same amount of time to set them back up because you now know how to but it will still take the same amount of effort to get it back up to the position it was before. And when it keeps falling constantly, it just becomes frustrating.
In affiliate marketing, once your campaign dies, for whatever reason, your income dies. Most times seeing that income dying just hurts. You could be enjoying the day with your family and friends or at work, only come back to see your campaigns were slapped beyond recovery and your source of income was stopped.
Take Google for instance – I was talking to a Google representative over the phone and I remember what she said to me. I called to find out what I’m doing wrong or what I’m not doing that my landing pages are given poor quality scores each time I put a campaign up, no matter how hard I try to improve them. She said to me, “as an affiliate, it is hard to succeed.” On the other hand, Yahoo! told me exactly what I need to do when they removed my ads for editorial issues. Is Google just that cocky or do they really care about the “user experience?”
Google isn’t going to hold my hand and tell me what I need to do to make things better because they have hundreds of advertisers lined up to take my spot. And then there are networks and advertisers. Sometimes your offers will go offline without notice. Other times, the network/advertiser will ask to stop the traffic because it is not banking out for them even though you finally figured out how to make it profitable. Basically, I have NEVER seen the potential of one offer because before I can even scale it up to its full potential, something happens. Either my campaigns are slapped or the offer is pulled. I just hate seeing income disappear so fast without warning!
After experiencing so many hurdles in the last few months, I started thinking about my business model. Is it the nature of offers that I run or is it that I do a poor job at everything because I don’t have much time for the business as I would like to? Whatever it is, it is really frustrating to see the income dying just unexpectedly. Basically, your business, your income and your livelihood is always in someone else hands-be it Google/Yahoo or the networks and the advertisers. They could flip the switch tomorrow leaving you scratching your head in utter confusion and anger.
I know in business things are never smooth. Perhaps affiliate marketing is like that too-a roller coaster. For some reason, I still believe it is possible to create a long lasting campaign and things are not so short living. It would be impossible for me to go full time until I figure out how to make my campaigns last long or figure out what Google wants to avoid constant slaps.
I believe that it is possible to succeed as an affiliate in spite what Google says. I’ve done it and seen it myself. Affiliate marketing has shown me potential and I’m going to continue trying to learn and grow my business.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. What has your experience been in affiliate marketing? Has it been similar to mine? I also want to hear from people who have gone full-time. Share your stories! 
-G
When advertisers don’t pay for the leads/sales, do you think the affiliate networks should come forward and do the right thing, that is, pay the affiliates out of their pockets?
I think all affiliates would agree with me when I say, networks are suppose step up and pay the affiliates the money they owe in a situation when the advertiser refuses to pay for the leads that were driven under the guidelines of the advertiser and the network. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of the affiliate to run around after the network begging for the money they owe. After all, that’s what networks are there for, to look out for the interest of affiliates. Otherwise we affiliates can just go directly to the advertiser and deal with this kind of headache directly with the advertiser.
I’m waiting for approximately $2,800 in payments from network-X (won’t say the name just yet) for one week’s worth of leads. The advertiser, who has done shady things in the past with others, now refused to pay the network for the leads I drove until further investigation. They claim that lead quality sucks. Funny thing is, I’ve been driving leads to the offer of last 2 months. Just last week they noticed the lead quality was bad? Why didn’t they say anything before?
Anyhow, I sent my affiliate manager the screenshots of my campaigns, which clearly shows that I’m runny ads for the same keywords they run. So in a way, I’m their only competition so far on search. And in some cases my ads show up before them. I belive, this is the reason why they don’t want me out there since now they have suspended their offer until further notice.
Anyway, I just want to be paid. I don’t care if they stay or not. This advertiser has been jumping from network to network. They were kicked out of Azoogle for stealing affiliates data and now at this new network, they are refusing to pay for the leads.
Affiliate marketing sometimes just gives me a lot of headache. Things haven’t been smooth for me lately. With offer dying without notice, this advertiser not paying, I’ve hardly seen an offer stay alive for more than two weeks in last two months, leaving me to scramble for a replacement offers. This month I did break my personal records and got up to $1400+ a day but it only lasted for 7 days. That was in the beginning of the month. But since then, I haven’t been doing much. I’m taking a break from AM for now. Hopefully I’ll be refreshed next month and start from scratch.
-G
May was a good month in-terms of revenue but not so good in terms of profits. In may, I saw my highest revenue ever done. 5k more than my previous record. Again, nothing extraordinary but okay nonetheless. However, the profits were not as impressive as compare to the jump in the revenue.
My Numbers for May:
Revenue: $22,893
Expenses: $16,003
Profits: $6,860
ROI: 43%
In May, I spent close to $15,000 with Yahoo. What I noticed is, Yahoo traffic is a little less in quality than Google, therefore conversions rates are slightly lower than what I use to get on Google. The reason for I think is, in Yahoo you can’t accurately target keywords like in Google. In Adwords, you can define keywords match types, however in Yahoo, there is no such thing as keyword match types, instead, you can either set you keywords or adgroups to “advance” matching or “standard” matching. Advance matching will give traffic from all related keywords in your niche for that keyword in your adgroup. So, your traffic could be coming from keywords that are not even in your adgroup and never intended for.
I did n0t spend much with adwords this time. Only about $250 this month.
I won a 4GB Ipod Nano in May:
On a positive note, this month I won a 4GB Ipod nano from Hydra. I generated little over $18k with Hydra and $4k with Azoogle. Hydra rewards its affiliates every month for generating a certain number of revenue. If you do 5k a month, you will get $50 Best Buy gift-card and if 15k, then you win a ipod nano and so on.
I should be expecting my ipod in a month or so. I need to ask my AM when they mail out the rewards. I’m not really sure.
Goals of this month:
This month, I was on track to generating $30k but due to lead cap restriction on my main campaign it may be hard now. I was easily doing $1000 a day so far this month and had planed to scale up the campaign. But then I was told to not generate more than x amount of leads for this offer. That’s what’s called a lead cap, when you are told not to generate more a certain # of leads a day.
This month my biggest hurdles will be dealing with the lead cap on my main campaign and finding new offers to fill the void. Another issue for me would be my credit limit. I only have 20k limit on my CC. But my goal remains to do $30k this month and we shall see how that plays out.
-G
