No one cares about affiliates
Little update
It’s been while since I updated the blog. Given I enjoyed writing but just didn’t find any time to write. I’m deciding to write more often now. I’m thinking updating the blog more often will keep me motivated and active in my affiliate business. And of course, readers (you) will have new material to read and intern keep them (as in you) motivated and active.
Lots of things happened in between the time I was away. Offers died out, I started new offers, revenue jumped then dropped and so forth. But one unfortunate thing that happened was, I was cheated on by one of my advertiser and that’s the topic of today post.
Dark Side of Affiliate Marketing
So you work your butt off creating a new campaign. Spend 100s of dollars testing and tweaking it. When finally you turn it profitable, it dies. Wouldn’t that suck? I can tell from recent experience, it blows. It really blows. You just feel so crushed at the end.
My latest brush with a successful campaign turned ugly is nothing short of bad. Going for doing 150+ leads a day to ending the campaign puts frown on your face. This time it wasn’t the Google slap or the offer expiring, or the lead quality issue. It was basically a case of me being stupid and opening my mouth and trusting the advertiser and everyone else.
Why my profitable campaign died?
I started a new campaign about a month ago for this new advertiser, who at that the time was extremely happy with my traffic. I was making good profit too. They promised to work with me while offering me exclusive payouts and an exclusive landing page to promote. Few weeks later, they ditched the idea, took all my keywords I was bidding on to drive traffic and now doing direct marketing themselves right there beside me.
Long Story
A over a month ago, I discovered a new offer which gave me 2x the profit with my some old keywords I was running. After 2 weeks I hear praises from the advertisers for discovering a new source for highly converting traffic (something what the previous affiliates failed to do as they said). While on the phone with me, my AM and his manager, and the marketing guy from this advertiser company promises exclusive payouts and an exclusive landing page to increase conversions. They asked me the keywords I was running and I told them. BIG mistake 
We (or I) waited for this new page and new payout to start for a week, when I heard they want Azoogle to do the page instead. Azoogle took another week to make the page when week later I accidentally (while investigating why my traffic and conversions almost stopped converting) saw their own (advertiser’s) ads with custom landing page above my ads. They were not advertising on these keywords before. They basically took over my campaign for all the keywords I’m bidding on. I didn’t think they would do that. Now I don’t know who to trust. I emailed my AM and his manager right away and after they told me they’re not happy with the advertiser and might be cutting them out of the network.
Since then I have forgotten about the incident and moved on. Yes, my affiliate earnings went down the drain. I’m actually starting from scratch, finding new offers and testing new things now.
So who is this “evil” advertiser?
Update: I’ve removed the advertiser’s name because I don’t want people to be running reverse keyword search on the advertiser and try to figure out what keywords they were. I just simply don’t want to share anything more than I already have. Trust me, it always comes to bite you back. I’ve learned that from this experience already. 
Final words
The purpose of this post is not to bash the advertiser or cry about this recent experience. The purpose is to make other affiliate aware to avoid this advertiser at all cost. Because you don’t want to get something going, making a nice profit on their offer and then finally see the advertiser itself running their ads beside you out of no where, basically cutting out the middle man (you) and putting you out of business.
