The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

I’m all for making fast, short-term, easy cash.

However, there are some serious down-side’s to affiliate marketing.

I subscribe to Uber Affiliate’s blog. He just made a very humbling post titled “I made $182.64 Profit Last Month.”

Now, if you know anything about Paul, you know that he made $200,000 in revenue with Azoogle in 1 month last year.

So how does someone go from bank to broke in 1 month?

Pretty easily, actually:

Affiliate offers get canceled or expire - This just happened to me today. I have a campaign making $500 in profit/day and I just received notice it’s closing in a week. Gee, thanks for the heads up.

Affiliates steal your ads and landing pages - Yep, with no competitive barriers, affiliates swipe ads and landing pages, leaving you and your once profitable gold mine looking more like a gold pond.

You get CANNED - Networks have all sorts of “Terms And Conditions” - If you accidentally or willingly violate these terms, you will get banned from running the offer.

Without a list, you have no real asset - If you aren’t building a list of opt-in’s, your “business” is more like a sophisticated arbitrage operation.

Networks reduce your payout - Yeah, this happens ALL the time. Let’s say you are making $3.00 on a nice dating offer, then they decide to give you $2.00. Well, there goes your profit margin.. you can kiss that campaign good bye.

You Get SLAPPED by Google - You call your landing page a work of art, Google calls it a poor attempt at adding value. They slap the daylights out of you, and tell you to insert more money and try again.

Your girlfriend dumps you - Okay, this is what happened to Paul :) I feel for you buddy.

So the moral of the story is to become a merchant by creating your own products and getting hoards of affiliates promoting your super duper product. Then you can meditate in a Vipassana Ashram in India while your affiliates are making you piles of cash.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 4:45 pm and is filed under affiliate marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.