5 Bad Things About Affiliate Marketing

In this article, you’re going to learn the five things that I hate about affiliate marketing. Now I’ve been affiliate marketing since 2003 and I currently earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year as an affiliate. So I’ve got some love for affiliate marketing, but it sure isn’t without its challenges.

And you’re going to learn the five biggest challenges here in this article. And in the end, you’re going to learn the right way to do affiliate marketing so you can kind of overcome and bypass and side skirt a lot of these challenges you won’t have to experience. Let me just deal with them Because I’ve already been through it. So number one is getting stiffer payout now wow wow you as an affiliate marketer, by definition don’t have all that much control. When you’re working with an affiliate vendor through an affiliate network, you do have a third party in between, right?

So if you’re on ClickBank or you’  reusing something on share a sale, you have that kind of the third party company in between you and the vendor. But what’s been going on recently lot companies are running in house programs, whether they are on Infusionsoft or SamCart or Thrive cart or whatever it might be. Even some word press based ones on Member Mouse and these individuals are within full control and they can choose not to pay you.

If they so deem they can disappear, they can fall off the face of the earth. I have one vendor who has withheld $8,000in payments from me and I’ll be honest with you, that sucks. I sent $16,000 worth of sales and I didn’t my $8,000 in commission jokes on me. Lesson learned, and this is one of the challenges, big challenges of the kitchen the nd of relinquishing control of being an affiliate marketer and again, stay to the end and give me a thumbs up if you like this content because I’m going to teach you how to bypass these kinds of challenges at the end.

Number two is vendors changing your links on you. This is such a big problem. It’s crazy. It even happens all the way up to the Amazon affiliate program. We’ve had literally, I’ve built posts that talk about specific setups. One of them was my video, MyTravel vlog gear set up, um, and I had all of the different items that I use to build my travel video marketing rig. And Amazon changed all of the links.

I think what actually happened is the product sold out from the Amazon listing page and the next vendor created a new listing page. So my legs just stopped showing up, which means people are finding my content on Google, they’re reading through, they’re clicking on my links to take my recommendation and they found nothing. And this is not limited to Amazon, that’s just the one that stands out in my mind.

This has happened on a bunch of different networks. It’s happened on some individual programs and yet again, you’re not in control and oftentimes they won’t let you know that they made a change to their URL structure. Maybe even they changed the actual affiliate management tool, right? They went from a, from kind of a built intoSamCart one and they added on like an iDevAffiliate or something like that and it changed all the links.

And they forgot to update your lists. It happens. And that’s just number two. Number three is they stopped supporting products. Now this one really irks me because I look at especially any sort of affiliate product or any sort of product that has a monthly or annual recurring bill. I kind of look at that recurring bill as a contract, right? So when I buy something and the company says, Hey, it costs $100 or $200a year to keep updated, I think that’s them saying that they’re going to actually update the product. And what happens is sometimes they abandon their products, they make their millions, they go on to do other things.

They want to be cool kid digital nomads. I don’t know what that is. There’s some that I’m extremely frustrated right now that I may be going public with soon. Um, but they’ve literally abandoned their projects. And here’s what happened. So when they launched years ago, it was a great product. It was one of the best in the markets. So I not only used it, I taught how to touse it, I integrated it into my business. And I recommended others did as well. Now they really aren’t updating it.

They’re not holding, they being the vendor aren’tupholding their end of the bargain, which means it kind of looks poorly on me because I now have all this evergreen content that I built and now that it’s going to this tool that’s getting a little bit sluggish and it’s not really holding its original promise as it wants to be done, looks bad on me and it’ss outside of my control.

So that was number three. Number four is a scammy course creator selling dead methods. This is the spool of affiliate marketing and there’s kind of a like an S curve, if you will, a growth curve or a bell curve with how affiliate feeeeeee marketing methods work. Okay? So what happens is a couple of crafty and creative affiliate marketers learn a method or two, they learn away to build a type of website, whether it’s an Amazon review site they earn way to leverage YouTube videos to drive affiliate sales.

They run it as fast and as, as quick and as hot as they can. And then that method starts to work less and less over time because it gets saturated, right? They’re essential and of, um, diluting their own source. But then that’s when they’ll create a course on it. And these are the 400 and997 and sometimes they’re even thousands of dollars for these affiliate marketing courses that are selling this outdated kind of methodologies. So big-time problems.

1. is it brings people into the system kind of misaligned expectations. And that’s just a problem for the entire industry of affiliate marketers.

2. is for those other marketers who figured out the game and who was working this strategist successfully all of a sudden, thousands and thousands of new individuals come in as competitions.

3. Copycats start to show up and essentially they blow up the spot. It’s the proverbial beach town in Mexico that one knew about until all the Instagrammers and the bloggers blew up the spot. That does happen to us in the world affiliated and there’s very little we can do like this other than kind of continuing to stay on the leading edge of our game, right? You don’t want to be buying the old methods that the gurus are now selling you because trust me if off those methods.

4. we’re still kinged as good as they once did, as their testimonials say they were they wouldn’t be teaching them. They would be actively leveraging those methodologies themselves. So that’s number four.

5. is there of individuals who it a half attempt, who affiliate marketing and they go on to say, this stuff doesn’t work, affiliate marketing is a scam, and that’s completely untrue, right? I’ve built a very successful care career raging affiliate marketing as one of the monetization channels that I use. It’s just harder than most people realize. It just takes a lot more work than people realize. It absolutely does work when we get the game right, which brings me the right way of marketing.

When you’re focusing all of your energy on growing an audience of people and helping that audience of people really to accomplish their goals, to create the life they want to eir problems. You’ve got the captive attention that his hiss his hiss them onto an email list that you personally own.

This is the right way to do affiliate marketing because what happens is when someone changes out your links or when a vendor stops paying you, or when your relationship with a specific affiliation, goes downhill, which at some point will happen career, you’re in control of the flow and you then have the ability to simply replace them another review one who’s actively developing the product that they are actively standing behind it delivering on that original promise. Right?

So the goal is for you as the affiliate marketer to add value to be a, an in-between, right? Between the person searching on Google, or youtube and the product itself. Then your job is not just to link them to it, but your job is to actually meet that individual where they are. You’re there to help them answer that question of what they’re searching for. You’re there to build a relationship with a longterm relationship, and really truly help them get on the path to solving their problems, answering their questions and achieving their goals.

When you do this, you become their trusted advisor and ultimately you may start by selling affiliate products and then you can replace the products with by making a lot off Facebook ad videos. I built an audience of people interested in Facebook advertising. I have affiliate relationships with some Facebook advertisers right now and guess what? I’m starting to my own Facebook advertising course. This is going to increase my margins. It’s going to increase the value of my positioning. It’s going to increase my profits overall.

The value I got as an affiliate marketer was the ability to monetize the process of growing my audience and now I can replace that vendor with my own products. And this is truly the real powerful way to grow a super successful longterm business. As an affiliate marketer, as I said before, I got over seeress affiliate marketing. It has revolutionized my life, but it isn’t without its own challenges. And so often the fake gurus and the people on Instagram touting the passive income lifestyle only tell you the good sides and there is a dark side to affiliate marketing. Be aware of that and remember, add value, grow the list, own that relationship because that ultimately is the value.

You can then replace the offers, you can replace the vendors and you can even create your own offers and really maximize your ROI that way. Thank you very much for this, for your time.