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When Affiliate Programs go bad
Posted on Thursday, May 17 @ 02:16:19 EDT by steve |
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When Affiliate Programs go bad
- Problems with affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money on the Internet, but there are a few precautions you should take to ensure the longevity of your marketing efforts. In this article I will go over a few common problems with affiliate programs and discuss some possible solutions.
One of the biggest problems with affiliate programs is that sometimes they will change their link structure or close the program all together.
Problems with affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money on the Internet, but there are a few precautions you should take to ensure the longevity of your marketing efforts. In this article I will go over a few common problems with affiliate programs and discuss some possible solutions.
One of the biggest problems with affiliate programs is that sometimes they will change their link structure or close the program all together.
When you join the program they give you links to link to them with your affiliate ID. You go out and spread your link throughout the Internet. You build applications around the link structure they gave you and you start seeing sales. Everything is going great and will continue indefinitely as far as you can tell. Then one day your wonderful affiliate program sends you an email telling you that they have changed the link structure and all your links will no longer work. They might even tell you that they are stopping the program all together. So here you are sending the traffic but no longer getting paid for it. The worst part is that there is nothing you can do unless you planned for this day in advance. Luckily you can easily protect yourself from this unhappy scenario. How? Simple! DON'T LINK TO THEM.... Instead link to yourself and set up a redirect using .htaccess, html, JavaScript, DNS redirects or a service like TINYURL. Now when they change the link, you just change your redirect to the new format and move on. If the program stops altogether you have the option of redirecting all your visitors to a new company or a message that you don't work for free and are no longing endorsing that company. This has saved me lots of money and time, so I strongly suggest you do it before it’s too late.
An issue that affects affiliate marketers is duplicate content penalties. A lot of affiliate programs will offer product descriptions, user reviews and other information for you to use on your site to help sell the product. The problem is you’re just one of thousands of affiliates using that same info. When search engine bots read your site, they will see that you have the same content as thousands of other sites and block your page because it is a duplicate. This will ensure that your page will never appear in search results. The solution to this is easy but can be time consuming. Instead of using the descriptions and reviews they give you, write your own. Find something about the product that other people are not talking about, write your own review, make a list of pros and cons. Anything that helps you stand apart from all the other affiliate programs will help you place higher in the search engines and will help you get the sale.
Another problem I have had with affiliate programs is staying within their terms and conditions. What today is preached as the latest in affiliate optimization, tomorrow maybe against the Terms of Service (TOS). This issue is harder to solve. The only advice I can give you on this is, don't go crazy over optimizing. Stick to the official advice giving by the affiliate program. Most affiliates will have a Blog or an affiliate help page which will give you some allowed techniques to optimize your ads. If you want to experiment, don't do it on all your sites. I had one for my sites banned from a major affiliate programs for using a technique that I had read that a lot of other big webmasters were using.
Luckily I had only done it on one of my sites, so it was not too bad. I learned my lesson and moved on.
The last problem we will go over is finding a good affiliate program.
There are lots criteria for finding a great affiliate program and everyone’s needs will be different.
Some things that you should consider:
Strength of the company.
A week does not go by that I don't hear about an affiliate closing and not paying their affiliates. While you can never know what program will close, the stronger the company the more likely you will get paid in the event they do close the program.
Commission rate
The commission rate will determine how much you will make. The higher the rate the more you make.
Type of product
Usually you want to pick affiliate programs that sell products related to the type of site you have.
Number of products offered
Some affiliate programs have hundreds of products you can sell. The more products they have, the more products you can sell and the more you will make.
Price, ease of sale
While high priced items will make you more money, they are harder to convince people to buy and you will have more competition. You will need to see what works for you. For some sites, it will make sense to sell high price goods but in my experience it is easier to convince people to buy low priced products
You can find a list of the top 10 affiliate programs we use at:
http://www.goaffiliateprograms.com
With the proper research and precautions you can protect yourself from many of the pitfalls of affiliate marketing.
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