Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. If you are successful it can provide you with passive income for years.
Who doesn’t want an endless stream of money coming into their bank account?
I am going to make a concious effort to step up and increase my affiliate income. In the past I made a lot of money through affiliate marketing and I want to get back to that same level.
Unfortunately, the affiliate world isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. As an affiliate marketer you need to have a thick skin and be prepared to be screwed over on a regular basis.
I talk about this in the video below.
Keep reading on to get a better understanding of how I’ve been screwed over by affiliate companies this year.
Affiliate Programs Closing Without Letting Affiliates Know
This isn’t my first complaint or rant about negative experiences in affiliate marketing. I spoke about issues in-depth in the article “Eleven Reasons Affiliate Marketing Sucks” and touched upon it in other articles such as “WordPress Companies Need to Do More for Affiliates” and “When Should Affiliates Stop Promoting a Product?“.
Despite my frustrations with affiliate marketing, I do want to increase my affiliate income and show all of you how I am going to do that, so my future blog posts about this topic will hopefully be more positive.
This week I have been reviewing existing affiliate programs and reviewing ones I could join and actively promote. I am going to document this research in an article for you guys so stay tuned :)
Whilst reviewing links in my webmaster resources area the other day I found many of the companies I was promoting were not active anymore.
- Several companies had been bought over and merged with other companies
- Many companies no longer existed
- One email marketing company was now linking to a movie rental service (I’m not even joking!)
There is one thing that ties all of these companies together; None of them advised affiliates that their affiliate program was closing. They continued to allow affiliates to promote their company without as much as an email.
It is a reminder of how little companies value the affiliate marketers who are spending time and money to send them traffic.
A similar incident occurred last month with an established WordPress company (I don’t want to point the finger at them so won’t name them).
The company contacted me and asked about helping me promote their themes. I attempted to login to my affiliate account, but my login information was not working and the password reset stated that no account was registered with my email accounts.
After requesting help with this issue I was informed that several months ago they had some issues with their database and some of the old stale accounts have been removed. They checked and confirmed that my affiliate account was disabled.
What the F**k!!
I had been sending traffic to them for several months and they were not tracking conversions. I had no account, no evidence of traffic being sent, no evidence of conversions, and no idea whether I had a lot of money in my account previously or during the months after my account was closed.
The fact that they would do this is worrying. At the very least, all the hard work I put into writing articles to help promote their products warranted an email.
When I queried the whole thing they advised that could only see the user ID, but not account details of affiliates such as username and email, so they couldn’t inform me of what happened.
This seems like a cop out in my opinion as a quick look at their traffic stats would have shown what websites were sending them traffic and from there see the exact affiliate ID being used.
This situation demanded a full investigation so that no affiliate lost out. None was performed.
The company were still keen to work with me, but how can I work with a company that would do that to affiliates?
I may have lost $20, I may have lost $400. I don’t know and I will never know as my affiliate account no longer exists.
This is a stark reminder of how little companies think of their affiliates.
Making Money Blind
Sometimes you find the right product to promote, but the affiliate program is very poor.
FeedBlitz is a good example of this. Four years ago I was using the service and published a thorough review of what it could and could not do (the review was over 11,000 words).
Their affiliate program paid 10% of commissions initially rising up to 40% when over $100 is billed. On paper, it seemed like the perfect product to promote.
As I write this article I have sent FeedBlitz over 4,050 visitors and to date this has generated me nothing. I have generated $8.99 in commissions, which doesn’t even meet the minimum payout requirement, so no payment will be made.
It pays to be a little skeptical when you’re an affliate.
Sending over 4,000 targeted visitors to a service and generating no money raises suspicions. Unfortunately, I cannot check anything. FeedBlitz provides no way of analysing traffic or conversions.
With no reports to refer to, I am completely blind as to what is happening.
The Affiliate Selection Process
All of these experiences highlight the importance of being selective with what you actively promote. You should not invest time or money into promoting a product or service if the company does respect its affiliates.
A company should provide affiliates with support and provide them with the necessary tools to generate conversions. This will help both the affiliate and the company make more money.
Even if you select a good product or service to promote from a company that treats affiliates well, there is still no guarantee you will make money with them.
I have recommended some great products over the years that generated me no commissions, whilst a solitary link in an unrelated blog post to another product or service generated me thousands.
You need to test a lot of affiliate programs and then see which one converts well. Annoyingly, the affiliate programs that generate good commissions do not provide good support.
Have you been treated badly as an affiliate? If so, please leave a comment below and share your experience.
Thanks for reading.
* Featured Image Credit: Andrew T Thrasher
Hi Brian,
Thank you so much for taking time to answer my comment. I have forwarded you my previous unanswered ticket from ShareASale regarding the issue.
And Thank you Kevin for raising this. I will let you know of any updates on this issue.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to Pradeep Brian. Hopefully this can be resolved well for everyone involved.
You can see in my next article that I have a good opinion of ShareASale and want to increase my income through you guys.
Hey Pradeep,
I’d be happy to look into the issue privately for you. Our policy is to not discuss individual Affiliate account details in a public forum – but you can email me at [email protected] and I’ll be happy to take a look and get back to you. Merchants are in ultimate control of their programs on ShareASale including approving/declining Affiliates as well as transactions – but if you feel like something here was done wrongly we would be more than happy to at least research it for you and see what happened. Our clients are both Affiliates and Retailers – we take our responsibilities to both very seriously.
Hi Greg.
I have never gone as far as running an affiliate program for someone just so that I can promote them. I do appreciate that many companies don’t understand how it all works etc, but I’d rather work with companies that do instead of doing everything.
Affilinet is a European affiliate network (same idea as ShareASale). I believe they have bought over Affiliate Window, which is a company I used for several years.
If I was in your position, I would probably look at alternatives, but it’s difficult to say without knowing the specifics i.e. your website, the industry etc.
Thanks :)
That’s very disappointing.
I sent a tweet to ShareASale asking if they can comment on this.
I know that some merchants would do this with their own in-house affiliate program, but they should not be allowed to do it on ShareASale. ShareASale need to get involved in this.
Now that we are talking about it, I am thinking that this would be a great business idea. Having some kind of third party that would make sure bloggers and companies are on the same page… Have you ever heard of such project ?
What you are saying about companies not understanding affiliation is true, but there is something you are missing : for most non-english speaking companies, if, as a blogger, you do not go the extra mile, there is nothing for you to promote !
For instance, I’ve already took control of a partner’s WP admin credentials in order to create an affiliate program for them, so that I would be able to promote their products.
It is time consuming and risky (and you kind of work for free), but if you don’t do that you are more or less limited to Amazon.
Another example is Affilinet, a plateform that’s supposed to take care of affiliation for you and the companies. This is kind of the most popular affiliation plateform in France. Well, I’ve never managed to see how much money / sales I’ve had, and each time I want to create an affiliate link I have to send someone an email because I can never find the information anywhere…
What would you do if you had so much trouble ? Would you go the extra mile or just give up ?
Looking forward to following your journey, Kevin.
Definitely disappointing with that single case but otherwise, I too think that ShareASale is one of the best affiliate networks around.
I wanted to highlight the problem with the Merchant/Company more than ShareASale. They disabled the account citing that I had publicly published their coupon code when in fact they (their affiliate manager – whoever they had employed) got in touch with me in first place asking to be listed in the coupons section providing a personalised coupon code.
Luckily I had the email proof that I forwarded from back then but the founder got back replying that was a mistake from their team member and despite that, it wasn’t ethical on my side to make that publicly available ????. I guess he saw more benefit in voiding all my earnings from past few months and disabling my account.
Hi Greg.
I don’t see this ever changing. I started doing affiliate marketing in 2000 and the same problems existed then. I have probably lost hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies messing around with stats, closing their programs that initially promised lifetime commissions, or simply because the company shut down or was bought over.
You just need to accept the fact that it will happen and be careful about who you promote.
It’s a shame that this is happening in France. I would only work with established companies as companies that do not understand affiliation are more likely to close their program early.
Too many “Internet Gurus” try and paint the picture that it’s all sunshine and rainbows. It’s not. Affiliates are regularly getting screwed over and no one does anything about it. It’s like the wild west.
More often than not, all you can do is stop sending the company traffic.
I tried to make this blog more profitable through advertising, but it’s difficult. Page views for most blogs have decreased because of the sheer volume being published every day. Not to mention the fact that a large number of internet users use ad blockers so banner revenue is much less than what it should be.
I charge for reviews on this blog to compensate me for my time etc, but I would like to diversify and increase my affiliate income.
Glad you liked the post. I will try and do more articles like this and show where I succeed and where I failed miserably :)
Hey Pradeep.
That is very disappointing that ShareASale never looked into this. I appreciate that they have to look after merchants, but they need to ensure that merchants act fairly and treat affiliates with respect.
I have always had a positive experience with ShareASale and view them as one of the best affiliate networks around.
Did the company advise why they disabled your account? Was it because of the source of the traffic e.g. PPC.
Thank you for this article !
I agree with you when you say that some companies do not understand how valuable a strong affiliate network could be for them.
As I work in France (mostly), the situation is even worst, because you often have to explain to the companies what an affiliate is, how it works, etc.
The lack of formal contracts and the lack of “justice” makes affiliate marketing very flexible but very unsafe too. How do you see this evolve in the future ? Some kind of blogger’s union that would take matter in their own hands when a company does not provide the support it should ?
Hi Kevin. Warts and all stories are great because it adds realism to an otherwise fairy-tale veneer. With the exception of AMZ, I’ve been monumentally unsuccessful with affiliate promotions. Revenue has never justified the effort and at times I have had good reason to believe that was not because of a shortage of clicks. And even AMZ is challenging because of their ridiculous one day cookie. Promoting anything over $50 is a waste of time since comparison shopping always, ALWAYS, kills the cookie, even when the buyer comes back to AMZ to buy!
Instead, I’ve focused on advertising revenue but am now moving to start again with a combination of affiliate programs and my own branded products.
It will be interesting following your progress here.
Thanks for the rant :)
Well said – “As an affiliate marketer you need to have a thick skin and be prepared to be screwed over on a regular basis.”
I mostly see problems with companies that are new to offering these Affiliate programs and haven’t quite grasped the concept fully to appreciate the efforts of their affiliates. No wonder we hear questions doubting if someone’s affiliate account will be shut down if they become successful.
I recently experienced this with one of the ShareaSale listed WordPress niche companies that disabled my account after I started getting many conversions. When I took it up to ShareaSale, they never investigated this, as I am sure for them Merchants are more important to the platform.
The most frustrating thing about the situation is you have no authority to complain unless you take legal measures (which are obviously beyond the reach of most affiliates).
So, I guess it’s worth investing time and efforts only in the established Affiliate programs of reputable companies.