5 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing May Not Be The Answer For Your Blog
Credit: evagor@sxc.hu
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money blogging. As long as you are writing about a niche that a few people care about, there is a good chance you can find affiliate programs that can help you promote products to your readers and get compensated when they buy using your links. There is no magic number of dollars that you can make with affiliate marketing. Many bloggers assume that there is no ceiling to how much money you can earn from affiliate products. While that may be true, since you are only getting a small percentage of what you are selling on your blog, there is so much money you can earn. But there is a floor. That’s when you don’t sell any products. So affiliate marketing is quite risky for publishers especially if you have CPM deals lined up for your blog.
I have been fond of affiliate marketing for years now. It’s what allowed me to start my business and fund it when I didn’t have enough resources to hire people or purchase equipment and services for my business. So affiliate marketing will always have a special place in my heart. But there are reasons I am not focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing anymore. The business has changed dramatically in the past few years, and while the industry is not dead, it is being pressured from all sides. Here are just a few reasons why I don’t consider affiliate marketing to be right for my business:
- Control: when you start your own business, you’d hope that you can have control on what’s going on with your business, and what you can do to increase your revenue. In reality, affiliate marketers are not in control of their destiny. In many cases, affiliate programs are too uptight with all their rules and policies. Some affiliate programs don’t pay you if you blog about their products. Others will right off your affiliate commissions if you refer people to them through the search engines. Worst of all, your affiliate program could ask you to make major changes to your website in order to continue your relationship with them. Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in the corporate environment, and I am aware of the challenges of working with partner companies in the past. But I have found many affiliate programs to be too demanding and uptight.
- Unfavorable Landscape: affiliate programs have shown that they really don’t care about their affiliates. When companies cut their affiliates off the minute Internet tax is imposed in a certain state, you know you are not a priority for your affiliate partner. I guess it’s only fair as affiliates are there to generate leads for their merchants. So expecting merchants to care too much about affiliates may be wishful thinking. Many merchants are struggling these days and affiliate marketers are getting the boot as a result. Fair?
- Risky: affiliate marketing may look not so risky to publishers at first. But if you think about it, it does put pressure on publishers to perform and generate sales. It doesn’t help that some affiliate programs ask their affiliates to generate a certain amount of revenue each month or else. Unlike advertising and sponsorships, with affiliate marketing you are not entitled to a minimum monthly check. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t get paid. It’s always wise to diversify just in case.
- Limitations: as an affiliate, you are very limited to what you can do to promote affiliate products. Many merchants don’t allow you to access their conversion data or even install your analytics code on their landing page. So you are going to be limited as far as ways you can improve your campaigns. The payments are another issue. I can’t tell you how many times we have delivered sales for companies only to find out they never intended to pay us for our troubles in the first places. Yes. That’s fraud. But it happens all the time. As a startup, we can’t afford to go after all these companies. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that affiliate programs practice such an approach from time to time. Popular affiliate programs may not take such an approach but by leaving their terms and conditions vauge, they leave the door wide open for affiliate abuse.
- Competition: I love competition. That’s why I got in the business world. If you can’t take competition, you may want to quit blogging and look for a job that doesn’t require you to compete with others on a daily basis. Unfortunately, not all competitors play fair in the affiliate marketing world. There are some who engage in black hat tactics to steal sales from others. Some spam your blog or launch hack attacks against it. Of course, there are some affiliates who have no clue what they are doing and end up destroying everyone else’s credibility in their niche. Many online marketers create and sell products that target newbie affiliates. Unfortunately, most of these marketers are not good teachers.
I am not suggesting that you can’t make money from affiliate marketing. On the contrary, if you play your cards right, there is no reason you can’t make a decent amount of revenue from your blog on a monthly basis. However, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You should always work towards creating and selling your own products. It’s much more lucrative, and you’ll have more control. Hate to be cynical, but whatever you do, don’t put all your hopes in affiliate products.
