Affiliate Marketing - What Gets My Goat

Just a whiney thread really about what really gets my goat with affiliate marketing.

Now, 85% of my income comes from Adsense, which I love. Drop a spot of code into a page and walk away, it does the job. Log into the easy panel and check your stats, your earnings, your CTR, your ePCM instantly. Live. In real time. Super.

But that's not enough is it. No, You have to try everything that's out there too... make sure you're not missing a trick. The market shifts and incomes fluctuate, so you have to have different things to offer your website visitors.

So, you enter into the World of the Beast: Affiliate Marketing.

One rule I have got though is: VERY RARELY do I ever sign up with an affiliate programme directly. I use the ad networks because they give me quicker access to potentially hundreds of advertisers in one place/format and it's easier to reach the minimums every 1-3 months.

Oh how ad networks promise the earth, but what's the reality? Well, here's the list of things that really get my goat:

1. I can't tell what's on the inside. I can't see the clients. So I have to join.
2. I join ... then you want to wait while a human inspects my site, which could be up to 3-5 days.
3. Sometimes I never hear from you.
4. Sometimes you reject my site with a standard copy/paste saying it could be one of the 15 following reasons (long list, no idea which it could be)
5. Your interfaces are all different - mostly confusing
6. Your clients now want to vet my site before they approve me
7. I have to register every site I own - maybe you want to check that one too
8. For each client there is a different agreement and arrangement over how I can use each creative on my site. e.g. maybe I can't use it in email, it has to be on a website, I can't use PPC for certain words
9. Your campaigns are time limited
10. Suddenly from nowhere I get an email saying a campaign has been terminated with immediate effect - and I have to drop everything and figure out where I've placed it on my site
11. Your stats are hard to fathom out
12. I put the code on my site and though I know I am getting clickthroughs there's not much signing up going on
13. There's way too much small print that one could fall foul of.
14. If I have to register every one of my sites with you and I want to use the campaign on all of them, do I really NEED to create the code for every one, or can I copy/paste it across all my sites in one go for now? Until I know how well it's doing there's no point for me to track it... it might underperform and I want to whip the code off in a week

It really is hard work isn't it! Sometimes it can take me up to 20 minutes to login and go through what's in there to pick something to trial on my site and get the code. Only to find it makes me £2 for one month and nothing ever after.

What gets YOUR goat with affiliate marketing companies?

 

Great list.....I agree with all of it but particularly #10. Drives me crazy too. So crazy, that I no longer use the network that is the worst culprit

 

Individual affiliate programmes have proven to be a problem for me for some other reasons too.

A couple of years back I tried the get paid for emails programmes to see. I could get great downlines, but they insisted on paying by cheque. With a minimum of $25 for a pyaout, when $1=£0.50 along would come a $25 cheque and it would cost me $16 to put it through my bank - and foreign cheques aren't guaranteed banked for a further 6-8 weeks after you've put the cheques in the bank. I stopped bothering to bank them.

Some others even stopped paying out, changing their terms. In particular, I was promoting one that paid £1 per signup, other98percent, I had over 30 signups quite quickly when they said they weren't doing that because some people had been getting members fraudulently. So you go to all the effort of doing a review and getting referrals, for nothing.

It really does ... get my goat.



And there's a top marketing guru online, huge company, reputable, internet marketing guru ... who doesn't provide me with any traffic statistics, so I can't tell what's working! Nuts I say, crazy.... especially as they bang on about stats being so important! GIVE me some then! I have a dozen different sites that could have got that referral!

 

With one I had over £100 in my account and it just wasn't paid out. I even contacted them to ask why it had disappeared but they could never tell me why. That was affiliatefuture. It was £100 from sign ups, all legit. But they never said why they weren't paying out.

Oh it's good to moan ... it's sooo good