Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

Following on from my earlier article, “Why I love Affiliate Marketing”, here is the polar viewpoint, showing the not-so-nice side of our Industry. Far from just throwing together a few ideas to counter my positive viewpoints, the following are genuine problems within Affiliate Marketing. I walked away from AM in 2005, and the following points were huge factors in my decision to do so.

Affiliate Marketing is lonely. There’s no doubt about it, AM can be one of the loneliest jobs going - Sitting at home in front of a computer all day with no “real” people to speak to is no life for anyone. Prior to 2005, I had been known to go a whole week without leaving the house, or talking to anyone apart from on Messenger!

There are no set hours. It’s all too easy to sit there and do 14 or 15 hour days, seven days a week. I know, because that’s exactly what I used to do - It was very rare that I worked less than 100 hours in a week (Still only down to around 60 hours a week now, but that’s much improved!), working through the night was common, and holidays were rare. I would never go away for more than a week, and I would always take the laptop with me. It’s very easy to fall into this trap, particularly when your boss (i.e YOU!) is a slavedriver!

No-one understands you. My father is probably the best example of this. He’s now progressed from the days when he thought I had to stick stamps onto emails to send them out, but just the other day I had a phone call: “My mate’s got a shop, selling bits for vacuum cleaners. Can you put them on your website?”. It’s only taken him seven years to learn that I do “something with websites”, but I don’t think I’ll ever explain AM to him (or anyone for that matter - I had to use Salt and Pepper shakers to explain it to Er Indoors once!). The two questions I get asked most often are: 1. Can you build me a website? (No, I know next to nothing about web design.) and 2. Can you fix my computer? (No, I know nothing about computers, except how to turn them on.)

People think you’re grubby. Had to get some reference to Nick Robertson into the negative side of AM, but he’s not alone - There are many, many Affiliate Managers out there who believe all affiliates are leeches, piggy-backing on their brand, using spyware, posting unauthorised discount codes, etc etc. And it’s these affiliates that result in companies like ASOS tarring all affiliates with the same brush, dragging down commissions and keeping merchants from entering the marketplace. Most of the full-time, professional affiliates are upstanding, hard-working people that bring a lot to the table. Quite often it’s the newbies looking for a quick buck that try things on, but it’s the rest of us who lose out.

There’s no security. When things are going great, Affiliate Marketing is brilliant. But when times get a bit tough, it can be very unforgiving. No sooner have you lost a merchant that was earning you a thousand pounds a month because “they’ve run out of budget” (laughable IMO - how can you run out of budget for performance-based marketing??), than Google will decide to drop your site from the index, and your webhost goes down for a week. This happens to all of us at some point, and you’d be forgiven for thinking someone’s got it in for you. A nice 9-5 job looks pretty appealing sometimes - It would be nice to clock off, walk out at 5pm and not think about work until the following morning. But that’s not the life we chose.

The Goalposts are always moving. There’s a perfect example over at A4U at the moment, where a merchant has chnged their T&Cs, and then retrospectively rejected an affiliates commissions! Unfortunately, this kind of thing is quite commonplace in AM. Merchants are forever changing the rules, and many do not even bother to notify the affiliates that they have changed until they start rejecting commissions. CJ are the best of course. If any program terms change, you must accept the new rules within 7 days or you’ll be kicked off the program. Which is great if you fancy taking a fortnight’s holiday - You can come home to find you’ve been kicked off half your programs!

Too many suits, Not enough substance. The reason I stopped going to many get2gethers was the plethora of arrogant tossers in their flash suits, coked up, trying to stuff business cards into my hand whilst trying to get into the toilets. There’s obviously a lot of money to be made if you can get your affiliate program working well. Unfortunately, some agencies (and networks) decided to send their entire sales force, who would get pissed up and start giving it the hard sell. By all means, buy me a beer, tell me what you do and we can exchange cards. If we can work together, I’ll get back to you. Force a card on me, or get in my face with the usual “what can we do to earn you more money” sales line, and you can forget any chance of me wanting to work with you.

So there you go - Quite a few reasons to hate this Industry. Just writing this has brought back a few memories of why I left AM in 2005, and it’s a shame to see that the same problems still exist. However, the points I made in the “I love Affiliate Marketing” article were the reasons I came back to this Industry after just 14 months out, and on balance, I don’t think I’d want to work anywhere else than Affiliate Marketing right now.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

PLEASE NOTE: Lammo is supported entirely by the kind donations of its loyal sponsors - Please help keep this blog running by supporting them:

DGM are one of the cornerstones of Affiliate Marketing - Under their original name UK Affiliates, they were one of the very first networks I joined back in 2000, and they're still going strong today.

With some top name merchants, and some excellent support staff (the cheques in the post guys!), there's bound to be plenty of DGM merchants to consider for your sites. Click here to find some today.