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Who is Lammo?
Posted by Lammo in 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.
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Nice post , I have started out doing from small mlm work and now doing some affiliates like you say newbies keep trying and finding way , but now I am really fed up too , well , i’m just 17 and I have skip my college class many times because of this work , it just make me wanna sit all the time. I think I have to leave it now before my life will just pass away very fast , but then it can make me money .. this is what holding me back . if you can give me some suggestion about anything , please send me here smith23_23@hotmail.com , i enjoy reading your post.
What did you do on your 14 months out?
Hey Joe,
I did nothing at all for the first 3 months – just recharged the batteries, and had my first 2-week holiday in 5 years! I then started to look at getting back to business..
I looked at several businesses, and very nearly bought a pub – In the end I ended up working on an old business I had, working as a Utility Warehouse distributor, which suited me down to the ground, as I could run it in about an hour a day (rather than the 100 hour weeks I was doing in AM) – it didn’t earn me huge amounts, but I was well on the way to building up a significant income with them when AM came calling again.
I’ll probably go back to that one day too, as it was such a great “lifestyle” business – I still get paid a fair bit of commission every month still (3 years since I did any work for them!), and they sent me on a cruise around the med in 2007 (all expenses paid), but for now, I’m focusing 100% on Affiliate Marketing.
Interesting. Sounds like a good scheme, especially for a master affiliate.
Lammo, sorry to bring this back to the fore but I have to confess, I hadn’t really been exposed to your stuff too much until I came across your ‘Decade in AM’ post series this week. This has made me check out a few of your other posts and I find them very very interesting.
This one here about negative AM points is just so spot on. It was written a couple of years ago and it’s very interesting to see how you as a person have changed your viewpoints in this time. I mean you obviously make a decent living out of AM and I am just starting out, making a £400 a month profit with 3 sites (only 1 is actually earning anything) and I read these posts of yours and find myself wondering if its all worth it?
I spend every spare moment online, trying to ‘make more money’ because I look at AM as the key to me getting out of the day job and back into self employment. To do this, I’d need to bring profits up to around £1500 a month but when I read your posts (I havent read all of them by the way, just a few these last couple of days), they make me really ask myself if it is worth it. For example, I have the 9-5 job now, I come home, switch off from it until the next day and get paid at the end of the month. But Ive ran my own business before and I want that feeling again, to be in charge of my own destiny…I see AM as the platform for that and I know several ’succesful’ affiliates have told me to keep going but I find myself in the ‘no life anywhere else category’ of your problems with AM above.
It doesn’t feel healthy to work like I work but at the moment, it seems ot be the only way to get those earnings up to a respectable enough amount to start and think about taking my foot off the gas.
I guess what I’m asking is, if you had your time all over again, would you still take the AM route and has it afforded you the life you wanted?
@WhiteKnight – No worries ressurecting this old post.. it’s interesting to see the stuff I was ranting about 3 years ago! And I’m so glad that I’m longer working 60 hour weeks, but still running the business on around 25 to 30 hours (yes I know I’m “working” at 10pm on a Friday night, but this isn’t really “work” as such!
I’m a firm believer in a good work/life balance, but even more so now that I’m a parent. That being said, I wouldn’t be in the position to work part time hours that suit me, from home without having first put in those years of 100 hour weeks.
You don’t have to go to those extremes, but you have set yourself a realistically achievable goal. If you’re prepared to work your arse off until you get to that goal, then you’ll probably succeed. Yes, that will mean not having a life for a while. The key is not to keep on working for the sake of working once you’ve reached your goal.
To answer your question “if you had your time all over again, would you still take the AM route and has it afforded you the life you wanted?”, yes I would still take the AM route, as I love the life that AM now lets me live, but I wouldn’t choose to waste the years and money that I did in the mid 2000’s chasing mega-bucks when I was already making more money than I actually needed.
Having said that, I’m a big believer in “no regrets” – If I hadn’t acted like a total arse and blown a shedload of money chasing a big pot of gold, I wouldn’t have the mindset I have right now (and I’d still be acting like a total arse), so I say “No regrets. Make some mistakes. Make some bloody huge mistakes. Just make sure you learn from them”.