All Entries in the "Affiliate Marketing" Category

Google and SEO Hater Video

I was sent a link to this video by a friend. This guy, Ryan Deiss, hates Google and says all of the SEO experts he has dealt with have ripped him off. He says he has the best source of traffic there is and that Google is afraid of them.

He’s talking about Facebook ads. Watch the video then come back and make a comment to tell us what you think about what he says in the video. You can find the video here.

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Affiliate Program Nightmares

This blog post is addressed to all of you out there who manage an affiliate program. There are a lot of people who try really hard to promote your products. You should really appreciate their hard work. Your income depends on them. Without your affiliate marketers, you fail and you’re out of a job.

Too many affiliate program managers have the attitude that they are doing a favor for the affiliate marketers. It is the other way around and you really need to understand this.

Things affiliate program managers do that make affiliate marketers want to find someone else’s products to promote. (These are things that make your company lose money because affiliate marketers go elsewhere.)

1. Joining your affiliate program: Why would you ever make this process difficult? I recently signed up for an affiliate program and was rejected. Why? Because the affiliate program representative called my phone one time and I didn’t answer.

I was on the phone with a client who I might have sold their product to. The voice mail they left said I could call them back and appeal the decision. I called them back. I got their voice mail. So now I will reject them as an affiliate program I choose to promote using their same logic.

2. Inactivity Policies: If I still have your banners and ads on my website, I’m still promoting your products. Just because I have not logged in at your website for a specific period of time doesn’t mean I’m not promoting your products. Closing an account because I have not logged in at your website and not informing me that you have closed my account is theft.

It means you are hoping I won’t notice and continue to sell your products for you and you won’t have to pay me. You know that some affiliate marketers have a lot of websites and/or a lot of pages where they have placed your ads.

You know they get busy and some even forget where they put them. They trusted you. They leave the pages up. And if they don’t know you closed their account for awhile, you get to keep their commissions. Again, if you do this, your are stealing from them.

3. Changing affiliate codes: Another way affiliate programs steal money from affiliate marketers using the same type of scam as above. You get an email stating the affiliate program has been changed and every affiliate marketer now has a new affiliate code and they need to change all of the links and ads they have put up.

Affiliate program managers know that you can’t drop everything and do that right now. They also rely on the fact that some won’t see the email or they won’t remember everywhere they put the ads. That means all of the affiliate marketers who don’t change the code on all of the ads will still be sending business to the affiliate without the affiliate having to pay them.

Some affiliate program managers do this every now and then to increase their bottom line. It is stealing.

4. Removing banner images: This one isn’t theft. It’s stupidity. An affiliate program manager will make a bunch of new banners for their affiliate marketers, then not tell them, then they delete the old banner images. Now every page that had the old image on it has a space where the old banner image used to be.

Either email the affiliate marketers in your program that they need to change the images or leave the old banner images where they were.

5. Not paying affiliate marketers at all or not paying them in full: This one is really outright theft. There are affiliate program managers that steal all of the commission and others who do not report all of the sales made by an affiliate marketer.

You can only get away with this for a short time. There are ways for an affiliate marketer to know you are stealing from them. The extra money you make ripping them off won’t support you when everyone knows what you did later.

Summary: Make it easier to join. Don’t remove old banner images when you create new banners. Don’t steal from affiliate marketers with shady tactics. Your affiliate marketers are who pay your salary and make you profit. Treat them better.

What experience with affiliate programs have you had? Share them with our readers here. Affiliate marketing is hard enough without the affiliate program managers making it more difficult.