How Affiliate Programs Undermine Their Own Affiliates
By: Jimmy Labrador
Affiliate programs in theory are a great way to do business in the internet without the need to come up with your own product. You can look for arrays of product available in the net and then decide to market them as an affiliate. If you make a sale, then the creator of the program gives you a commission.
However, and this is something you should have realized by now if you have been trying to do that, the scheme has a loophole which is difficult to plug because it runs counter to the program owner's drive to recruit as many affiliates as he or she can. The loophole is the announcement at the bottom of practically all landing pages that the program is recruiting affiliates to promote it. Here is what you will typically find at the landing page:
Affiliates Legal Disclaimer Privacy Policy
Having led your prospect to the landing page through your own ad, if the prospect now begins to explore a little and clicks "Affiliates" then a new window opens and the prospect gets an invitation to become an affiliate of the very program you are trying to entice him or her to buy. After reading that invitation, how can you expect your prospective customer to buy the program through you? Chances are that he or she will register as an affiliate and buy the program through his or her affiliate link.
This process can repeat itself down the line and no one makes a sale for as long as everyone else registers as an affiliate. The only time any affiliate in the program can really make a sale and a commission is when the affiliate duplication process stops at a certain point and a customer simply buys the product without bothering to explore the product's affiliate program. How far would this point be from your original starting point, no one knows. No one monitors it; not even the program owner whose bottom line interest is to make money regardless of who is making the sale for him/her.
How can you remedy this situation? It is a challenge to answer this because I am tempted to say outright - forget about affiliate marketing. That would be unfair because in spite of its flaw as discussed above, you can still make money with it in theory - provided your prospective customer does not opt to become an affiliate right away before he or she makes a decision to buy.
You can at least be careful in selecting affiliate programs to promote:
A. Closely scrutinize the landing page of the affiliate program. Is the invitation to become an affiliate something that is very obvious? Beware, you might just waste your time promoting it.
B. Explore the internal rules of the product's affiliate program. If your prospective buyer becomes an affiliate instead, does the program allow you to be credited so that you can still somehow earn a commission if the buyer-turned-affiliate buys the product? If not, then that's a double caution for you to carefully weigh your decision to become an affiliate and promote the product.
Well, if in spite of the above caution, you are still very much enamored with the product and really want to promote it, then go ahead. Your own prayers can help you. Pray that your would-be customer decides to buy before discovering the link to become an affiliate. Maybe that works occasionally.
About the Author:
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