Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Market

As you may know, affiliate marketing is a way of earning commissions by helping other companies sell their products. With affiliate programs, each time someone clicks on your link and buys something, you earn credit that will be traded in for cash at the end of the month.

Many people buy into the idea that this business model is lucrative and relatively easy to do, but according to a recent study by E-Commerce Research Lab (ECRL), less than 20% of all affiliates actually make money with these programs. The main reason for this is because they don't exert enough effort or traffic into their pages. It's hard to believe how much money can be lost when affiliates are careless with their work.

Based on the findings of this study, which was conducted on a sample of 1,012 affiliates, 80% of all affiliates and 79% of all retailers lose money. In other words, affiliate programs are not worth it for 80% of the market!

While you can't blame the victims for simply giving up or not investing enough time into their marketing efforts, you can still question their decision to promote such a product and/or company as reputable. Let's see in detail why these programs will never work for your business:

1. You may have spent months building up your online presence. Then you came across a company that offered you a piece of the pie for just a few dollars. It sounds too good to be true, right? The problem is that it is. Check out this video by DontSellLies.com, where they took an otherwise reputable affiliate into court for deceit.

2. Most affiliates depend on their own traffic and resources to get sales. This leads to more demands on their time and energy than what they can take on with the necessary resources and effort needed to promote a great product like DDD!

3. There's no way to reserve a spot or space on a website unless you have some kind of ownership or copyright claim. In other words, if you sign up for an affiliate program, it's not guaranteed that your referral link will be used.

4. You can't control the quality of the product and/or service being promoted through your link. This is especially true with companies that are so large and impersonal that they rely heavily on automation to complete their tasks.

5. Some affiliate programs allow for bad reviews to be removed by their employees without any recourse for the retailer relying on those false testimonies to sell their product.

6. There is usually a big difference between what affiliates earn and what retailers actually receive. For example, if you buy products from Amazon, you will probably pay more for them than what the affiliate earns for that sale. In addition, it's not uncommon to see affiliates not receiving their commission check after selling their product. If this happens, there is no way to get in contact with them or make a claim with the company.

7. If you want to become a successful affiliate, you need to do more than hand out some links and wait for the money to roll in. You need to have a plan on how you will promote your product, who you're dealing with, how much time and effort it will take, and what kind of results you're hoping to get. If you don't have at least one or two of these covered on your list, then it's not worth joining an affiliate program.

8. Many affiliates find themselves signing up for multiple affiliate programs just to collect more credits because they forget the disclaimer that the powers that be usually put on their sites: "Affiliates are prohibited from selling services outside of their selected products. Selling of unrelated products and services is considered a breach of our program policies, may result in the suspension of your account and could lead to legal action."

9. Many affiliate programs will take a big chunk from your commission without telling you about it first. For example, if you earn 10% for a sale you make, they may take out 50% for unknown reasons. This is called "commission optimization services" or something to that effect.

10. You can't cancel your affiliate membership to that company because it could hurt your commission for the month, year or even lifetime. This is why many companies have strict contracts in place. What happens if you change your mind about the products and services you are promoting?

11. There are so many referral networks out there that you will not be able to keep track of them all and you may end up promoting a product from one of them, even though it could be violating some contract that you signed up for elsewhere.

12. The company's customer service department is probably large enough to support thousands/millions of affiliates, but it only takes one complaint from one customer for them to remove your link without warning or cause.

13. You can't rely on these programs for your main source of income, especially if you are a newbie in the affiliate game. It's too competitive and there are many more pros out there than you. Instead, use them as a place to start learning and applying some basic philosophies behind affiliate marketing. You may be able to get some sales, but you will never be able to make much of an impact on the world with this type of business model.

14. You still have to pay taxes on your earnings even if the company offers you some kind of payment extension plan or discount to pay your bill later on.

15. Most affiliate programs allow you to promote a large number of products, but you will still have to do most of your business in one industry like shopping, sports and/or entertainment.

16. Global companies will take advantage of your desire to earn some extra money. This is why they run massive affiliate programs with thousands of affiliates all over the world.

17. You are not allowed to "sell" your personal links to any company or person you choose no matter how good they may be or how much they pay you for referrals! How can anyone trust an affiliate with this kind of policy? If it's too good to be true, then it probably is!

18. You still have to work hard to get people to buy your products. All you can do with most affiliate programs is tell them what the product is, how much it costs, where they can find it and then sit back and wait for the sales to roll in.

19. You cannot scale your business model very easily even if you want to target other segments of the market. This is because many companies are limited and regulated by government agencies like the FTC. They will only allow you, for example, to target a certain group of people or something along those lines.

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Conclusion:

Affiliate marketing programs can provide you with the ability to make some extra money from home, but it's not the only way and there are many more pros than cons when it comes to this type of business. It requires a lot of effort and dedication to succeed in this area, but if you really want to make it big, then you need to realize that gimme gimme gimme is never going to work. You will have to work hard and invest a lot of time into starting up your own business and when others see your "success story", they will be most likely jealous because they are not doing the same thing you are.