Riding the Affiliate Rollercoaster

Do you have what it takes to survive the affiliate marketing rollercoaster?

This last week has probably been the toughest week I’ve had since I started doing affiliate marketing full time in January of this year.  The amount of mental turmoil I went through this week would have made most people turn around and run back to the safety of their 9-5 jobs.

Inspired by the idea of taking my affiliate income to the next level I put my nose to the grindstone and for the past few months I’ve been launching and testing new affiliate campaigns left, right and center.  The last three weeks especially have been the busiest I’ve been in a long time. 

So where do I stand after launching and testing dozens of campaigns in the last few months? 

Seemingly in the same place I started. 

Every single one of the campaigns I launched in the last few months has been met with failure.  Some campaigns failed to get any traffic at all.  Others were able to get traffic but weren’t able to convert at anywhere near the levels required to pay for the keyword prices the marketplace demands.  Some campaigns were slapped with a low quality score by Google, while others sent a whole bunch of traffic but didn’t covert at all.

The biggest challenge I’ve been struggling with, especially in the last few weeks has been trying to wrap my head around a sound, long term affiliate marketing strategy.

It may sound simple on the surface but there are actually a lot of factors involved beneath the surface in this business that not many people talk about.

For example, the issue of ethics.  What do you do when you launch offer after offer and get your ass handed to you by competitors who are displaying absolutely no business ethics or morals when promoting their offers? 

I mean, I’m not talking about promoting automatic re-bill offers that some people consider shady.  I’m talking about blatantly lying on your landing pages, impersonating celebrities, creating fake testimonials, making false statements about your products, and a variety of other tactics that will get your ass sued sooner or later.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been in business long enough to know what’s considered “fair game” by most courts of law, and what will get you sued.  Some of what I’ve seen out there in the last few months is definitely borderline or completely illegal. 

Working Hard at the Wrong Things?

When you work for yourself, it’s sometimes quite easy to get lax with your time schedule and to take it easy and slack off a little.  During such times, when you don’t produce any significant results in your business it’s only natural. 

However, when you dedicate yourself and begin to really work hard at your craft every day for weeks and months with very little results to show for your work, it can be very disheartening. What’s worse is that you don’t know if it’s simply a numbers game and you just have to go through the crap to eventually see results, or if you’re just repeatedly making the same mistakes over and over again.

The Affiliate Rollercoaster

Anyone who’s done affiliate marketing, and especially anyone who’s done affiliate marketing full time will know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that affiliate marketing can be like a rollercoaster.  It’s like you all of a sudden turn into a bi-polar basket case.  One minute you’re excited about launching your new campaign and seeing the initial traffic start to arrive and a short while later you’re depressed because the offer isn’t converting at all and your CPC costs are going through the roof.

You make some tweaks in your campaigns and the next day you get some amazing conversions, only to find out that it was a temporary blip and your conversions suffer every day after that.  You just get a campaign semi-profitable and the advertiser pulls the offer.

Not everyone can handle these types of ups and downs and the stress alone has scared off a lot of young affiliates.

Learning to Persevere

Whenever I hit turbulent times like these in any of my income streams and businesses, my frustration is always coupled with excitement.  I get excited because I know that 90-95% of people who get to this exact same spot in their affiliate marketing career will not persevere and get through it.  They’ll quit and move onto the next “system” for making money online, or go back to their day jobs.

What’s exciting about this is that on the other side of this rollercoaster ride is a place where 95% of my competition no longer exists.  Last week Google went on a banning spree and began to drop the hammer on a lot of affiliates promoting certain types of offers. 

Although a lot of affiliates are pissed with Google right now for their ruthless attitude in banning their accounts, this type of thing can only serve to help our industry in the future.  Just the thought of getting your account banned for doing “shady” stuff on Google seems to have already begun taking effect. 

I’m starting to see less and less ads and landing pages on Google that promote offers in unethical and most probably illegal ways.  This is good news for affiliates that take a more long-term approach to their business and who don’t want to risk losing their business by trying to promote offers in shady ways.

There will always be smart affiliates that find clever ways to promote offers that some would consider “sneaky” or “borderline unethical”, and those affiliates are smart enough to walk the fine line between “clever” and “illegal”, but I think the days of those affiliates who are either too immature or too inexperienced to stay on the right side of that line are numbered.  That’s not to say that everyone who got banned in the last few weeks was doing anything illegal or even unethical. 

From what I’ve heard, Google went on a banning spree and took no prisoners.  Only the affiliate themselves will know if they were actually doing anything wrong, or if they just happened to get banned based on some minor technicality they weren’t aware of.

Either way, my strategy has become clearer than ever.  I’ll continue to follow my intuition and stay on the right side of that line, being an affiliate that makes money by providing value and connecting people with solutions to their life’s problems.  I’ll let Google, the authorities and the marketplace in general sort out those who are so over that line they’d have to be mentally challenged not to realize they’re breaking the law.

Reaching Out to Others

One thing that’s been really helpful to me in the last couple of months is networking with other affiliates and Bloggers on forums, via chat and on the phone.  There are a lot of changes going on in the industry and I’m not the only one who’s had their share of frustrations.

Having a chat with other affiliates who have launched 30-40 campaigns and not seen any success definitely made me feel a lot better that I’m not the only one with such challenges, and networking with them will definitely help me to find ways to solve these problems.

If you’re currently on the affiliate rollercoaster and feeling frustrated, try finding someone to network with in this industry to help you stay motivated.

At times the rollercoaster may seem scary, but compared to working a 9-5 job full time until age 65, I’ll take my chanc
es on the rollercoaster.

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