If you’ve been involved with affiliate marketing for more than a few months than you probably have figured out that this business doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in the mainstream world.
Is it any surprise?
Blackhaters affiliates gaming search engines, online gambling affiliates, pornography affiliates, “free” ipod offers, etc, etc, etc. Let’s be honest, this type of crap get more media attention than the 1000s of affiliate out there promoting honest products and services using honest methods.
Than there’s also this scenario: A lot of honest affiliates get sucked into promoting an affiliate offer that’s basically a scam, and then when they come to terms with the fact that it’s a scam it’s hard shutting it off, since they’re making so much money.
I WAS ONE OF THOSE AFFILIATES!
It all started 6 months ago I was promoting an affiliate offer that was EXTREMELY lucrative. I mean I was spending upwards of $5-10k/day on Adwords pushing traffic to this offer and my ROI was 300%!@?!
At first I was oblivious, let’s be honest, naive, to the fact that the offer was a scam (I’m not going to give the details since I know some of you out there will jump at the opportunity to promote it).
After working with the affiliate manager I began to realized that the entire conversion model was based on deliberately deceiving the customer.
The affiliate manager strongly advised me to put the Google feedback button on the thank you page (that comes from the Google conversion pixels) below the fold and disable the scroll bar, so people couldn’t file complaints. Apparently several of their other affiliates had gotten kicked off Adwords because of too many customer complaints.
I started to feel more and more uncomfortable promoting this offer.
What’s worst, this affiliate manager AND his boss, where constantly pestering me, almost on a daily basis, treating me like I was one of their employees. I was constantly being pushed to get my sales higher, to double serve my ads (a direct violation of Adwords TOS).
It gets better…
At the Affiliate Summit in Miami I had a chance to have dinner with my affiliate manager and some of his other affiliates, and boy was that an eye opener!
The affiliate manager asked everyone at the table if they were doing any spamming.
One group of affiliates, who are running a highly successful affiliate company whose name I will not mention on this blog, replied that they had setup a bogus membership site (for movie downloads or something) that they are using to just get people’s user ids and passwords.
They were then using these user ids and passwords to BREAK INTO THEIR EMAIL accounts and spam their list of friends with affiliate offers. They were having a lot of success with this since most people use the same id and password for EVERYTHING (security tip there).
The affiliate manager (my affiliate manger!) laughed and nodded in approval.
To say the least I was absolutely disgusted! These guys are nothing more than cyber-criminals! And apparently, perfect company for the affiliate manager.
At this point I was desperately trying to find an excuse to shut my campaigns down with this merchant and clear my conscience. I REALLY started feeling very guilty about promoting this merchant’s scam product, but then at the same time I keep looking at the money coming in and had a hard time walking away!
And if I even tried walking away, I know my affiliate manager would be pestering me to no end. It’s like I was in the mafia!?!
Had I sold my soul to the dark site? Was I no better than these guys that were breaking into other people’s email accounts?
As luck would have it I found an exit strategy. Not too long after I came back from the Affiliate Summit I got an email from Google stating that I had to make some changes my affiliate site (for the above mentioned merchant) or they would start disapproving my ads.
My site was getting too many user complaints, not surprising!
Instead of trying to make some modifications to my site and come to a comprise with Google, or start a new campaign under some else’s account, or a million other things I could have done to get around this, I did the honest thing…
I shut down ALL my campaigns for this affiliate offer. I literally walked away from millions of dollars in profits. And I’ve never been happier!
You know, my happiness is more important than any amount of money I could have made from this merchant.
I believe you can make millions honestly, and I also believe you can make a fortune AND be happy. You don’t have to sell your soul to make money in affiliate marketing!
My tip for you is to be very carefully of what you promote, it’s easier than you think to get tempted by the dark side, especially when there’s a lot of money involved.
The fact is we’re all human.
Ask yourself what’s more important, your happiness or making money dishonestly by cheating people? If you’re a newbie affiliate the path you choose now will likely determine where you end up 5, 10, or even 20 years from now, make it a good one!
It generally takes a good deal of research to get a campaign with that kind of ROI. “naive, to the fact that the offer was a scam…” Come on with it….
“On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re too honest you’ll find yourself eating scraps off the table.”
I have to disagree there. I don’t deal at all with shady stuff like ebooks, gambling, “free” offers, ringtones, payday loans, {insert just about anything from most CPA networks}, and I can tell you that I’m not certainly eating scraps.
There’s still room to make money online doing 100% white hat marketing.
Nice post, I totally agree and I would have done the same thing. You can’t put a price on self respect. Besides, like ghoti says, there’s plenty of money to be made by everyone doing it the legit way.
rofl.
You’re welcome for the blog topic. I can’t believe I actually may have helped you pawn this crap off on people.
Don’t bother blocking me. This is my last post here.
“rofl.
You’re welcome for the blog topic. I can’t believe I actually may have helped…….”
say what????????
I think that sometimes you just get caught up in the affiliate business and do things that others are doing only to realize later that it wasn’t the smart thing to do. One of my CPA reps just flat told me that “if you want to make real money you need to spam emails” and about that same time I kept getting emails blocked and returned from this major CPA network and the reps response was “I am not surprised…” and that was because they were major spammers. I dropped the campaign and network right then. If I am going to make money online it has to be by me doing what I consider the right thing. Amit, Way to go and not only did you do the right thing when you became aware of the situation you were brave enough to share about it openly! Touche!
Hey there,
Only just started following your blog so reading some old posts. Man, it’s nice to see an honest affiliate such as yourself. Oh, and great presentation at the affiliate summit by the way
Matt.
Way to go Amit…
You can’t put a price on integrity.