Affiliate Marketing – Interrupted Income

Many of the members that join us at InfoMarketer’sZone have tried their hand at affiliate marketing where they put up a site, write some articles or blog with the intent of promoting other people’s related products through a special link that pays them a commission on each say made from referrals. 

This is a great way to learn how to market on the internet because you can start immediately at little or no cost and you must learn the basics of how to generate targeted traffic to your front-end, pre-sell process (at least half the battle no matter what online business you are going to start).

But eventually, anyone involved in affiliate marketing will experience some challenges, one of those challenges is what happens when the product you are promoting either is taken off the market, raises their prices, changes their promotion strategy or in some other way impacts your affiliate income? 

Nothing is worse that spending your time & energy building traffic to an affiliate site, ramping up your commissions to $500, $1000 or more each month and then having that vendor change something overnight so your profit disappears!

Often there is nothing you can do except complain, but that doesn’t put money in your bank account does it.

LIMIT YOUR RISKS WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

Having the vendor for a product you are promoting make chnages to their product, sales page or sales process isn’t always a bad thing…indeed, your main responsibility as an affiliate marketer is to keep an eye on your return on traffic.  How many sales do you make per visitor you send their way…if that goes down marketdly and stays down as a result of your product vendor making changes to their business, then you often have little recourse but to complain. 

The fact is though when you are affiliate marketing, you are ultimately leaving control of your income to your product vendors, there is always a risk in doing so. 

Here are 3 things you can do to lower that risk:

1. Use redirect links so that you can simply change an html file on your system to replace one vendor with another on all past marketing links you may have across your sites.   Let’s say you are an affiliate for autoresponder X and over the last year you have hundreds of links in articles, blog posts, social networking sites, etc… – if you use the direct affiliate link you are screwed – no way you can go back and change all of those if suddenly you need to recommend autoresponder Y.   So instead, you use a redirect from an html page you own so that you can make one change centrally and all of those old links are redirected to the new vendor

2. Stick with large, successful and major vendors – I can’t count the number of small-time vendors I used to act as an affiliate for way back when that up and disappeared one day taking owed commissions with them

3. Augment your affiliate income with your own products…don’t rely 100% on affiliate commissions for your income, it is just too risky.  I like at least a 50/50 balance between my own products (where I can leverage others to affiliate market for me!) and affiliate marketing.  

Your own products could be info products like ebooks, reports, manuals, membership sites or the like or it could be software that you have developed for your marketplace.  In either case, the important factor is that you CONTROL the supply, pricing, and positioning of that product to the marketplace.  Once you hit a successful infoproduct model nobody can suddenly interrupt that process and impact your income overnight…

I know with at least half my income coming from products I own and control I sleep much better at night…I think you will too.