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If you go by the hope doled out by
affiliate networks, then all affiliate publishers should have become
millionaires by now. After all, all they were asked to do was sign up
with an affiliate network, build a site and plug in a product
manufactured by any of the 100s of affiliate merchants that were
showcased on the affiliate network's website – and the cash
supposedly would have started rolling in.
If it were true, almost every online
shop owner would be stuffed to his gills with cash. But that was not
to be. Instead, here is the true account of what actually happens to
an affiliate publisher:
Eager beaver entrepreneurs, who have
always been told that the Internet is an El Dorado, rush in to sign
up as affiliate publishers. They spend their hard-earned money on
building a website and promoting it in the hope of making it big, but
after a few months realize that their dream was just that – a
dream. Yes, the truth is affiliate programs work only for those who
have luck on their side, and here are the reasons why:
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Affiliate publishers do not own a
website that's swarming with traffic – they have to build traffic,
and to generate traffic they need to market their websites
aggressively by spending money on PPC ads, content generation and
distribution, link building, and other SEO techniques. These
entrepreneurs have been told that if they can manage to get their
website somewhere in the top 5 or 6 listings of a search engine
results page, then they have hit big time – nothing can be further
away from truth, as customers will always prefer to buy a product
directly from the manufacturer, by-passing the affiliates. Remember,
Internet marketing is not easy – it requires a whole lot of time
and burns quite a bit of money.
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Assuming even if you make it to
the top of the search engines' results pages and many people do
click on your website, the conversion rates are downright pathetic.
If just 1 from 500 visitors buys your product, consider yourself
lucky – that's how bad it is!
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Then there's intense competition
breathing down every affiliate publisher's neck. Just imagine, if
it's easy for you to pick up a piece of code from an affiliate
network and set up an online shop, then doing the same will be as
easy for everyone else – the lesson is: 1000s of affiliate
publishers compete with each other for a pittance and end up
publicizing merchant's product.
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Unless you sign up with a reputed
affiliate merchant, you're never sure about the company and the
quality of the product. You can also get into trouble if a customer
sues you – of course, this is a rare occurrence. So, if you're
stuck with an unscrupulous merchant, you'll spoil your reputation
and waste a lot of time and effort.
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The global economy is going
through trying times – and when it comes out of these trying
times, people are going to save the money because the recent
experiences would have jolted them out of their spending habits. So,
don't think that by hosting an affiliate shop, customers will drop
by and pick up an item or two daily.
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Affiliate publishers work out of
their homes, and get into the affiliate game to make some
side-money. They do not have the time and patience, nor do they want
to invest the money. The result is their website turns into a
tombstone with the passage of time.
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You may have heard success stories
of some affiliate publishers – but don't let them spur you.
Research first and you'll find the number of affiliate failures
grossly outnumber the number of rare affiliates that have succeeded.
If you ask me, affiliate programs are
not as hunky-dory as they are projected to be. They pay in small
trickles and have an in-built failure rate of over 95%. The only way
you can make an affiliate program work is to develop your own product
and enroll affiliate publishers to popularize it. Now, that would be
a sweet deal – you make the baby and let the nannies take care of
it as well as publicize it in the bargain.
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