My Insight Website (For What It's Worth)

What is an affiliate program?

Becoming an affiliate means that you send visitors from your website to another persons website, and if they buy something, you get paid.

Affiliate program types

Some companies run their own affiliate programs, and others farm them out to places like Commission Junction, or the Google affiliate program. Amazon has an affiliate program that works pretty well, and has been responsible for a few small checks over the years.

Problems with affiliate programs

One of the problems with affiliate programs is that to make any real money from them, you will probably need a lot of traffic in sectors in which it is notoriously difficult to get traffic. Of course, you can buy traffic from Google or Facebook, but this can be a tricky business and could result in the loss of a Google Adwords or Facebook ad account if not done carefully. Google frowns on sites built solely for selling affiliate products, and has shut down thousands of accounts because of what they see as misuse.

Social media is another possibility for affiliate traffic, but you need to be careful not to spam the sites, and this is also difficult and can lead to problems with social media sites if they perceive what you promote, and how you promote it as spam.

There is also the problem of affiliate thievery, both from hackers who use programs to intercept your sales and make them their own, and unscrupulous companies who do not want to pay their publishers what is due them.

My personal experience with affiliate programs

I ran across this problem recently with a leading supplier of hard goods, work supplies, and other items related to brick and mortar businesses. One commission check, followed by other sales that mysteriously dissolved into cyberspace, with no record of the tracking numbers in their database.

Another program, run "in house" by a major dealer of big ticket items produced similar results. I had been sending them a lot of traffic, from links that provided a clear indication of where my visitors would be going, and what they would find when they got there. Not a single sale resulted, according to their accounting. By this time, I had put in place a series of safeguards in the form of tracking software, and some less technological methods.

After receiving phone calls and emails from people who had bought products through my links related to service issues, and having tracked thousands of visitors through the links, I determined that they were in fact dishonest. I confronted them with questions on the issue in a polite manner, and to my surprise, within a month, they closed their affiliate program!

Needless to say, I was not happy!

Do you remember that old saw about when life hands you lemons? Sometimes it works! What happened as a result of some affiliate vendors dishonest business tactics resulted in my highest earnings!
To read more about this see: Making Money Online | Selling Leads