Email Marketing in Affiliate Marketing
I’ve been working in the Affiliate Marketing Industry for a couple of years now. As defined by Wikipedia:
Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliatesfor each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
It really is a unique and interesting concept. Basically, these affiliate networks provide you with a menu of offers to choose from. They create the landing page, track the stats, and display approved creatives. The offers are recieved directly from the advertiser and a cut of your earnings goes to them. For example, affiliate network recieves a Business Oppurtunity offer from advertiser that pays them $20 per lead. Affiliate Network uploads offer to their site and displays that same $20 lead they got from advertiser for $17.50. You have a solid offer that you might otherwise not of had access to with no management on your end while the Affiliate Network takes their cut for providing the service. A win/win situation right??? Not always….
Looking deeper, I’ve seen it all. The biggest problems on the affiliate side is scrubbing and shaving. This industry is highly unregulated and fraud is common practice. Scrubbing, the lesser of the evils, happens when the advertiser or affiliate network doesn’t pay you on leads that are already in their system. I can understand this practice to a certain point. The leads are useless to advertiser if they can’t sell them. However, the frustrating part is, in the affilate marketing industry, a handful of advertisers domainate the market. Thus, it is very common to generate numerous leads that you won’t be paid for. Shaving is completly illegal and there needs to be federal laws in place to ban the practice. Shaving occurs mostly on the advertiser side. Whoever controls the advertisement has the ability to turn off the firing of the pixel. In other words, leads will come in, but they won’t pay you for them. Unfortunately, this has happened to me on more than a handful of occasions. The companies I work with now are very ethical in the way they do their business, but most are at the mercy of the advertiser. Advertising company wants to see quick boost in profits, turn off the pixel for an hour and watch the leads come in! Makes me cringe thinking about it. There needs to be some sort of 3rd party watch dog to hold the advertisers accountable for their actions. This is one of the few instances where federal legislation is needed to outlaw shaving.
The competition in the Affiliate Marketing industry is fierece. As one CPA network owner explained to me,
”Its a very simple business model that you can launch with under $1,000 in startup costs”
There isn’t a day that goes by that somebody somewhere isn’t hawking some sort of new offer to me. There really isn’t much difference between the hundreds of affiliate netowrks out there either. Most of the networks I work with are built on realtionships and trust. Knowing that the networks are in your corner when an issue arises shows commitment to developing a solid business relationship.
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing