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Pulling The Rug From Under Affiliates…

A past article getting a fresh airing… with new comments at the end… :-)

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A major concern of mine for people who only earn money from affiliate programs is that the rug can be pulled out from under you.

It’s all very well building excellent mini sites and making sure pages score highly in the search engines.

But what happens if the affiliate program closes?

What if the affiliate program commissions are changed such that you earn $0.25 per click instead of $0.50… but you know all your pay per click campaigns are only profitable if you earn over $0.35 per click?

Nightmare!

Here’s a very real example which I received from c2it, the Citibank-backed person-to-person payment system (kind of like PayPal)…

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c2it.com

Dear Neil Shearing,

We want to thank you for participating in the c2it (SM) service publisher program, and to advise you that we will be terminating our program on September 30th, 2002.

We will continue to pay a $5 commission for every approved c2it account that you generate until September 30th, 2002. However, international sales must be conducted before September 30th to be eligible for the additional commission.**

c2it links will be deactivated on September 30th, 2002! c2it creative links will be removed from the CJ interface on September 30th, 2002. You are no longer authorized to feature c2it advertising on your site(s) or within emails at that time. After September 30th, you will not be eligible for any commissions on c2it enrollments (leads) and or c2it transactions (sales).

If you have any questions pertaining to this news, please feel free to contact me. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

We have enjoyed working with you.

Regards,

c2it Affiliate Manager
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Hmmm, not much fun if you were referring people to their program and earning $5 per referral!

My advice is to make money from affiliate programs while you create your own product.

Once you’ve launched your own product, you can use affiliate links to “backend” sell to your customers… but the “frontend” (your products) give you that all important income stability.

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I would now include Adsense in with those comments… Adsense is owned, run and operated by Google. If, for any reason, they halved their payouts or even closed the program, there would be huge problems for anyone who built their business (and income) around Adsense. It wouldn’t be total devastation because you could re-direct site traffic to other programs, but it would involve a lot of extra work and hassle.

In a word, diversify. :-)

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Current posts, Original articles, Affiliate marketing, Adsense tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Pulling The Rug From Under Affiliates…”

  1. money saving advice Says:
    July 9th, 2006 at 12:39 am MyAvatars 0.2

    Totally Agree Neil,

    I think most marketers have now just gone straight to adsense and by-passsed affiliate commissions.

    Not sure why but all I can think off is changing links etc like you suggested, where’s google just looks at your page and gives you the ads.

    Most newbies etc are working so hard to get the traffic for their niches, that they letting it go so cheaply by getting 1 cents adsense clicks, it’s better in the long run if write your own ebook, or make a product or sell something physical or just give something away for free if they subscribe to your newsletter, then you know you can send them something in the future.

    That’s my way forward anyway,

    Kevin
    uk