OK, the title is a little extreme. I was reading through some old RSS posts and read Jon Fisher‘s (owner of Wickedfire) blog. He doesn’t write much but his last post dated December 20, 2008 is pretty interesting. The title of his post is Affiliate Marketing Hard Times Are Coming! Although affiliate marketing will never be dead (there is always something to market and a traffic source to do it on) it has it’s peaks and valley’s just like everything else. Jon called that a valley was coming in December and I think he was spot on.
Sure there are those who are still hitting combined caps, but caps at 2k leads a day for each offer are pretty easy to hit when you have hundreds of affiliates all hitting the same type of traffic sources, using the same damn landing page for the same damn offer.
Reasons to be wary are because our typical traffic watering holes are drying up. Recently Facebook decided to nuke all ads pertaining to diet and Google is bitch slapping the shit out of those blog landing pages for Acai too.
These are two very valid points.
#1 – Copycats basically destroy profit margins on offers. They also kill the offers themselves because they get oversaturated.
#2 – Copycats lead to major traffic sources cracking down on affiliates. Traffic sources cant show their users 10 of the same ad that lead to the same landing page all of which are a scam. It leads to bad user experience.
These problems mixed with the bad economy lead to a bit of a lull in affiliate marketing right now. I think it will be more evident once some of the scammier rebills that are making the affiliate networks lots of money are gone. If you compare the variety of offers right now to the variety a year ago, there is a huge difference. A great deal of new offers coming on to networks are rebills. There are a lot less lead gen campaigns or anything unique for that matter coming onto networks. This is probably because advertisers don’t want to spend the money right now.
Bottom line is this. As Jon called it a few months ago, we are in harder times right now for affiliate marketing. If you make it through, you will be stronger then before but everyone is going to have to adapt.
AM will go back to where it was before the summer of 08 where any noob could throw up a lander on FB and have 5 figure days.
Ad hustler, I can sense the fear in your writing. I know where you coming from. For those who are the first few to capture a niche with own creatives ideas, its annoying to see copy-cats appearing from every direction possible.
Trust me, AMs are to be blamed here as well. Once I got email from my AM from copeac (my account in pretty much inactive there). She told me how I should promoted acia and gave me a link to some acai flogs. I’m assuming these blogs belonged to her affiliates. Surely I was going to copy and try it out. But half way through working on it, I stopped because to me it didn’t make sense. I rather look at this business as long-term then reap the awards for short period of time and then move on to something.
What I’m trying to say is, what we do is never a secret. When you make money, somehow, your ideas get replicated and before you know it your campaign isn’t profitable anymore.
Do you think networks should regulate affiliates. Stop taking new affiliates or put an age limit (I’m tired of those 15 year old copy-cats).
-G
@Niche – I’m not fearful, as I will be doing this long after all the copy cats are gone. I just see a dip, but dips leave room for huge explosions of growth.
@Konrad – LOL
I agree with G by the way, I think the networks are to blame. Yes, Affiliates copy/rip landing pages, but that has been happening forever. I can’t remember any other time or offer though, where multiple AMs would email me with links to other affiliates landing pages, banners/creatives, offers to use and places to target. It happened for Acai, Grants, Teeth Whitening and the Skin Care products so far.
While people love to accuse affiliates of going for the quick buck and the easy money, I think that can actually said for networks as well in this case, and networks got more to lose, they not only need offers, but also affiliates. And if they keep this up they may just piss enough people off or turn them away.
Interesting points. Love the discussion 🙂
I think Jon is a fear mongering asshat..
Thanks why to survive you need unique traffic sources, unique angles and unique offer setups. The shitty economy is actually a goldmine if your smart. Corporate branding campaigns are going down the drain and all these advertising agencies are reducing the cost of traffic big time.
Thats why*