Why I Don’t Like Affiliate Marketing

I get a lot of emails from people who want to know how to make Money online and I understand how confusing and difficult it can be. I spend a lot of time writing and posting on forums and blogs, one of the reasons I do this is it helps me to think about what direction I want to be going in.

There are so many ways to make money online that it can be overwhelming. And I’ve made money from just about every way you can imagine.

I am going to explain why I don’t like affiliate marketing, yet I do have affiliate sites and I make money with those sites. Once I finish this post I will write and explain to you how great affiliate marketing is and how to make money doing it.

Seems a bit confusing, doesn’t it.

Here’s the thing.

I like affiliate marketing because it allows me to test marketing methods and make money online without having to directly deal with clients. However, there are a lot of downsides to affiliate marketing and it’s the reason I tell people it’s not the best place to start.

When doing affiliate marketing you are selling someone else’s product, you are relying on them to have a website that is able to convert the traffic. You can have the best site in the world but if the site you are sending them to is offline, not working properly or just flat out can’t convert the traffic then it’s all a waste of time. You are at the Mersey of someone else.

And once you make the sale you’ll normally have to wait 45 days to get paid for all your work. And a lot of companies will start changing the way they pay, and what they pay for once you start making serious money. I was making over $15,000.00 per month with one of my affiliate sites and the guy felt I was making too much.

He even asked me one day why someone in Colombia needed so much money. He tried everything he could to cut down the amount I was making, we finally parted ways.

But the real kicker is the backend sale. Most money is made on the backend. As an affiliate the second that customer makes the sale you lose them. They are now someone else’s client and you will have to keep working to find new ones.

The hardest part of making money is finding the new client the money is in keeping the old ones.

I hope that all makes sense and now I’ll move on to all the ways to make money online.

Google Search Engine Optimization

I even spent 2 hours on the phone yesterday trying to convince a potential client that it is better to be #1 on page 1 then #1 on page 4.

The argument put fourth is that you will convert a higher percent of traffic by being on page four then being on page 1. However, the only reason someone would be looking on page 4 is if;

A. They couldn’t find what they were looking for on page 1, 2 or 3.

C. They are the competition and are just checking out the competition.

The fact is that many SEO’s can’t rank you on page 1 so it is better to try and sale you on the illusion that page 4 rankings are better than page 1 rankings.

Take a look at the clickthrough as a % of the TOTAL clickthroughs for a search term:

#1: Will receive 42.3%
#2: Will receive 11.92%
#3: Will receive 8.44%
#4: Will receive 6.03%
#5: Will receive 4.86%
#6: Will receive 3.99%
#7: Will receive 3.37%
#8: Will receive 2.98%
#9: Will receive 2.83%
#10: Will receive 2.79%

Before you buy SEO from a company that is trying to sale you on how good it is to be on page 4, take a look at the above numbers and ask yourself how much traffic you will be missing out on by not being number 1 on page 1.

Oh…and to give you an idea of that the top of page to looks like, on average it only receives about 0.66% of the total clickthrough’s.

If you want to be a bottom feeder, feeding off what others have left behind then go for the top of page 4, otherwise to succeed you need position one, page one.

Understanding PR Flow

I am not sure how people can call themselves SEO’s and not have a clue as to how the search engines work. Understanding the way PR flows throughout a site is an extremely important job that all SEO’s should understand.

As I said before, I don’t visit the forms much but the other day I ran across this post.

Now…the original poster asked a very simple question

Hi I’m trying to decided whether I should have a link to my homepage on my page headers. I suspect it’s fine to just make the logo take clickers through to the homepage without having another tab on the header called ‘home’ which just takes up space. But, I wondered if it might help Google’s bots navigate around my site if I have a home link and therefore help my ranking.

What does everyone think?

thanks,
Steve

The neat thing was all the SEO’s immediately agreed that placing links all over the page and linking it back to the home page wouldn’t hurt your SEO efforts. And what was even neater was that when they were proven wrong they ignored that and went into a usability argument.

I bet they were all Obama supporters.

The problem with having more than one link on a page (that is linking to the same page) is that Google will pick one link and ignore the others. So…we have our logo that can be clicked and takes us back to our home page and then we decide to put another link on the page with our anchor text, not only do we lose the anchor text for the link but the PR is also lost.

Google not only ignores the second link (which test has proven) but according to some statements made by Matt Cutts (that I can not find) the PR for the link that is being ignored evaporates (the way I understand it).

Now, this means that the PR that would have originally been passed back to the home page is less and since it’s a site wide issue (if the site has a lot of pages) we should be able to see the difference in our rankings if the problem is repaired.

Google is always changing the way they rank pages and PR flows, using outdated data and old information will get us into trouble. And if you are going to call yourself an SEO, you should at the very least keep up with how the search engines rank pages.

Read the Thread

I don’t spend near as much time on SEO forums as I once did, but it seems that something’s never change.

If someone goes to a forum about search engine optimization and asks a question about search engine optimization, why is it that some want to-be SEO always shows up and start talking about usability issues?

It’s not a usability question and it wasn’t posted in a usability forum.

The only reason I can see a SEO answering it as usability issues instead of a SEO issue is because he doesn’t know the answer from an SEO point of view.