Affiliate Lifestyle Secrets 4 Lesson

 

Hello and welcome to Video #4, and we are going to talk about The Disadvantages of affiliate marketing.

 

So as you already know, affiliate marketing is based upon promoting other people’s products. So that in itself says that you have no control over the vendor or the product itself. So in some respects, your business is in the hands of the vendor, as far as promoting the products. But now that you understand that you need to do things like building your email list, which is very basic, but if you do that it doesn’t matter if somebody takes it down, you can always switch it to a different vendor, a different product or similar product in that niche. And that’s the beauty of affiliate marketing, as long as you are building a list. Back in the day like decades ago I remember when we would promote product, we would send traffic directly to the vendors’ product, and then we will make sales. But then we found out typically weeks later that we were sending traffic to an offer that didn’t exist, or the vendor just decided to take the product down without ever telling us. And this is something that happens day in and day out. A lot of times there is a lack of communication between you and the vendor.

 

Having an email, that in itself can be an advantage, but it can also be a scary thing at times, especially if you have a product, it is a really good product, you are making a lot of money and the vendor just decides to quit, right? So that’s why in that case there are other things that you can do, which we'll talk about in just a minute. So having an email list can be an advantage, but if the vendor takes down their product, that alone can be a scary thing at times. So you are kind of living on the edge, but that’s why I said if that you and that your perspective and that’s your expectation of what’s real and what’s not, then it’s not going to become a surprise when that happens. But I will tell you that happens a lot.

 

So let me put this in perspective. Vendors come and go, that’s the nature of how things go. In the last decade of being an affiliate marketer I’ve seen hundreds of vendors come and go, and a lot of times vendors, they’ll get into these [routes] where they will create totally brand new products. For example, one vendor sometimes often will create 10 to 20 different products every single year, and if you think about how many vendors there are, you could find 10 really good vendors. One of those products eventually will become outdated, right? So if that is the expectation that you have, then great. You are not aware and - you are aware of something that not a lot of affiliates are aware of. So that means that affiliate marketing often has a short-term cash flow for each product, so making as much as you can during that short-term period of time is key, but at the same time that’s why I say you got to build your list. If you don’t build a list, you are building an affiliate marketing business that will fail, not if it will fail, it will fail. So in other words if you’ve worked really hard to produce a winning campaign, you are either going to need to find a new vendor, to replace the old if that ever happens. So you need to make sure that you have a backup plan. Or you need to work out a special deal with them assuming you’ve made them a lot of sales and say hey, I’ve made a lot of sales for you, I put a lot of time and effort into this, how can we make a deal? Maybe you could make a special deal just for my list, or maybe they are going out of business and you can just buy the whole business if it's making you a lot of money. So there is a lot of different avenues that you can take, don’t quit, just think about the possible solution that there potentially is. And if not, you have to get into that mindset of letting go if there is no option. And this is why there is so much hustle involved and it's more of a short-term strategy than a long-term strategy.

 

So what are the lessons that you can learn before you get started? When you promote a product, you want to ask yourself a few things. So ask yourself this - #1 - are there similar vendors, are there similar products with the affiliate programs? So if you find a product that you really like, and you promote it and it does really, really well, at that point and only at that point begin to look for products that are similar, and then approach other vendor and you could possibly promote those products to your lists and say hey, you’ve bought this product, or I’ve showed this product, but here is a similar product, check it down, and see which one converts the best. But while you are doing that, you're going to have a backup plan, it’s even better if there is 2, 3, 4 different products, different vendors, you can figure out which vendor is really willing to work with you and which vendor is not willing to work with you.

 

Another thing we've found over the years is that vendors that are willing to bend over backwards and work with you, often times you're going to be able to make more money doing that. Vendors that weren’t really opening to working with us, a lot of times ended up being very, very small campaigns. Yes, they made a little bit of money, but not a lot. So typically you want to find at least, like I said, 3 or more really good products, so that if one vendor takes their product down or they go bankrupt, you always have that backup plan. And that really why I am harping on this, because we’ve been in situations in the past where we promoted one particular product, we’ve been really excited about how much profit it was pulling in and bam, the vendor takes the product down or they disappear totally and there is no other products. So in that case you can see it as we lost all the time and effort that we put into it, or you could see it as a lesson to make sure that you have a backup plan.

 

Now if this happens to you, you need to ask yourself a second question, which is if there is none, is this a product that you can hire somebody else to produce? And you becoming the vendor? Because if you can do that you’ll actually make a lot more money, you already got traffic flowing to the product and then not only do you get a cut, you get the whole cut, because now you are the vendor. So that’s more of a long-term strategy that you can take, but the question is how willing are you to put all the effort into that because, you know, being a vendor does take a lot of energy and time, but at the end of the day your long-term business is going to stretch further and your profit margins are going to be a lot higher. So with that said, it's often better to have a long-term strategy, to have a mixture of both, your products and products that you promote as an affiliate. And that way you are not hustling all the time.