I don’t often get into pissy, down and depressed moods often, but I’m in one right now and I felt the need to vent. My last post showed a negative aspect of having your own product, so this post I’ll give you a negative aspect of being an affiliate.
I have a product that I was selling on PDC for almost a year now. I’ve gotten a lot of consistent sales with it over time. I’ve been making maybe $100-200/mth on the site for the last few months, but I’ve really tried to bump up it’s rankings to help increase traffic.
Anyway, I logged into my PDC account the other day and saw that I had an inbox message from the product owner stating he was giving all his affiliates a week to change their links. He was ending the affiliate program. The date has passed for removing the links, but his site is still up. He still accepts payments through the PDC link. In fact I got credited for a sale yesterday.
I know what you’re thinking. “It sucks dude, but it’s just part of the game. You only lost out on a few hundred.” I know. That isn’t really what has me bummed out. A few months earlier I contacted the owner and asked if I could have access to the product so that I could sell it better. It wasn’t like I was just asking him for it like I was a leech or something. I’ve sold this product a lot at this point and he said no. He had some bullshit excuse “I have 2000 affiliates and I can’t give them all access.”
First, this is PDC. You do not have 2000 affiliates. This is a nice little niche we’re in and it is big enough to make money, but not big enough for 100 active affiliates. I bet there was probably around 5 active affiliates making sales for him.
Basically, he is one of those publishers that hates affiliates. There are a good publishers out there that know affiliates are how you make money, but than there are other publishers that resent the fact that they have to pay affiliates. I think this guy falls under that category. He’s still running his site, he just doesn’t want affiliates, which tells me he doesn’t want to make more money he just has a resenting problem.
I know what you’re thinking though, “just replace it with another affiliate product and move on.” If I could do this than I would of already done it and wouldn’t of even posted this. The fact is that there aren’t any other products. Or at least products that are worth my time. It’s hard to go from an affiliate commission of $25 per sale to an amazon book that costs $11 (that’s a $0.44 commission).
The thing that is getting me down is that I either have to dump the site with some shitty affiliate commission or build my own product and compete against him. It is going to be a pain in the ass to build such a product, but than again I want to literally beat this guy for fuckin’ over affiliates.
I was clipping at his heels on the front page of Google for the niche keyword (not long tails, actual niche name), but I just recently got slapped to somewhere in the 100 positions. Coincidentally, I was slapped down there the same time he announced he was ending the affiliate program. Maybe he was upset that I was getting close to dethroning him. I’m at least hoping my major drop in Google is just a temporary thing that will come back.
It’s just annoying when you’re doing business with someone you think is looking to make more money, but they really aren’t. They have some agenda where they resent affiliates. It’s lame. Fuck’em. Fuck’em in the ass.