The trouble with most get rich quick schemes is either that they don’t work or that they do work but are illegal. The fastest way to get a lot of money is to rob a bank. It’s also a good way to get yourself shot.
Here in our world of affiliate marketing the quickest way to get rich is to force your affiliate cookie on all and sundry and the fastest way to do that is to spam as many people as possible. Spam is everywhere. It must work, people must get rich doing it otherwise it would have stopped by now. It’s also illegal in most parts of the world. So why doesn’t anyone ever get hauled in front of a judge for it?
Over this weekend I’ve happened upon several spammed product feeds in Google’s product search (formerly known as Froogle). They’re just product feeds from major merchants (John Lewis for example) with the product URLs cloaked by bouncing through a redirect on a server in China. This is spamming pure and simple. It adds nothing to the product search, adds no value for the merchant yet makes a tidy profit for the spammer. It’s against Google’s terms and conditions and it’s against the affiliate networks terms and conditions. Yet people still do it. And why? Because it’s an easy way to get rich quick and no one is going to shoot you for it.
What penalties are likely to be imposed on these spammers that they can’t soon find a way around? Google can delete their product feed, ban their IP, block their email address from signing up again but any of these things can be easily defeated by the spammers. The affiliate networks can cancel their accounts but the spammers can sign up again with different details. What’s to stop the spammers? And equally why should legitimate affiliates be prevented from using such tactics if they think they can get away with it too?
As far as Google goes I would have thought they were perfectly capable of detecting these shady redirects in their product search. After all, they seem to have managed to clamp down on such practices in their standard web search. But what can merchants and affiliate networks do about it? I’m sure they have their methods for detecting spammers but my question is whether the window of opportunity is wide enough to make it worth the risk for the spammers. Can the affiliate networks catch the spammers before they can pocket their commission? If not, it’s a lucrative earner with no real work and no real risk.
Of course, wherever there’s an opportunity to make money there’s an opportunity for corruption. Wherever there is communication there is spam. But it’s incredibly frustrating to see other people getting away with it when you yourself are trying to play by the rules. On a related note, I’ve just done a Google search for “free bets” and there are Adwords ads showing up despite the fact that Google don’t allow gambling ads. Surely a company worth over $160b which is famous for it’s algorithms can find a way automatically to enforce their own rules on their own products…
Affmeter is an essential part of any affiliate’s setup so I was rather saddened to learn that it is no longer going to be available for free.
I discovered Affmeter shortly after becoming an affiliate last year. It’s a really handy bit of software that logs in to all the affiliate networks you are signed up with and amalgamates all your earnings into one report. Every half hour it pops up a message on the screen telling you how well (or in my case usually, how poorly) your earnings are progressing. Best of all it’s been available for free.
So it was somewhat disappointing to be greeted with a message today informing me that the free version is being discontinued. It looks like the announcement was made last week but the news has only just caught up with me. It’s a shame but I quite understand their reasons. I’d often wondered how much money they made off their Pro version when the free version did 99% of what most affiliates want. Obviously not enough to keep the wolves from the door.
As someone who develops software for a living, I know how much time and effort it takes to produce a quality product like Affmeter. There’s nothing similar on the market that I’m aware of and the people behind it are very responsive to affiliates’ needs. It’s a well-respected product but you can only get so far on the respect and good wishes of your users. Bills need paying. Stomachs need filling.
So it’s a shame that a good thing has come to an end but I’ll be paying the very reasonable upgrade fee (less than £20 at current exchange rates). Affmeter Free is dead, long live Affmeter Pro.
I made a bit of a stroppy post the other evening about the sudden influx of emails I received from affiliate managers right after 5pm on a Friday. Julia Stent from Affiliate Window was kind enough to respond to my post and also give me permission to quote her response here. So here’s the relevant part of her email:
“Just wanted to send you a quick message about your post regarding Dixons emails on Friday night. First off - sorry about that, that was our team here!
“I thought it might be relevant to explain something to do with our email system (and I suspect other networks too). Sending out emails to the potentially thousands of affiliates joined to a programme puts a big load on our email server. If this is done during office hours, it can slow down our receiving external emails from affiliates. This means we have to delay sending out some programme notifications until after peak times.
“I realise this isn’t ideal, and believe me we are working on it! Already at the end of last year we added a whole batch of new servers but these were prioritised to tracking and reporting. I’m not an IT wizard but I suspect there’s a delay at our email supplier’s end as well.”
As a day-jobbing IT manager I can quite understand why Affiliate Window would want to send their bulk emails at a quieter time of day. I know one particular employee at my day job who seems to delight in jamming up our internet connection for an hour or so by sending large PDF files to 500 external contacts at the same time.
Equally, you’re never going to please all the people all the time. For every Monty who objects to Friday evening emails there’ll be A N Other Affiliate who prefers it that way.
So apologies to any affiliate managers who were offended by my first post. Obviously you have your reasons. It’s just that this particular Friday evening was a perfect storm of things annoying me and getting those emails was one of them.
What does anyone else think?
What is it with affiliate managers and Friday evenings? I’m only a small time affiliate signed up to a relatively small number of merchants but by 6.20pm this evening I’d received seven emails sent after 5pm today. For comparison, I only received seven emails in the first 17 hours of the day.
I know this is a constant bugbear of many affiliates but I’m already in a bad mood (see post above about Dell) and it really grates with me today. OK so I do most of my affiliate work evenings and weekends but that doesn’t mean I like spending Friday nights reading emails. At least let me have one evening a week when I can switch off.
In the sin bin (so far) this evening : The Link, HMV, Dixons (2 emails), Argos and O2 (2 emails again).
Update (6.30pm) : Cosmos Holidays join the fun. At least they start their email by apologizing for the late email.
How did I react when I saw Max the student affiliate’s earnings online? I raced into the kitchen to drink some milk just so I could race back to the PC and spurt it out my nose all over the keyboard. Here’s this 18 year old kid pulling in more off one affiliate network than I’m making at nearly twice his age in a fulltime job! (yes, I know it’s only turnover not profit before anyone says)
After I’d calmed down a bit, wiped up the spilt milk and reassured the neighbours that my loud exclamations were nothing to worry about, I read the rest of his posting. Essentially he’s asking why we’re not more open about our affiliate earnings and he signs off by asking other affiliate bloggers for our reasons for either posting or not posting our earnings. That did get me thinking. My immediate reaction is to get defensive and say that I don’t want to show people my earnings and why the hell should I? But the honest answer is that I don’t want people to find my affiliate packet a little limp and inadequate.
I’ve been working seriously on my affiliate business for about six months now on an evenings and weekends basis. I’m not somebody who has an awful lot of patience and the fact that my affiliate earnings are bumping along with no obvious sign of improving is leading me into the “could give it all up now” mindset. I’ve heard many a successful affiliate describe this point in the development of their business.
And this is where the wonder of blogging and community comes into play. Reading about other affiliates’ successes and how they got where they are now keeps me going in these gloomy times. I’m sure Max and Keiron and Shoemoney all took time to learn their craft and build up their business. They didn’t just start one morning then head down the bank that afternoon to collect the wheelbarrow load of cash they’d made. So Max, thanks for posting what you did. I’m not sure I’ll want to do the same when I’m in your position but if I do ever reach that position it’ll be thanks to people like you keeping me inspired.
Whether they’re the chocolate kind or the internet kind, cookies are great.
When I was at school a million years ago the most popular kid in the playground was the one who brought the packet of mini chocolate cookies for a break time snack. Don’t ask me why but it was always more satisfying to scrounge a cookie than a handful of Wotsits, Square crisps or Snaps.
Here in the internet age cookies have acquired a new meaning. They’re the little snippets of data a website sends to your browser so it can recognise you when you come back again. They’re essential to affiliate marketing. When a visitor clicks on your affiliate link they receive a cookie from the merchant’s website and then, if they buy something, the merchant uses the cookie data to know which affiliate they should be paying.
The best thing about cookies is that they don’t go away if the visitor doesn’t buy straight away. It stays in the browser and most merchants will pay out if the visitor comes back to buy something at a later date (generally up to 30 days). I’ve been discovering in the last couple of days just how good this can be. I’ve had several sales now where the actual transaction took place weeks after the visitor originally clicked my link. It means that the long barren period earlier in the month where I was making virtually nothing isn’t as bad as it seemed. It also shows that you shouldn’t write off an idea too soon. The customer might have bookmarked the offer to return to after payday.
There are a couple of complications after all nothing is ever simple. Firstly, merchants only pay out for the last affiliate to refer a customer. Kirsty explains it well in her post here so I won’t bother repeating it.
Secondly, some people don’t like the idea of being tracked on the internet so they’ll set their browser to reject cookies or to delete them when they log off.
Third, some merchants don’t set tracking cookies at all so you only get one chance at converting. Amazon, I believe, are notable for not setting cookies.
I like cookies and I’ll be paying closer attention in future to merchants’ cookie policies. It also backs up my idea that it’s better to concentrate on more niche products from smaller merchants as it’s more likely that the cookie-carrying visitor will return to the same site to complete their purchase.