How To Get It Wrong – Pt. 3 – Affiliate Programs

Either there’s a lot of total incompetence in today’s Online Marketing world, or I’m being too picky, or maybe as I work more in the field, I come across more examples of it.

Today’s rant is about affiliate programs. There’s nothing wrong with them, and the companies that specialise in it, such as Clickbank and Click2Sell do an excellent job.

It’s when marketers decide that they don’t want to pay commissions to these companies any more and go off and do their own thing that it can all go wrong.

If you run an affiliate program, of course you want to encourage your affiliates to make as many sales as possible, and those experienced affiliates can generally make a good number of sales from mailing to their lists. But what about the guys who are just beginning? They don’t have a list yet, or if they do, it’s either small or untargeted. So when they make a sale, it’s a big thing for them.

It’s when they receive that first pay-check from an affiliate program that they get really enthused about the product and work harder to get more of the same.

I saw an affiliate program recently where the commission per sale is a very generous 50%, amounting to a very nice $98.50.

Like many affiliate programs, you have to wait 60 days before they pay up, to cover the possibility of refunds. Then after the 60 days is up, they ask you to forward them some tax details, or a declaration of no tax liability if you’re from outside the USA. This of course, delays the release of your affiliate commissions by another week or so.

Once they have acknowledged your tax declaration, they still won’t release your commission, because “The first payment request requirs (sic) a minimum balance of $100 in your affiliate account. After that you may make a payment request for any balance remain.”

So they set the commission at just a couple of dollars short of $100 but then tell you that you need to earn more than $100 before they will pay you. To be fair, it is in the terms and conditions that you can read before you sign up.

But how is the beginning marketer going to react? I guess they think he’ll set to it and try to generate the next sale as soon as possible. WRONG! He’s going to be totally disillusioned. He realises that even if he made another sale today, he’s going to have to wait another 60 days for it to clear the refund period, meaning that he has waited for over 4 months to get the commission from his first sale.

As an inexperienced, beginning marketer, it probably took some time and effort to get that first sale, so the chances are that it might take a while to make the second one.

Is it any wonder that over 90% of people who try their hand at online marketing simply give up?

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