Affiliate marketing is bad. It certainly is one of the most popular forms of online marketing today - it allows you to promote products from companies of your choice and earn a commission for doing so. There are many benefits to affiliate marketing, but there are also some negative consequences that you should be aware of before getting started. In this article, I will share 10 of the worst things about affiliate marketing, so that you can make a good decision about whether or not it’s right for you.
1. The Reality of Low Payouts
Affiliate marketing is not always an easy method to earn a healthy payout.
Many affiliates make little to no money from their efforts. According to the survey we carried out back in 2021, only 19% of affiliates earn a minimum wage or more from their affiliate marketing work.
The payout rates of some affiliate programs (such as Amazon Associates) can be as low as 1%-5% per sale. It’s soul-crushing when you’ve sold $1,000 and the total commission turns out to be a mere $10-$50.
2. Hard To Get Recognition
After all, you only promote someone else’s brand. You don’t have your own. And that’s what millions of other affiliate marketers do. It’s painfully competitive and you’ll be forever one of the millions. This can be pretty demotivating.
3. Hard To Sell High-Quality Products
For a new affiliate marketer, it’s hard to find high-quality products to promote and successfully sell. Because by the time you find one, many other affiliates are likely to be promoting it already. It’s almost impossible for new affiliate marketers to come up with a better sales strategy than experienced marketers.
4. Constant Quest For New Products
If you were selling your own product, you would keep focusing on improving it so that the product would have a long, sustainable life in the market. But you don’t have that kind of control over affiliate products.
It’s good to stick to one affiliate product but the risk is that the product could disappear at any time in the future. So to mitigate the risk, you should be constantly looking for new products.
5. Low-Quality Products Can Waste Your Time, Effort, and Money
So you keep looking for new products, and that will cost you every time. Your time and effort will be wasted if the product you wanted to promote does not live up to your expectations.
6. High Costs
Affiliate marketing can be expensive - especially if you're trying to start from scratch. Software fees, website hosting fees, email marketing services, and other overhead costs associated with running an online business such as training fees, etc. Starting an affiliate marketing campaigns can be costly.
7. Lack of Control
Because third-party networks power affiliate programs, you have less control over your earnings than you would where you promoted your own products. There may be a price increase or there may be decreased quality. There may be a change in affiliate terms and conditions which you will have to follow if you want to continue.
8. No Transparency
Unlike with direct sales channels such as retail stores or online retailers, customers don't have complete visibility into how their money is being spent when shopping through an affiliate program. That’s not your problem, as long as you have your affiliate disclosure displayed on your site. But you’ll still receive “requests for refund” from users.
9. SEO Takes Time and Effort For Nothing
You think organic traffic is free, so you put in all your efforts to optimize your website for search engines; keywords, speed, publishing quality content… You’re still not ranking because your domain authority level is too low.
SEO requires strategy. Unless you have a very specific target market in mind and you know what keywords to target, you run the risk of doing more harm than good by targeting nonspecific keywords.
SEO also requires maintenance - even if you do target the right keywords, if your site isn’t well-maintained, your search engine ranking will plummet. This can lead to decreased traffic and revenue, which defeats the purpose of investing so much time into improving your ranking in the first place. Keep trying, and you might get to the top in 10 years' time. Or the whole concept of search engines may be gone by then.
10. The High Cost of Advertising
It’s only one way or the other. If you don’t want to struggle with content creation, you have to pay to advertise. Big-buck affiliate marketers spend a lot of money on advertising to get their products in front of potential customers. For newbies, this can be a seriously costly affair, and it can make it tough for affiliates to earn a healthy income from their campaigns.
11. The Frustration of Working Long Hours
Working Long Hours
The feeling of;
- Not being able to process in your affiliate marketing career due to long hours spent working.
- Isolation from friends and family because you are always working.
- You're not doing enough to meet your goals and expectations.
- Constantly being behind on work and never having enough time to rest or recharge.
The constant pressure to perform in order to keep up with the demanding work schedule… You probably wouldn’t mind working long hours if you had your own brand that you’re proud of. But while very few audiences trust you and understand your business, it can be emotionally draining.
12. Passive Income Is a Myth
They say affiliate marketing is a great way to earn passive income. But it will only be decent passive income when you’ve sold a monthly membership program to a number of people, and only if those people maintain their membership.
For example, you are selling a training program that costs $40 per month and your commission is 50%. You would have to have 100 referrals to make $2,000. And the reality is, they would leave the membership after a while, if not after the first month. It means you would end up promoting the program constantly to make a decent income, which means it would hardly be a passive income.
13. Difficult To Be Totally Unbiased
You want to promote your affiliate product over other products in the same niche. But you know there’s a superior product which isn’t letting you become an affiliate. In this situation, what would you do?
If you stayed totally honest, you wouldn’t be making money, but if you tell users that your affiliate product is better than the superior one, you’d be effectively creating a fake review. It’s very hard to be totally unbiased.
14. Lack of Career Advancement Opportunities
Because you’re promoting other people’s products, there’s no further career prospects. This can lead to a diminished sense of career progression and a feeling of stagnation. And that’s why many affiliate marketers move on to build their brand by becoming online tutors or selling their own products.
15. Less Opportunity for Mental Stimulation
Lack of stimulation is a common issue with affiliate marketing due to limited opportunities for team interaction. Working as an affiliate means you are already working for someone, and the only people you regularly contact may be your affiliate managers. You can still hire someone to do some admin tasks for you, but usually, an affiliate marketing job is a lonely one.
Unless you belong to a community where you can be motivated, you may experience boredom and lack of stimulation. Boredom can lead to feelings of stress and negative emotions, which can have negative consequences on productivity and satisfaction.
15 Worst Things About Affiliate Marketing: Final Words
As with any form of marketing, it's necessary to be aware of the potential downfalls before getting started. Affiliate marketing is no exception and there are a few things you need to be aware of in order to avoid common mistakes.
I hope that this article has given you a better understanding of what affiliate marketing is and the potential problems it can bring. Before signing up with an affiliate network, be sure to do your research and make sure that the program is something that you are comfortable with. It's also important to remember that not all programs are created equal, so make sure you spend enough time assessing each one before making a decision. Thanks for reading!
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