
Signs that an affiliate program might be shaving
It’s frustrating. You come across some awesome content that fits your niche perfectly. Best of breed stuff. And they have a webmaster affiliate program full of great promotional tools and FHG’s. So far so good.
Within 24 hours you get one or two sales. Encouraging. You then expand your promotion of the site, only to never get a sale again. And those two first sales – forget about them – you will never see the money, because you are below the affiliate program’s payment threshold.
Fortunately, this scenario is the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of affiliate programs operate in an ethical manner, but there are others who are not so honest. So how to you identify them?
Here is how I go about it.
I identify the niche of the product for which I am doing the research. I search for that niche keyword in Google and inspect the first 20 sites that are returned in the search results (excluding those that do not promote affiliate products). If the product is not being promoted by the main players in the given niche, ask yourself why. In some cases, it might just be because it’s a new product. But more often than not, it’s because webmasters have caught on to the shaving and have stopped promoting the product.
I have been hit by this phenomenon on two different occasions, and in both cases, I was hard pressed to find anyone promoting the said products, despite the fact that the content was as good if not better than the competitions. One can only question why these content producers even bother running an affiliate program. What’s the point – webmasters are a pretty savvy bunch, and will catch on to the scheme within a few days.
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