As an affiliate marketer, I’ve sold link-building clients to agencies, coffee beans to hipsters, fridges to first-time homeowners, and mattresses to about half the UK population.
Affiliate marketing has been good to me, but after selling more than £1.8M in products, I’m giving it up.
I’m going all in on course creation, audience building, and paid communities.
Here’s why:
Affiliate Marketing builds loyalty for other people
My affiliate revenue came primarily from SEO. I’d write a post like “best mattress for side sleepers” and then sprinkle magic SEO dust over the post to get it to appear in google searches for that phrase.
People would land on the page. Click the affiliate link. And I’d never see them again.
But those people might go on to become loyal customers of the companies I’d promoted.
Someone else was building a customer base while I received a commission.
Yes, the commission was nice, but it made growing a long-term sustainable business that much harder.
Instead, if you collect them into your world by building them a product and selling it to them you can create fans. Your fans then get excited by future products you create and might even follow you to different projects. You can build up loyalty and keep them around instead of being a toll bridge that they pass through paying you on the way past.
No control over anything.
My job was to get a buyer to click my link and go to the merchant’s page I was partnered with. After that, it was out of my hands.
I can’t stand it anymore. I’m sick of sending people to unoptimized sales pages. I’m tired of promoting products that have gone out of stock without realizing. I’m fed up with promoting products I can’t help to improve.
I’m also fed up with ridiculous terms and conditions. One company I worked with didn’t pay a commission if a discount code was used.
But after a customer clicked my link, they landed on the merchant site and got a pop-up for 20% off, which meant that all my commission was denied.
This pissed me off.
I want that control back. You can regain all that control by creating your own product and being in control of the entire funnel from start to finish. When you sell a product, you are in control of what happens next.
It can be taken away overnight
I’ve had a lot of great experience partnering with smaller companies that want to work with you as an affiliate partner. But giants like Amazon Associates don’t care in the slightest.
One day, you can wake up to an email declaring that all your commission is going to be cut in half and that there is nothing you can do about it. I’ve had it happen three times from Amazon alone, and every single time, it hurts.
But I was a solo publisher. I can’t challenge Amazon and make a difference. I can only grin and take it if they decide to shaft me.
Sure, things like that can happen when selling your own products. The software you use to sell might increase its percentage fee, but it won’t increase it from 5% to 50%.
Again, it’s about control and responsibility. Take charge of where your money comes from.
It’s become too competitive
I got into affiliate marketing in 2016. The done thing was to grow a site using SEO to get search traffic that you could then funnel to your affiliate links.
Back in 2016, there used to be Yahoo Answers appearing in the search results that you could easily outrank with good content. But now everyone has good enough content. And AI is only making it harder to stand out on Google with good content.
Yes, you can still create a site and grow it with SEO. I’m still using AI as part of my tactic for growing my podcasting site. But there is more competition than ever, and commissions are decreasing, meaning you have to work twice as hard for half as much.
But if you build a loyal audience you can earn more per person in your audience by selling a product compared to earning commission and you get to enjoy the lifetime value of that customer.
The maths adds up to being able to earn much more with a smaller audience, and so other traffic sources like social media become a viable option.
It’s boring
Writing an article that compared 43 near-identical mattresses used to be my bread and butter.
Now, sitting down to write a post like that makes me want to tear my own eyes out and let the abyss take me.
There’s no creativity. There’s no joy. There’s just organisational bullshit that makes you want to cry.
Compare that to building a loyal audience and creating something you are truly proud of and it’s clear which is going to be more fulfilling.
That’s why I’m building my audience of budding writers ready to take things to the next level at Kieranmacrae.com. It’s exciting. It connects me to the people I want to serve. And it’s a ton of fun.
Plus, I focused on writing while developing my SEO skills, and so I’m able to transfer those skills to new platforms. When you learn difficult underlying skills, you make yourself future-proof.
Sign up below if you’re a digital writer ready to take your writing business to the next level.
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