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Your mom always said, “never put all of your eggs in one basket.” That applies to affiliate marketing to the highest degree. When embarking on your affiliate marketing career, the worst move you could ever make is to put all of your faith into one program: here’s a detailed explanation why…with case studies!

Scenario 1: Tarnished Affiliate Gold on Commission Junction

In 2008, I searched thoroughly for the best affiliate programs to join on CJ.com. I wound up signing up to well over a dozen, and trying them all out over the span of six months. One of the most surprising and utterly ridiculous examples of “dumb luck” was found with Yahoo Toolbar’s affiliate program. It paid you $1 every time someone downloaded and installed Yahoo Toolbar. Sounded promising enough…so I tried it.

I created a very content-rich one page advert for this toolbar, with an affiliate link all the way at the bottom of the page. I promoted the hell out of this page with targeted backlinks, and eventually got it to appear at the top of page 1 on Yahoo.com for “download yahoo toolbar.” There were times where I appeared in the #2 spot, below Yahoo Toolbar’s home page itself! The result…I was making $500 per month just from this program, because I was getting around 15 conversions per day. Yes, you heard right – and I’m not lying nor exaggerating. I was floored. I was on cloud nine.

Then, something tragic happened. Later that year, my earnings went from a comfortable and predictable average of $400-500 per month to a couple dollars…then, eventually, zero. What happened?! I checked the SERPs. That wasn’t it…I was still there, dancing from #2 to #3 on Yahoo for “download yahoo toolbar”…I even had the same rank for “yahoo toolbar download”…

I jumped onto CJ.com and looked at my dashboard, earnings report, and any other chart I could find. Yahoo Toolbar affiliate program was gone. Yahoo pulled the plug on it. There was no email. There was no warning. No nothing. Just a big F-you. Nice to know you – thanks for the memories.

While I could go off on a new article explaining how Yahoo was a bunch of unprofessional bastards for doing what they did, I won’t bother. You already know that as an affiliate marketer – what they did was underhanded and wrong. Yes, it was their program and they had the right and ability to pull the plug on it, but look at the repercussions – I was now down $500/mo in my work-at-home efforts. I’m sure there are scores of other affilate marketers who nearly put their fist through the wall the day that program was axed.

If you thought that was a bad scenario, here’s one that is much worse.

Scenario 2: eBay Partner Network Changes Management

eBay Partner Network (ePN) has always been my #1 revenue stream. I joined in mid 2007 and started learning the ropes. As an SEO professional, it didn’t take long for me to earn around $200/mo, which later became $500, then $1,000, and finally, around $2,000/mo. At my peak, I was making around $2,500/mo. The potential to earn off of eBay Partner Network was obvious. I was so ecstatic over the returns from this program that I started to plan for the day where I’d quit my job, and be able to put 15 hours a day on a full time basis into this program, creating authority sites and promoting eBay products.

Then, I was banned.

The day I saw the infamous “ePN Dear John letter,” I thought I was going to be physically sick. I thought I was going to get a stomach ulcer. $2,500/mo to $0/mo – just like that, overnight. No warning, no suggestions, no contact – just the plug unexpectedly pulled from the life support system. As the letter states, they’ve decided to cancel your affiliate account and mentioned that you must pull all eBay feeds and links from your site.

There was no explanation why. I did nothing wrong – I never blackhatted a day in my life, and I never used PPC marketing. I never bought traffic, never did reciprocal linking or anything beyond traditional SEO and content writing. Thanks to this banning, my work-from-home career was officially over, as was my prospect of having a home business, let alone working full-time at one. ePN was 80-90% of my annual at-home salary.

If there is ever a way to make a webmaster feel like a chicken with its head cut off, it’s when an affiliate program sends you an email like that. As you already know, this goes much deeper than simply being dropped from an affiliate program. Now, it’s all about SERPs. You know, the fact that these ePN affiliate websites were getting over 500 organic hits per day and appearing on page 1 of Google for major two and three word terms. The fact that these websites were in MY POSSESSION, and were MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, and were about to lose the “meat,” rendering them entirely worthless and destined to drop in the SERPs at a dramatic rate once the bounce rate gets high. In essence, these websites were never mine – they were ePN’s. They were “god” in this scenario, with the full ability to give or take life away from these projects at a whim.

Yes, it gets even worse. Once the eBay links are gone, what do I do? I was selling stuff that can only be found on eBay. High cost used items. There are no affiliate programs that offer those things besides eBay. What do I do? Create a classifieds site and start promoting those sites as a “post your ad here for free!” service? Make nothing for a year or more until I start getting enough classified ads to justify charging $50/ad? Starve until that point in time happens (IF that point in time happens)?

In a moment of complete desperation, I wrote a letter forcefully asking for my account to be reviewed and considered for acceptance back into the program. I was one of the lucky few who were audited and allowed back in, once they reviewed my sites and saw that I had great content on each page (yes, they have an automated system that bans you. Your sites don’t even get reviewed, just banned because a machine deemed it necessary based on an algorithm). I was warned to drop my lower performing affiliate sites (which happened to be my newest ones, that weren’t ranking for anything yet). I was so gracious to be back in with ePN that I did what I was told, even though I felt it was outrageous to be told to drop any of my sites.

What’s most inconceivable is that no one would never expect an affiliate program run by giants like eBay to ever result in such a predicament. The reason why this happened is because eBay Partner Network had a complete re-organization from the top down that year, and its business model changed. The program began introducing confusing measures within the affiliate system that were never fully explained, which resulted in many more bannings as long-time and newbie affiliate marketers alike were unable to fall within the desired range.  It went from an affiliate program that anybody could use, to an elite, top-tier affiliate program that only advanced SEO professionals pulling nop-notch sales figures vs. sign-ups vs. click-throughs could be a part of. If your mathematics were off in any of those figures, your coffin got another nail in it.

At the time of this blog post’s writing, ePN bannings are still alive and well. Want to read something scary? Look at what an ePN member has just posted about how ePN now “suspends” your account, demands server logs, and then bans you from the program. They have officially become the Nazi regime of affiliate marketing programs. Fear mongering your affiliates is an atrocious way to run a program.

Avoiding Potential Affiliate Nightmares

Here’s the bottom line: never count on any affiliate program. Diversify. Run several affiliate marketing programs, a dropshipping program, one t-shirt business and several pay-per-click sites. Market them all equally. When one goes down, the others keep you afloat. Affiliate marketing networks don’t care about you – they follow orders from upper management. If upper management decides to send the program to hell, then to hell it goes. If they decide to drop a program altogether, so be it. The question is, are you ready for it at the heat of the moment? You better be. Otherwise, you’re nothing but a chump flopping around on the floor with a slit throat, not knowing what to do to save yourself.