1) Google is against you.

Take the direct quote of Google’s Frederick Vallaeys in response to the work of affiliate marketers: it is “…just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel.” Google has taken numerous steps to show their extreme favoritism to brands, and their very apparent efforts to bury affiliate marketing efforts in search results.

Starting in 2010, the search engine launched “extended brand results” listing actual brand names as links at the top of SERPs. The “Vince” update of 2009 tied two search queries (i.e., a user searching for “hdtv” and then searching for “sony” meant that Sony would receive a “vote” for the term “hdtv”), giving household-name brands — already established and known for a certain product category — another feather in their cap. Later that year, brands received an additional bonus in AdWords, where “sitelinks” would appear under an ad, pushing down the remainder of the page further.

Summer of 2011 showed the most definitive all-out attack against affiliate marketing, with the “Google Panda” update — a change that subsequently ended numerous small business owners’ careers overnight by removing their websites for certain keyword results from Google’s index entirely, and replacing those positions with big brands.

Later in 2011 was the inception of Google+ and “+1,” a social sharing tool that gives heavy bonuses and favoritism to big brands, who already have thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of followers who are able to +1 a new blog post by the droves within immediate time periods. Most recently, January 2012 saw an algorithm update to combat “excessive ads above the fold” on a website. Guess who runs ads above a fold? Hint: not brands.

If you thought you could simply go by the old adage “if you can’t beat em, join em,” think again — your affiliate storefront will NEVER achieve “brand” status. The brand signals that exist within Google’s algorithm know of the links pointing outward toward online storefronts that package and ship the products you’re promoting, identifying you as a “middleman” and therefore an “…unnecessary step in the sales funnel,” as Mr. Vallaeys puts it.

Although you probably don’t need more convincing about Google’s extreme bias against affiliate marketers and toward big brand name corporations, a simple glance at your flat-lined Google Analytics charts have probably clued you in at some point that your reliance on eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associate-driven websites are about as effective as attempting to make a new resurrection of the Million Dollar Homepage.

One more thing: when you lose a major keyword ranking, get dropped backward by several pages on Google and see that you’ve been replaced by big brands — don’t hold a shred of hope about re-gaining that page 1, position 1-3 position ever again. Sophisticated algorithmic signals have already given your ‘affiliate’ labeled site a brand new pair of cement shoes.

If you don’t want to believe me, check out this example of how Google torches affiliates.

2. Google is AdWords.

You might remember Google, it was a search engine that displayed organic results under a couple paid ads. Before it became completely filled with AdWords ads within the fold, it was possible to compete in search rankings for long-tail terms to get your affiliate sites some search attention.

However, a full computer screen’s worth of most Google page 1 SERPs is now entirely infested with AdWords, complete with a yellow box featured ad, subsequent ads and sidebar ads.

These days, the cost of appearing anywhere within an eyeball’s view for even a long term AdWords keyword is entirely unaffordable to the at-home internet marketer – give or take a few clicks per day. Google is now a place for the 1% to throw around their $2,000+/day budget to fight each other in an unreasonably expensive environment for the fight to remain on top. Perhaps you’ve taken your measly budget and used it for things more important, like lunch.

Besides…who on Earth would even spend a dollar on AdWords for an affiliate storefront? As anyone knows, it is *impossible* to track true conversions for an affiliate storefront, since you’ll never know how a thing about which clicks to your site led to sales on eBay or Amazon’s end. Spending money on AdWords for an affiliate storefront is like buying Pick 6 Lotto tickets every week and hoping for something to happen. It’s just AdWords 101.

3) Google’s “shopping results” in SERPs have ended your business.

If you’ve searched for a product and saw a SERP featuring a horizontal thumbnail image bar of products from different retailers with prices, you’ve probably noticed your imminent doom. Another nail in the coffin of any affiliate storefront: shopping results exhibit extreme favoritism to online retailers lucky enough to have muscled their way into Google Shopping, in a price comparison war against each other that takes place far above your current ranking.

The fact about these shopping price comparisons in SERPs is that they are nearly eliminating your chances of ever appearing for the keywords that trigger them. Due to the fact that the first 1/4 to 1/3 of a SERP is mostly AdWords, followed by one of these shopping results snippets that contain eye-enticing thumbnail images that break up an otherwise texty SERP, there’s barely any reason for the user to scroll down to get into organic results at all.

Since you’re nothing more than a middleman posting links to an actual supplier, you’ll never be able to appear on shopping results. Worse yet, the clutter of AdWords and product comparisons is enough to push organic results on to page 2 of results. This, above all else, is contributing to the extinction of the affiliate storefront.

So, What Now?

The changes I’ve seen, especially on Google, have really put an extreme perspective on my own personal business plans. It’s no longer worth investing time, money or energy in an affiliate storefront because they’re becoming extinct. In fact, affiliate marketing in general should be regarded as a past-time rather than a full-time job.

We’re embarking on a Google search engine experience that is entirely suited toward Big Business, where big AdWords spenders rule. If you won’t [cant] compete due to the extreme budget needed to join the existing fray, you’re left behind to hope for the best in organic, which is no longer a valid strategy in 2012.

As for Yahoo and Bing, the potential selling of Yahoo as rumored last year should be enough to make you realize that your measly Yahoo rankings are also not to be counted on — their days are numbered if anything should ever happen to the search engine.

Become A Brand

This truly is the only way to stay alive these days: brands, as defined by search engines, are most likely websites that have real shopping carts and checkout systems. They supply products themselves, instead of shilling affiliate links to real storefronts. They have real company names, not “exact keyword domains.” They have Facebook and Twitter accounts with real followers who actually interact with and care about the products being sold. They get real backlinks — not garbage links that their own webmaster scrounges for, since no affiliate storefront will ever have a successful, ongoing natural link portfolio.

Think about something you can sell or provide, and think fast. These days, you never know when the next iteration of Google Panda will re-appear and torch your remaining search rankings. Use your existing affiliate sites as 301-redirect fodder to give your new sites a boost in rankings, and start branding away!

It’s no secret that Google openly hates affiliate marketers and favors big brands, and that Google isn’t even a search engine anymore but a gigantic carnival of yellowbox AdWords ads, unfairly advantaged page-1 product suggestions, price comparisons with thumbnail images, and once you scroll *wayyy* down past all of it, you’ll see organic results dominated by big brand Fortune 100 and 500 companies; but it doesn’t really start to hurt until you see your bottom line.

(By bottom line, I’m talking about the graph on my eBay Partner Network dashboard, which took a nose-dive).

In fact, December 2011 was a crushing blow for me. It was the absolute worst month of 2011 in regard to eBay affiliate earnings. If you looked at my reports from 2006-present, you’d see that December has always netted around 3x the average of what I make per month, per year. It’s amazing what a de-ranking of certain keywords will do. Just moving from position 3 to position 5 on page 1 is enough to make me lose $500/month. $500/month is a lot to me. But, how about losing page 1, position 3  and going to page 4?

As I wrote previously, Google torched one of my biggest affiliate storefronts and it was a virtual ‘mortal wound’ to my earnings, of which I’m still trying to recover from by working from 8 AM – 1 AM every day on new campaigns and ideas. You can’t help but to feel as though it’s pointless, since even the search results for what used to be considered “long tail keywords” are dominated by big brands and wrapped in a shitload of paid ads that clouds what used to be a clean search engine interface.

What I find funny is that a second of my oldest affiliate storefronts — totaling about 500 pages of content and eBay feeds — enjoyed a long period of Google success due to low competition for a certain keyword. Now, that site was just recently de-ranked about 8 positions, and a big nation-wide brand now takes its place. The said brand has a website that looks like it was built in HTML and ASP back in 1997, with search engine un-friendly URLs and well over 100 links on its home page. But hey, it’s a big brand – so it deserves precedence over my vastly more helpful and content-filled website. At least, that’s what Google thinks.

The Sinking Ship Known As the Affiliate Storefront

Never before have I been so overwhelmed with fear about my career path. It seems like the old tried and true formula of “creating great content” that was SEO’ed properly and discreetly with helpful articles and good backlinks was all you needed to get predictable earnings, within a given range, every month for years. Then came Google Panda, a bastard of an algorithm that puts some websites before more deserving ones for the sole reason of being a “brand” (whatever that word equates to in algorithmic terms) and also being a company who can afford to pay hundreds of dollars per day on AdWords (that’s probably the definition of a “brand”).

As upsetting and negative as this all looks, I strangely see it as a calling. It makes me think that I’ve been doing the wrong thing for a long time – and that is, relying on 3rd party programs like eBay and Amazon, being a slave to unreasonable, conspiracy-laden search engines like G$$gle, and working harder than necessary to keep having to “prove” that my site is helpful and joining the fray of “cheaters” by “building backlinks.”

It’s insane. Just think about it.

With an affiliate store, you’re basically on a sinking dinghy in waters filled with battleships and aircraft carriers with corporate logos on them. It’s over. Your last resolve goes back to the phrase, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Be a brand name…that is. (Or, however that’s done, in algorithmic terms).

Thankfully, my strategy of never putting all of my eggs into one basket paid off – other channels, especially Squidoo, have been doing better than ever. Why? Because I’m building pages off of a brand, and Google favors brands.

So, instead of running a store powered by affiliate feeds and being punished by Google because you’re not physically selling products or owning the end-result site yourself, why not create your own local classified or auction site and keep 100% of the profit? Buy a good aftermarket domain for a couple thousand bucks, build a new WordPress site on it, hire a plugin developer, and slowly make the transition.

You’ll thank yourself later this year, which is probably when the rest of your ship will be underwater.

In what appears to some as the beginning of the end of affiliate marketing, the counter-productive Nexus Law claims yet another state, and yet another victory for the tax whose sole purpose is to combat what Big Business claims to be “unfair advantages” that online businesses have over brick-and-mortar. The victim: none other than the little guy…affiliate marketers.

We’ve seen this in several other states: NY, CO, IL, and almost California (thankfully common sense prevailed, there) with devastating consequences. Well over a dozen more states are up on the cutting block. Many of us even remember an affiliate-based company, FatWallet.com, getting media attention as it simply moves a few miles over the border of Illinois into Wisconsin to escape fallout from the Nexus Tax enactment.

Unfortunately, the veil of “unfairness” pitched to government coupled with the all-powerful allure of “greed” enabled lawmakers to take the side of Big Business in their pursuit to regain “a fair balance” in what was perceived to be an imbalance. Back on planet Earth, though, what we saw as a result are thousands of small businesses either going under, or migrating nomad-style across the border into another state to avoid the backlash of a law that punishes them for no wrongdoing on their part.

The law itself, although cruel on most who make a living from affiliate marketing revenue, wouldn’t have been so devastating if scores of Commission Junction and other affiliate systems (including Amazon) hadn’t responded by pulling out of entire states to avoid collecting tax on a state-by-state basis for each purchase. However, the law equally hurts these advertisers, as well. Well, except for the fact that they make far more than affiliate marketers, and control the on/off switch to the fate of their affiliate counterparts.

According to the Performance Marketing Association’s acknowledgement of Pennsylvania nexus tax, some 800-900 retailers immediately pulled out of Pennsylvania just in the first couple days of Nexus passing, alone. That was back in December 2nd. Check out your favorite internet marketing forum, and you’ll undoubtedly read about a new wave of CJ.com-based bannings that have just taken place during this next-to-last week of December 2011. Considering that Nexus Tax will be mandatory for collection in February 1, 2012, we will undoubtedly see that “900″ number increasing dramatically. Happy New Year!

Until some big non-profit organization or major Fortune 500 affiliate program successfully steps up to the government, the risk of Nexus Law passing in additional states marches on.

The point of the matter is that the fundamentals of Nexus Tax is a failure: collect tax for individual purchases from individual states = more money (yayyy! says the local government), resulting in massive companies like Amazon dropping programs that provide taxable income streams, the fallout being the loss of hundreds [thousands] of small businesses going under as a result, ex-business owners hitting the unemployment line, or simply moving out of state and taking their LLC’s earnings and taxpayer money with them to a neighboring state (those effects won’t be felt so quickly, but give it time).

Unfortunately, when we live in a society where our lawmakers are from generations who don’t understand how the internet works, ignorance and greed leads to tragedies like these. What I continually fail to understand is how these laws come to pass – there must be one hell of a one-sided argument being fed to politicians for such a terrible blunder to happen.

I truly feel for any PA state affiliate marketer who has already lost the opportunities that have been awarding them with the means of making a living as a decent tax-paying citizen.

Sometimes, I don’t even want to bother promoting a certain product, because of the intense competition offering the same product for way less. I can’t even express how many times I haven’t gone forward with an idea because of this throughout my career.

Personally, I’m thrifty, and I learned it well from my mother. I will spend a week researching a product before buying it. Then I’ll research the best place to buy it. When it comes to groceries, I don’t buy anything unless it’s on sale that week. I’ll wait 2-3 weeks or more for mayonnaise to go on sale, rather than buying it at full price. The point of the matter is that this should be considered rare behavior: hardly anyone does these things – a minority of the consumer population.

I started to think about my friends, and even the everyday conversations I see on Facebook. It’s a bad economy, and the general population is out there buying overly expensive things like Red Bull on a regular basis, going to Starbucks before work every morning to buy insanely overpriced coffee (as opposed to making it at home), they’ll get the newest iPhone to replace their 6-month old one…the list goes on and on.

That’s the moment it dawned on me…all you need to do as a marketer is to simply be there the instant that people like this are searching for something online. It doesn’t really matter what the pricing is, because they’re probably not bothering to check, anyway. Fear of pricing due to “price-gouging internet marketers” is holding you back from doing great things. They’re winning, because they’re holding back yet another competitor to enter the playing field – you!

About a year ago, I was on a dropshipping forum and expressed my regret about how most dropshipping programs give such slim margins for your profit. One guy – a really successful forum member and small business owner who most others looked up to – simply told me that “pricing doesn’t matter.” He told me to brand myself, offer a great user experience, and don’t worry about your pricing not being competitive with those other marketers making ‘penny profits’ for the sole purpose of being listed at the top in Google Shopping SERPs.

It seems as though the most successful people in life ignore the ‘fears’ that other people have. They try things, and they evolve after failure.

I didn’t believe that guy from the forum, but when I started to pay more attention to general sociology and consumer behavior seen in my Facebook friends, it started to make a lot of sense.

One of the reasons why the economy sucks is because people spend too much, save too little and buy things they don’t need. It’s bad for the economy, but good for you – the internet marketer trying to hustle some more cookie-based commission. Since you can’t change the world in that respect, why not at least get a piece of the pie?

Go back to the drawing board with your old ideas, and re-think them under the terms of the average person not caring that he or she will be spending an extra dollar by buying from your store. Make your store be there when they’re ready TO buy, but, make sure that it’s a damn helpful store that is offering a unique user experience that others aren’t offering.

Even most Amazon.com pages are unhelpful – it’s not hard to give a better user experience than an Amazon page with no description, no dimensions/weights/specifications, feature lists or even a sentence or two of compelling copywriting. All of that stuff is public knowledge, just gather all of it from other sites and make one big page with all of these things for your customers’ convenience. Improvise, and add the one thing that nobody can ever copy nor take from you: your style, your knowledge, and your personality.

It appears as though one of the original founders of Build A Niche Store (if you didn’t know, it’s a light CMS that allows you to create an eBay Partner Network website quickly and easily) has sent out a communication to the old BANS mailing list, which I’m still a part of. However, it has nothing to do about addressing how the founders have completely given up on the software, haven’t created an update in years, allowed their customers to potentially get banned from eBay Partner Network due to a simple software issue, given all of their customers a huge middle finger, and ax’ed the BANS referral program without sending any of their publishers a notice, but, just wanted to let the community know that their demonstration websites are now up for sale.

Looks like “GameImprovementIrons.com,” the original website that the founders of BANS had created to show off the software, is now being put up for sale. Things that make you go hmmmmm.

Perhaps they were actually banned by eBay Partner Network and have to peddle off the website as dead weight, or, the site itself has gotten chewed up thanks to the recent Google Panda update and its merciless butchery of affiliate storefront websites.

Either way, it’s both funny and sad to see the builder of an affiliate breakthrough sending an update to sell off the site that ‘started it all’ back in 2007 or so.

If you’re still using Build A Niche Store (I am), you’ll want to visit the forums, or what’s left of them. A few kind programmers out there continue to make improvements to the antiquated version v3.0, while the original creators of the software continue to ignore the community and collect payments from new copies sold.

Here’s an example: I’ve been a member of the Newegg affiliate program for many years, now. I love Newegg as a service, they’re simply a great store for computer parts. As an affiliate program, they suck. With a stated 0.50% – 4.00% payout (as of September 16, 2011), I’ve been making peanuts selling their expensive computer parts. Let’s look at the last 5 sales I’ve made:

1. Sale amount: $447.92 – I earned $1.67
2. Sale amount:$922.91 – I earned $3.56
3. Sale amount:$499.96 – I earned $0.90
4. Sale amount:$1,465.90 – I earned $4.70
5. Sale amount:$384.97 – I earned $1.45
   TOTAL = $12.28

Terrible. I’ve been selling thousands of dollars of this company’s products and have barely made enough to buy lunch for one day. There’s a problem here. Unfortunately, I have so much going on in my life and in my promotions, that I tend to forget that some of them even exist – such as the one page that’s making regular sales like the ones you see above.

The problem with most (if not all) Commission Junction programs is that their tiers are so bizarre. Newegg, for example, lists that “0.50% – 4.00%” range, which is strange in and of itself. Just look at their payout chart, though. There’s only ONE category that pays out 4%. About 85% of the remainder are paying out only 1%, and three categories pay out 2%. What’s more laughable – the first performance incentive comes for those who sell $375,000 of merchandise per month, and it’s only a measly 1.5%. Shit, if you’re making that many sales, you better start a business and take on Newegg rather than sell for them for a handful of pasta.

With that being said, here’s the obvious solution – Amazon.com sells the same computer parts at a flat 4%. I never get less than 4% there – ever…because that’s what the “Electronics” tier pays, over at Amazon. On top of that, I already have a 6.50% referral rate due to the amount of stuff I’m already selling for them.

WAIT, there’s more. This is Amazon, the inventor of “you might also like”. So, when I switch my links over from Newegg to Amazon, people are buying computer parts and seeing Transformers t-shirts, DVDs, gold plated bottle openers – who knows what other worthless things they don’t need but will add to their shopping cart, therefore, adding to my commission. With that being said, I’m making a full 4% commission here (I did the math on Newegg, I was making the low end – 0.50%), plus, the possibility of earning via impulse buy items.

The moral of this story is not for me to promote Amazon Affiliates, but to promote the notion of going with the better opportunity that gives you more benefit for whatever reason.

So, let’s do that list again with 4% commission to see what I could have made on Amazon Associates:

1. Sale amount: $447.92 – I would have earned $17.92
2. Sale amount:$922.91 – I would have earned $36.91
3. Sale amount:$499.96 – I would have earned $19.99
4. Sale amount:$1,465.90 – I would have earned $58.63
5. Sale amount:$384.97 – I would have earned $15.39
   TOTAL = $148.84

Holy crap. I could have made $136.56 more in one week just by doing NOTHING. Nothing but swapping out affiliate links for a sales page that already exists, and already gets active traffic.

Sometimes, we as internet marketers get so wrapped up on ‘what project is next?’ rather than looking at what we’ve already got, and the simple little tweaks you could make on them to increase your earnings dramatically. Just imagine applying everything in this blog post to about 20 of your existing sales pages that are aged, get traffic and sell constantly. Just imagine how much more you can make when you drop crappy affiliate programs for ones that actually pay you a fair amount! Try it out for yourself :)

How Google Panda Murders Affiliates

Let’s start off with the more personal topic – me, what I earn, and what happens when that gets taken away from me. I really don’t care if I’m about to be  accused of being a sore loser, because in this case, I am one. For background info, I will tell you a fact: since 2007, I was ranking on page 1, #1 in Google for the term “best watches.” As you can imagine, that keyword ranking alone was pulling in hundreds of dollars a month (in other cases, thousands, during the holiday season). I don’t think I have to expand on that, as you’re in the same boat as me and you’ve probably felt it, too.

Check out the graph below and look for the day of infamy: July 14, 2011 (blue line)

Everything went wrong that day, even though nothing technically happened that day. Traffic dipped. It went back up a few days later, then on July 26th (my birthday, coincidentally), back down to nothing.

This graph displays the website’s overall visits, and the dip was solely the cause of my being completely de-ranked for the term “best watches.” Yeah, completely – not even on Google page 50. I was just eradicated from Google for that term, although I hung on mildly on other search engines. Mind you, I never even did anything gray-hat to rank for that term, just basic gradual link building and content updates over the past few years. Nothing new, nothing different, no paid advertising and certainly no shady paid links.

You might have also noticed that this was NOT due to “summer traffic” as 2010′s results are seen in the green line on that same chart. The difference between both years tells that tale.

Wild Changes Favor Big Brands & Garbage Sites

What’s the first thing anyone in my position would do in this case? Search Google for “best watches” and see what sites are now #1. Here are the results as of September 1, 2011 with my notes about these results:

1. Esquire: “Best Watches for Men 2010″ (A big brand getting #1), last updated: Oct. 22, 2010
2. Amazon Best Sellers: Best Watches (A big brand getting #2), last updated: N/A, it’s an auto-updating portal page
3. Men’s Health: Best Watches for Men (A big brand getting #3), last updated: April 29, 2011
4. Independent.co.uk: The 50 Best Watches – Features, Gadgets & Tech (A big brand getting #4), last updated: August 23, 2008
5. BelfastTelegraph.co.uk: The World’s 50 Best Watches 2010: from Casio to Rolex (A big brand getting #5), last updated: March 19, 2010
6. About.com: Mens Watches – Things to Consider when Buying Mens Watches (A big brand getting #6), last updated: unknown, no date.
7. Forbes.com: The World’s Best Watches (A big brand getting #7), last updated: unknown, no date.
8. Chronocentric: Beginner’s Guide to Major Watch Brands (A page of fluff text), last updated: unknown, no date.
9. Youtube result: Best Watches Ever Made (A big brand getting #9), a garbage slide show of watches with a ton of affiliate links shilled underneath it
10. NewBestWatches.info: Best Watches Discount Watches Cheap Watches Site (no kidding, that IS the title of this page), a content scraped site with hundreds of links stuffed on to one page of spun articles.

My Synopsis of What Happened

I’m not going to write with emotion and say how upset I am about how “my site,” far more “worthy” than these, has gotten punished and taken place of by garbage (although that is true), but this is basically what I see on Google page 1:

1. 8 big brands are now dominating the page, including the 1-3 positions.
2. Half of these pages haven’t been updated in a very long time, so, “fresher” doesn’t = higher standing with Panda. Are these page 1 ‘guides’ helpful? Not really. The content ones are typical editorial fluff from multi-topic magazine sites.
3. Content garbage is king: a .info on page 1 of Google with spun content and heavy keyword stuffing? Is this 2005 all over again?
4. Evidently, if you have a trashy, unhelpful, new Youtube video with keyword stuffing and affiliate links (and using trademark-violated music in the background), you can beat out a website that has been ranking highly for years, like mine was.
5. One of my proudest achievements was beating “World Of Watches” in ranking for “best watches.” I’ve bought from them before, and they run a great service. Now, even they are suffering – they’re now buried in the middle of page 2, when they used to be neck in neck with my site.

Garbage is King

“NewBestWatches.info” wasn’t the only toilet floater in the results. For curiosity’s sake, I looked through pages 2+ of SERPs and noticed a few other turds: buyhotwatches.com, bestwatchesreviews.org, mens-luxurywatches.com, buyluxurywatches.org and others that are blatantly keyword stuffing and spinning, while providing no value to users whatsoever. One site, bestpocketwatchesstore.tk, was found on page 5 of Google (beating my old site, obviously) and it doesn’t even exist! It immediately redirects over to a parked page.

So, spinning is king. Or keyword stuffing. I shouldn’t have listened to anyone’s advice about helpful content over on sites like SEOMoz or Matt Cutts’ blog. Looks like it’s all about reverse-evolution on Google.

Things Are Getting Scary on Google

The unpredictability of Google seems to have become the #1 cause of anxiety in marketers these days. There have been a lot of shocking accounts of what Google has been doing to flood results with big brands and paid results – you can read about these case studies over at SEO Book (one of my personal favorite blogs of all time). There’s no doubt that something shady is going on.

How do you survive this? That’s the scariest part – if you’re a victim, there’s no quick way to recover. Hopefully you have a lot of different niches running at the same time, so one can bear the load of another that has fallen. Otherwise, you better be hitting those social networks day and night to get more attention, +1′s and backlinks. If you’ve lost a page 1 ranking to slew of big brands, you’re in serious trouble, since they’re getting preference with Panda.

It’s also time to re-think what terms you want to search for. Unfortunately, big brands get preference for big terms. I never considered “best watches” to be a big term, but just look at the SERPs for others and you’ll see a pretty obvious pattern.

In closing, I had to re-post this video that I caught on SEO Book…I think it says so much about what’s going on.

This tip pertains to a single promotional page I’m running, where I am listing a collection of the best products in a specific niche. It’s a 4-year old page, and is ranking highly and getting decent daily traffic. The page features about 20-30 products, listed in no particular order. Each one has a mini-review and screenshot, and it is updated regularly.

One thing I noticed through analytics is that the vast majority of people are clicking on the first three products. It’s not because they are the best ones, but simply because they are at the top of the list. It’s always amusing to see human behavior at work!

All I did was swap out the first three products with three other products that were already elsewhere on the page, but were from an affiliate program that yields a higher payout. The result was simply amazing. After a couple months, I noticed that I was earning nearly double of what the page was previously earning (psst, that was about $300/mo. more than the page was already making), just by moving a few existing reviews to the top of the page.

Once I saw the success of this ridiculously dumb strategy, I did a rinse/repeat on a few other similar affiliate promotions I was running. Go ahead, try this out!

It’s as simple as winning over the hearts and minds of the “I heard you can make a lotta money on the internets!!!1″ crowd with an infomercial that looks like a faux news segment. The particular book featured was “Advertising Profits From Home” by author Anthony Morrison, and the informercial featured Mark Victor Hansen (co-creator of “Chicken Soup for the Soul”) interviewing Morrison in typical infomercial fashion.

While nothing is promised, the book is positioned as being a way to earn a good $200 per week or $500 per month (or more) by following its method. The infomercial went on to feature the usual suspects who make $x,xxx using its method: the single mother, middle-aged mid-west woman and every other stereotypical infomercial demographic were seen raving over their successes…with sub-text saying “Results may vary.” May = you’re guaranteed to get a $20 book, and optionally, a lot of cash lost on additional services that leech more money from you.

A simple search for “Advertising Profits From Home” in my Google auto-suggest bar immediately pulled up “Advertising Profits From Home Scam.” Aha. Well, the first link I visited was from Reviewopedia which gave a decent overview of the book and what you’re up against if you buy it. What’s equally interesting are the customer comments down below, which we’ll call the “scamees.”

The full gamut of complaints from the ever-popular triple-price web hosting charges, to the pushy internet telemarketing consultant who charges over $7,000, were seen in these testimonials. It’s sad.

What we have here is a book that teaches a rudamentary system that you can easily learn by Googling “how to get into affiliate marketing” and reading through forums, but wait – there’s more…you also get overblown web hosting fees, a “free” website that you technically don’t own and a pushy sales jerk convincing you to shell out thousands more for nonsense. Oh, and you also get to split some affiliate commissions with the author, too.

The informercial for Advertising Profits From Home also happened to include a footnote about Morrison’s other book, The Hidden Millionaire. It’s basically the same premise. The book currently has a 1-star rating on Amazon.com with an eye-opening description explaining why (see the scammy catches mentioned in the paragraph above).

While I know close to nothing about Morrison’s background, he must have gotten a name for himself somehow to be funding nationally televised informercials. While his public bio (seen wherever his book is sold) looks rosy, the customer testimonials for his method don’t seem to rise above a 1 or 2 star rating, and this system has scum written all over it.

If you had the potential to make six figures as an author with your affiliate-savvy background, taking advantage of people who truly don’t know what they’re doing and look up to you as a source of credibiltiy, would you? If you answered no, then you’ll never be an infomercial-caliber internet marketer.

Here are the top 5 ways to know an internet marketing method book is a scam:

1. It suggests a “proven method” that insinuates you will achieve the same results if you follow them.
2. It gives price ranges as examples of what readers have been earning from the method.
3. It appears to target people who have no knowledge of internet marketing whatsoever.
4. It offers any kind of additional, attached/ongoing service for free.
5. It’s sold in an informercial.

…and this is why they are underhanded:

1. No methods are proven. All internet marketers have their own personal methods. As a new internet marketer, it is up to you to discover what your personal method is instead of relying on the methods of others.
2. There’s no such thing as an estimated amount of how much you’ll make from affiliate marketing. It depends on your skill level, what you’re selling, the commission scale of the program you use, and what search engine rankings you have achieved.
3. In my personal opinion, any internet marketing book that targets people who don’t have a clue about internet marketing is most likely a scam that is attempting to sell a service. Preying off of the unknowing is an unfortunate trait of internet marketing authors. It ranks up there with taking advantage of the elderly, or running a Ponzi scheme.
4. Nothing is free. Everything “free” has hidden additional fees. That’s a golden rule. Unless the free services are being offered by a reborn Mother Theresa, you can pretty much be guaranteed that nothing is ever done out of the kindness of anyone’s heart.
5. If it deals with “at-home income” and it’s on an informercial, it’s garbage.

Remember, the money these authors make is on the tens of thousands of copies of their $19.95 book that people never do anything with because they’re either lazy or don’t have time for it. Alternately, most if not all people quit when they don’t see immediate results. The remainder of the profits these authors make is on the cash collected from chumps who fall for the bait-and-switch tactics associated with additional fees like hosting, consultancy, etc.

Moral of the story — internet marketing books make money for internet marketing authors. There’s no such thing as a “marketing secret” because the internet exists, and everything you need to know is already out there for you to read…for free.

Think about this: an affiliate program that you make a decent salary off of has changed marketplaces (kind of like leaving CJ.com and joining some other no-name service that you’ve never heard of). They then send out an email, letting you know that you have one month to change all of the old affiliate links. It’s a migraine headache if you have been promoting them across a dozen or more channels, as well as within articles, bit.ly links and the like.

So, after a few weeks, I thought I had gotten all of the old links converted over, but I was wrong. I kept making $50 commissions every couple days that wound up being $0 because they were coming from old links.

WTF? I thought I had changed them over? I was wrong. There were still more links out there.

I contacted the affiliate network, e-Junkie, and informed them that I am missing commissions because of old links. I asked if I could identify which of my links were being credited to these missed sales. The reply was that it was impossible to know that information. I’m saddened that e-Junkie is one of the affiliate networks that doesn’t provide this. It truly sucks.

So, just before writing up this blog post, I just made another $50 commission that payed me $0. I’m infuriated. There’s nothing I can do.

This, however, is awesome for the affiliate program. Here’s where the conspiracy theory comes in:

1. Start an affiliate program
2. Program gets popular – you quit your job and do it full time because your publishers are promoting the hell out of your product and raking in the dough for you
3. Drop your affiliate network, give your publishers 1 month to change their links
4. X% of publishers will not do this (either they’re not very active, don’t get the automatic emails, or are lazy)
5. You’re now getting free advertising because of old links that are still bringing in residual sales. However, you’re not paying off commissions for these sales. Genius!
6. Rinse, repeat

Once this idea dawned on me, I wondered if it were true. If so, then that is pretty scummy.

As an affiliate marketer, you start to blame yourself for not having kept better records as to where you were placing affiliate links over the years. But, how can you? They’re probably all over your self-hosted and 3rd party blogs, Squidoo lenses, Hubpages hubs, EZine Articles, email footers, bit.ly links, Facebook & Twitter walls, user profile pages, forum posts & signatures and who knows where else.

The more I think about it, this could be one of the scummiest things you could do to your publishers. While many simply change affiliate networks due to the outrageous amount of a “cut” you have to pay the network, I really wonder how many more do it for the commission-less sales.