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Are Affiliate Marketing Programs A Thing of The Past ?

Posted by Brian Krassenstein on Oct 26th, 2010 and filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Affiliate Marketing

Are Affiliate Marketing Programs a Thing of the Past?

I remember back in the late 90′s and early 2000′s affiliate marketing was one of the easiest ways to earn money online without the need for much start up cash. All you had to do was create a simple website, join a ton of affiliate programs and start sending traffic. Now though, it seems as if affiliate marketing programs are dying out. The days of easy money are no longer with us, as major corporations eat into the profits of many of the smaller online companies which use to offer nice incentives.

Amazon.com is one of these major corporations. Although Amazon offers an affiliate program, the rates in which they pay are extremely low, making it quite difficult for anyone to earn a substantial amount of money selling via their affiliate links. Even if you did create a site dedicated to a few special products, and tried marketing that site via search engine optimization, and paid search, it’s likely a good majority of the people who may have bought from you in the earlier part of the 2000′s, would simply go directly to Amazon or Ebay and search for the same product.

The search engines are no longer the best start points to purchase a product. The search engines are being used more and more to research products before a purchase, however when a purchase is ready to be made, most consumers are going directly to the Amazons, Ebays, and Overstocks of the world. As time goes on the value and importance of affiliate marketing will likely continue to decrease.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/EleshaGabriell Elesha Gabriell Aflalo

    If you can push large volumes of traffic. You can make money. If you can’t you will not. There is no such thing as easy money. There is always a hot vertical or two. you just need to raise your hand and ask somebody. All the best. e

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1024847817 C Pace Lattin

    Is this a joke? Affiliate marketing revenues grow each year, are you crazy?

  • http://www.danielmclark.com Daniel M. Clark

    Which is why affiliates need to add value to their pages. You’re right in that affiliates can’t just put up some slapdash page and roll in the dough like some could in the past – but times changes, and affiliates change with them. Take product reviews for example: an affiliate can successfully (and sometimes rather easily) outrank Amazon, eBay and even an item’s own manufacturer in the SERPs with a great review (which includes a fully disclosed affiliate link, of course).

    I’d also like to ask: where did you come up with the assertion that affiliate programs are “dying out”? You made some claims in this piece that cite no sources.

  • http://twitter.com/affiliatesea affiliate sea

    Affiliate marketing definitely not a thing of past.But it is becoming more harder day by day,because of the heavy competition.

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