Cyber Monday And The Challenges Of Being An Affiliate

I always look forward to Cyber Monday. As an affiliate marketer, it's one of the biggest days of the year. Sales are down this year for me but still better than expected, given the cookie tracking problem that i mentioned. For anyone that's thinking of becoming an affiliate, i thought i'd put together a list of the pros and cons over the years.

Pros:

1. Passive Income

I got into affiliate marketing because i wanted to create a passive stream of income that wasn't tied to how much i work. This has been one of the biggest upsides of the whole affiliate marketing journey. Once the site was up and running and after some social media marketing, it really hasn't required much maintenance to keep it going.

Most of my traffic comes from Google and i think the content is helpful and evergreen so it should remain up there in the search terms for a while.

2. Opens up opportunities in digital marketing, SEO etc.

My blog's visibility has led to consulting opportunities where i help companies manage their online advertising campaigns, SEO for their websites, social media campaigns etc. To be honest, there's a lot of opportunity here and i've been lazy when it comes to actively seeking clients. So far i've just been managing the work from clients who approach me.

Cons:

1. The golden era of ranking a website is gone

Ranking a website used to be relatively simple six years ago. Just create a site, put some spammy backlinks, tags etc. and in a few weeks you'd have that site ranking. Not so simple anymore. Non-blacklisted PBNs, social media cues, bounce rate, time on site and content length have become much more important and harder to game.

2. Merchants are getting stingy

Just as it's getting tougher to rank a site, merchants are snipping away at the other end, reducing their commissions on products. This year alone, i got a 40% cut from Amazon. My site's traffic has doubled but i'm making the same amount as i did last year.

3. Adblock

Adblock is going to kill the whole affiliate marketing game as it stands right now. Some browsers like Opera come with it built-in and by next year, so will Chrome! It doesn't matter that your readers whitelist your site. When they click a link to a merchant site that is on AdBlock's list, your affiliate link will be automatically removed.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketers have seen better days. If you're looking to get rich, don't go into affiliate marketing. On the other hand, if you want to learn new skills, build something of your own and generate a small passive income quickly, affiliate marketing might just be for you.