You're about to hear the truth about affiliate marketing. I've done a lot of affiliate marketing. I've made tens of thousands of dollars online doing it, and I've seen a lot of the good, the bad, and the ugly over the last 10 years I've been at it. I'll tell you up front that affiliate marketing overall sucks. For most people, it's a waste of time and energy. Yes, there are certain cases where I've cleaned up earning money on affiliate marketing, but there are others where I've been betrayed by platforms suddenly changing conditions and dropping all their old links. Most of the time, affiliate marketing is not a good way to make money online. I'll give you lots of specific stories to back this up.
Where Affiliate Marketing Actually Made Me Money
Let me start with where I made the most money doing affiliate marketing. Where it really shines is when you've got a big, big business system that you can naturally slide affiliate marketing into. When I was on Udemy.com selling online courses, I was making tens of thousands of dollars doing affiliate marketing. But I had a system that you can no longer use: I had my own Udemy courses on Udemy.com, and then I took affiliate links and used a remarketing pixel from my Udemy course. They don't give you that anymore, but they used to. So I had a remarketing pixel from Google, I stuck that into Google Ads, and then I used Udemy affiliate links to my own courses on remarketing Google Ads. That worked disgustingly well.
This is what generally works the very best in affiliate marketing: when you can get some system like that set up where you can send massive amounts of traffic and you have all kinds of different ways to make money. I was sending thousands and thousands of clicks, spending up to five hundred dollars a day on Google Ads. Basically, if you found my course on Udemy through organic search or any other method, you just got endless remarketing ads for my own courses. If you bought my course, I got almost all of the income, because I would get some through the affiliate program and then some through Udemy directly. And I got a cut if you bought anything at all. A system like that will do a great job bringing in sales and commissions, but if you're just missing one little piece somewhere, the whole thing can break down.
How Platforms Can Trash Everything You Built
What's worse is that the platforms themselves can also ruin everything for you, as Udemy did to me. My Udemy account was eventually suspended for no good reason, and my entire system was just trashed because of how the team on Udemy was acting after a jealous co-instructor lied to them about the nature of our relationship. Udemy used that as an excuse during a time when they were struggling as a company, when their CEO was about to leave and things were already bad there. They got rid of me, and that trashed my whole affiliate marketing system.
What I've noticed is that affiliate marketing systems generally don't last very well either. This is why affiliate marketing sucks and why I don't recommend it in most cases as a good way to make money. Even if you get everything set up, I've seen a bunch of companies do something slimy: they intentionally change their affiliate systems, because then it breaks everyone's links, or they change the terms of the program so that if you ever have some period of inactivity, they can get rid of all your old commissions.
ActiveCampaign betrayed my trust greatly by suddenly switching their affiliate program terms. After years of me making tens of thousands of dollars in ActiveCampaign affiliate commissions, they suddenly introduced a new rule: if you went a certain period of time without getting any new sales, they wiped out all of your lifetime commissions going forward. When I signed up for the program, the big value proposition with ActiveCampaign was that they'd give you 20 to 30 percent lifetime commissions when you referred somebody. Naturally, out of their own self-interest, they're going to want to cut loose people like me who'd been referring to ActiveCampaign for years, to save that money. So they snuck this little thing in: if at any point you ever didn't get a new sale for a certain period, you lost all of your lifetime commissions. I was making hundreds of dollars a month on the ActiveCampaign affiliate program even when I hadn't generated any new sales for a while. I had people paying thousands of dollars a month on ActiveCampaign that I had referred. Because I missed one period without an active sale, they wiped all my old commissions off. That change essentially dishonored the original agreement they had made.
Even if you're operating in a program that doesn't change the links, they're very likely, out of their own self-interest to make a higher profit, to stab you in the back. This is the kind of thing that happens. Almost every affiliate program I participated in over the last seven years has, at some point, done something like that, or stopped doing the affiliate program completely.
The Tracking Problem Nobody Warns You About
If you want to be successful at affiliate marketing, it often takes a while to get it set up. Some of the best ways I've done affiliate marketing outside of the Udemy system I told you about were through YouTube videos and tutorials. This personally sucks for me, because at least half the time people don't even use the affiliate link. If you're sharing your affiliate link all over the place, many times people will be on a different device and it won't track correctly, or they'll use your link and then not sign up within 90 days. Affiliates do a lot of free marketing for companies. This is why I generally do not participate at all in affiliate programs today.
If you want me to promote your product on my videos, you're going to pay me for the guaranteed promotion I'm going to do. When emails come in through my Linktree offering me some commission percentage, I don't care what the percentage is; I'm not doing anything without getting money up front, because branding is very valuable. There are a lot of people wasting a ton of time and energy doing affiliate marketing, as I have in the past. Whatever commissions you think you should get, you actually should get more, usually two or three times as many based on the work you're doing. So many people don't use the links, or the links don't track correctly, that even if everything else is working, you often won't get credit for all the people you really referred.
I've run my own affiliate marketing program before, and that was highly revealing. You'd have people sharing affiliate links to my website, to Euthena.com, and they'd be selling their own course through it, and people would buy. About 50 percent of the time, I used my own affiliate links to track how often people were actually using the links, and about 50 percent of the time, people would go buy without using the actual link. They would go directly to the website through Google after I talked about it in a video. That's when I stopped doing affiliate marketing, seeing how often people won't even use your actual link.
The One Arrangement I'll Accept
Now, if you can get a sponsorship arrangement as a creator where you get a guaranteed payment plus additional commissions and your own custom link, that is a scenario that would be acceptable to me. For example, I do crypto videos. If a crypto exchange said, "Hey, we'll give you this much to do a video, and then if people use your link, we'll give you a percentage of that too," then that is acceptable. But what you do not want to do is just sign up for these affiliate programs and start spamming links all over, making videos and writing posts. In almost every case, that is going to be a complete waste of your time.
I've tested it almost every different way you can imagine, from having my own program to working others', and affiliate marketing is very beneficial, often for whoever's running it. I saw that myself with my website. It's very beneficial if you have your own website and you can convince people, or, to put it negatively, if you could trick or con people into using your affiliate program and doing your sales for you for free, that often works out well for you. I'm making sure to call out ActiveCampaign as being sleazy with their affiliate program, but they're not alone. Almost every other company, at some point, did something similar. Think of it: I was making lots of commissions, and they'd change from one provider to another and stop paying all the commissions on their old affiliate links. Almost every one of these companies rationalizes it by pointing to increasing profits, saying, "Well, we're switching this provider," or "We're doing this for whatever reason." The bottom line is that it's profitable for them to do something that screws over the affiliates.
Why I'm Careful With What I Share
I recommend against affiliate marketing in most cases. I recorded this because someone in my community was asking about affiliate marketing. There are some affiliate things where you just have people put in an email address and you get paid on that, and I personally don't participate in anything that I wouldn't want to be a part of. I don't like signing up for these affiliate email schemes, and therefore I don't share them, even though I could probably make lots of money doing so. I don't do it because what I've learned is that it's not worth making some money in the short term if I give people a bad experience. In my experience, over 12 years of being a creator online and at least 10 years of doing affiliate marketing, if you send somebody off somewhere with an affiliate link or email marketing and they have a bad experience, you get credit for that. It's important for me to be careful and considerate of what I share with my audience, because if I send you over to buy a product you don't like and you end up returning it, you'll tell somebody else that I suck, because I sent you in a direction where you got scammed or ripped off or bought something you didn't need.
Affiliate marketing is like a minefield. Most of the time, the longer you walk around, you're going to lose a limb if not get blown up completely. In most cases, I'd recommend you don't do affiliate marketing. The one thing I'm trying out right now is an Amazon affiliate system that's completely on Amazon.com, where they're basically paying you to upload videos, and if people click on the videos, which are all directly on Amazon.com, you can get a commission. That's more like getting paid to create content. A similar thing would be getting paid directly to upload YouTube videos, which I do; they're just paying you a percentage of the ad revenue. I wouldn't even classify that as affiliate marketing, because to me, affiliate marketing is sending you from one place to another. Technically, though, that Amazon setup is in the affiliate program. I'm researching it and I'll share more once I've got it figured out.
Thanks a lot for listening to my experience with affiliate marketing. If this was helpful and you'd like to hang out with me and ask about your own specific situation, the best way to work with me on this today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where the community gathers and interacts with me directly. You can dig into more of my thinking on building an audience and making money online through my YouTube Coaching playlist.
Much love, and I look forward to answering your next question inside the community.