Spending a lot of time online I run across the term “Affiliate Marketing” all the time. I even go to an “internet marketing” event once a month here in Austin to meet other entrepreneurs, but always found some of the people doing affiliate marketing a little perplexing (and sort of shady).
When prying into what they do, they never gave me CLEAR answers. They would always say things like, “I do lead generation” or “performance marketing” or “sell an online product” and other buzzwords I didn’t fully understand. I’d ask, “Ok, give me an example of a product you generate leads for” and they’d state a general industry at most (such as insurance, health or real estate). Some of the people said they do “PPC arbitrage” and that they “promote products” but wouldn’t go much further into detail about their business.
I was never satisfied with these responses and just presumed these people were really shady (which some of them are).
So here I am trying to find out what these people do and they keep skirting around the actual details…WHAT THE HELL?
I can tell them I own a rave store and sell light up stuff online. It’s a pretty straightforward, and they can even see the website for themselves. Why were these people acting so shady? They were obviously hiding something or lying about something.
Many of the people I met in the affiliate marketing world seemed to sell herbal pills online or get rich quick schemes for the masses. Most of the products they were promoting seemed relatively useless once purchased, and most had “interesting” billing plans.
In my mind, I saw “affiliate marketing” as referring to a website that promises to get you rich quick…something like this kind of crap:
(You should be PUNCHED if you even TRY to click that image).
I’ve read many bloggers like John Chow and other guys who make their living from blogging and they frequently talk about affiliate marketing. I kept wondering what exactly it was, especially since they correlate so much of their income to it…..so I decided to do some research and find out…..