Advertiser360: Becoming A Super Advertiser

The vast majority of the Internet marketing courses that have come out recently revolve around the merits of affiliate marketing and how that is the way to make big money on the Internet.

Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative, but if you have been doing affiliate marketing as long as I have, you will know that there is a dark side to affiliate marketing that a lot of these courses fail to mention.

Let me explain.

Over the past 18 months, I have been personally ripped off as an affiliate by various merchants and CPA networks.

And I am not the only one.

This happens to affiliate marketers every single day and is part of the being an affiliate marketer.

Let me share with you some of my recent experiences.

I did a promotion for StatsJunky and their software program almost 18 months ago and generated a five-figure affiliate commission for my efforts.

Unfortunately StatsJunky never paid me and just kept making excuses and false promises that I would eventually be paid. I spoke with other affiliates of the same program and they all confirmed that they were not paid.

I promoted many Internet marketing related programs to my marketing lists and had problems getting payment from some of the owner’s of the products I endorsed.

Do I get steamed about it – heck yes!

If you are promoting any cost per sale offers, I highly recommend that your work with a cost per sale network such as Commission Junction or Clickbank so that you have some level of protection.

If you decide to work directly with a company that has their own in-house affiliate program, make sure you do your background checking on whether they pay their affiliates on time.

Another sad reality that you will soon realize in the affiliate game is that products that fail to meet the expectations of the customer end up with high refund rates.

I have promoted many of the major launches and have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions (sometimes with just one launch).

So you can imagine my surprise when I see a 55% refund rate (this is the stuff you never hear about after a major product launch) and get emails from people who bought through me explaining their reasons why.

Here is a list of major factors that they point out as the reason why they refunded:

1. Did not meet expectations – therefore not worth the price

2. Poor customer support

3. Missing content that was promised

These are ALL things that as an affiliate you have absolutely NO control over.

I am also a very active CPA marketer, but find very frustrating when CPA advertisers start scrubbing (removing leads) or CPA networks that reverse leads after the fact claiming that they were low quality.

This is especially frustrating since I use paid traffic to generate most of my CPA commissions.

I had one CPA network contact me and tell me that the advertiser was refusing to pay the $75,000 the owed me in CPA commissions for a 30 day period. There excuse was that the leads were of low quality.

I went back and forth with the CPA network explaining that why did the advertiser continue to let me run traffic to the offer for thirty straight days if was backing out for them?

Luckily I was working with a fairly large CPA network that took care of this and managed to get the advertiser to pay and most importantly, got me paid.

My word of advice if you decide to promote CPA offers is to make sure that you work with the large corporate style CPA networks rather than the smaller “Mom & Pop” CPA networks because they can cover your backs if the advertiser refuses to pay.

Small CPA networks simply don’t have the resources or financial means to cover your losses.

Unfortunately I have run traffic through some smaller CPA networks in the past that did refuse to pay me and I was out tens of thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions.

The other thing that burns me is the lack of respect that affiliate marketers get today. Of course, some of that is a result if shady affiliates who created fake blogs and articles to dupe people into purchasing products and offers.

Unfortunately major sources of traffic such as Google have now made it part of their mandate to weed out affiliates who use their Adwords PPC platform.

Trust me as I heard this from a reputable source that knows a Google insider who has confirmed this. This is a shame considering it was affiliates who built up Google Adwords to where it is today.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still LOVE affiliate marketing as it has made me a huge sum of money over the years – I just like be a product owner more.

I just wanted to share with you some of the bad experiences I have had with affiliate marketing and some of my tips on how you can avoid some of the problems I have had with getting paid.

I once had a candid conversation with a friend Steve Clayton (one of the Blueprint guys) who told me that he quickly switched from being an affiliate for a dieting program after generating $1 million in affiliate commissions for the product owner.

He told me that he had found out that he was only the third top affiliate for that product, meaning that there were two affiliates who generated more sales then he did for the product owner.

It is crazy to think that there were three affiliates who were responsible for almost $6 million in sales alone!

And the product owner was just sitting back while affiliates drove all the traffic and sale.

Pretty sweet position to be sitting in – if you ask me.

I also had other close friends who were generating as much as $5 million a year in CPA commissions. They came out with their own course and were asked why if they were busy making $5 million with affiliate income, why bother creating their own product?

Their reply was simple. Why not if they can make another $5 million selling information on how they run their successful affiliate business? They went on to make another $5 million selling their own product in less than three weeks.

Smart thinking if you ask me.

Do you want to know a little secret?

I can pretty much predict who will win a major product launch by just watching the previous product launches.

The winner is usually a person who just recently finished their own product launch.

Why?

Because they just built a huge, responsive prelaunch list with their own product launch because they had their own product to sell.

There really are a countless number of reasons that you should seriously consider becoming a product owner if you haven’t already.

As a product owner, you control the list and entire sales process.

When I used to work in the corporate world as a consultant to small businesses, we always took our clients through an exercise that would show them how they could increase their revenues and profits.

All of the steps I used to teach offline businesses can be applied to online advertisers.

The interesting thing is that these concepts are quite simple and not rocket science.

Let me explain to you the four factors to product owners should concentrate on that will increase revenues and ultimately profits.

1. Get More Customers

Not too complicated – right?

Just get double the traffic and if your conversion rate remains the same, you will double your customers and revenues.

Now as an affiliate, the more sales you make, the more commissions you will get. But at the end, you are just one of many affiliates that could be promoting the same affiliate product so who do you think is benefiting in the end?

The product owner of course.

In fact, with all the traffic that you have sent to the product sales page, you might have built a nice hot list of prospects that you will NEVER have control of.

2. Increase the frequency of transactions with each customer

Here is where you as an affiliate really lose out. Unless you are with an affiliate program that pays out lifetime commissions on ALL their products (yeah right), you will rarely see any affiliate commissions on additional products that are created and sold to the customer.

3. Increase the price of your products

You have absolutely no control over the price of an affiliate product that you are promoting. This is left up to the advertiser who decides what he or she would like to charge.

And since most advertisers are not sophisticated when it comes to split-testing to find the optimal price to sell at – once again as affiliates, we lose out on missed sales.

4. Systems

Systems within an online business include everything from the sales letters, squeeze pages, back-end funnels, autoresponders, customer support channels – all which bring in millions of dollars in sales for the product owners.

You as an affiliate have no control over ANY of these systems and probably don’t even see a dime in affiliate commissions from anything that happens after the initial sale.

If you truly want to build a lucrative online empire, I think affiliate income should be your secondary source of revenue whereas selling your own products or services should be your primary focus.

About six months ago, I had a good friend Peter Nguyen present at my live training seminar about moving from the affiliate marketing to becoming the product owner or advertiser (as they are called on CPA networks).

He blew the audience away with his wealth of knowledge that he has gained over the last few years working with dozens of advertisers.

In fact, it was Peter who encouraged me to create my own products that have gone on to do millions of dollars in sales.

Over the last 10 months, I have been working closely with Peter’s team to create an entire training course called Advertiser360.

This courses guides anyone who is interested in becoming a super advertiser by selling their own products and services.

The course is massive and is physically shipped out to customers, but also as a digital component that you get full access to.

Click For Advertiser360

Best wishes,

Gauher Chaudhry