The Ramblings Of Lawrence Piper Internet Entrepreneur

The other day I discussed a couple of reason why I hate affiliate marketing. The biggest problem that I’ve encountered yet that makes affiliate marketing a less than worthwhile effort is actually getting paid.

One of the hardest parts of affiliate marketing is finding a product that you can believe in enough to really want to have other buy it not because it will make you a buck but because you know it will help them. When you find one of those products it can be a truly life changing event because you passion will just come out naturally. That’s when you will see the sales actually start coming in. Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy your hard earned money. But what if it never shows up?

I’ve been fortunate enough to find 2 such products that really evoked my passion and I felt could truly be worth other peoples time and money. Both times actually getting paid became an issue and I’ll describe the situations in detail. In one situation the company handled everything with flying colors. The other left me hanging in cyber-space and I finally had to stop my marketing efforts although some of it being viral is literally unstoppable.

The first was when I purchased my copy of Zeus Internet Marketing Robot by Cyber-Robotics.  Like most smart marketing companies they give out a free trial version of their software and the link pages it creates contain 2 banner ads back to their company. Even the paid version does this but it can be removed in the paid versions.  One of the banner ads would only have a link to Cyber Robotics and one would have an affiliate link to them. Although you could (and I did) make them both affiliate links.

I found that the program worked great for finding potential link partners, organizing those links into a well themed categorized directory and for e-mailing those potential partners as well. Because it worked so well it did excactly what they said it would. It drove human traffic from my partner’s sites and it help get me number one rankings on the search engines for many many terms. Because of this I started telling others on a forum that I was a moderator of at the time and many others downloaded the trial version and some eventually started buying and told me they had done so yet I wasn’t getting notices that I had an affiliate sale.

Finally after several instances I contacted Cyber Robotics and talked with the owner David Notestine a wonderful man who had the perfect solution. Not only could a person be a Zeus affiliate but you could also become a Zeus Dealer. The difference was in who collected the money. Because the program requires an activation code supplied by Cyber Robotics a dealer can purchase those codes in advance and then create their own sales page for the program. They then determine their own price they want to sell the software (activation codes) for and collect the money directly from the customer and pocket the profit themselves.  Why wasn’t I getting the credit for the sales as an affiliate? As mentioned in Part One I didn’t know to tell people they had to clear their cookies before clicking on my affiliate link so I would be the one getting the credit.

The second product I found that I felt was worth promoting was an e-book called “The Master Plan” by Charles Heflin owner of SEO20/20 and University 20/20. Charles wrote an excellent book about how properly structuring your site is part of properly optimizing a site to get top search engine rankings. I knew the process worked because most of the principles were already being incorporated in my Excalibur Brothers website. Because I felt he had so well explained the process I decided I would join his affiliate program and promote the book as well. Charles was even gracious enough to provide the affiliates with a branded copy of his “The Master Plan Primer” that revealed parts of The Master Plan but obviously left you wanting the entire plan. Useful but Incomplete. It was brilliant and it worked.

The first couple of months went fine and I received my PayPal payments as promised. But then the third month I didn’t get  my commissions. My inquiries via e-mail and private message in The Master Plan forum went unanswered. I finally made a public post in the forum and a month later a public reply was made (since I was apparently not the only one) to send our details directly to his e-mail.

I did this when I finally saw the post but all further communication ceased. Let me make clear we are not talking large amounts of money. I was only making one or two sales a month but isn’t multiple streams of income the idea? Little trickles become a big flow. But I digress. The notices I received even included a phone number which I called and left many a messages and I will admit eventually the irritation was definately showing in my tone but I never resulted to vulgar language. The lack of response was probably more irritating than not getting the commissions themselves.

I even contacted One Shopping Cart who administers the affiliate program and while they did get a reply from Charles that was forwarded to me I still never received a reply or payment from Charles or anyone at SEO20/20. While earlier I said it was not large amounts of money it wasn’t just chump change either. As of this writing the total owed is $692.48 but I’ve terminated the banner ads I had on my link pages and the download links for the branded primer and the traffic swarm ads.

I would love to say that this means that you should stick with the “big guns” like ClickBank, LinkShare, Share-A-Sale and others but I have yet to make a sale using any of their programs. I guess that’s why I love e-commerce so much.

So while I’m sure there are others out there making tons of money using affiliate programs I’ll stick with selling physical products. Just my two cents worth this week.

Lawrence