How Affiliate Marketing Links Hide You from Potential Customers

Affiliate marketing must sound real good to a business. They pay a small commission and they multiply their web presence by hundreds or thousands of pages, all with links pointing back to their site. There's no way sales can escape their reach, there's no way a customer can overlook them. To the sales affiliates, affiliate links must sound like a great deal too. All the affiliate has to do is put up a bunch of web pages, using content provided by the merchant, then sit back and watch the commissions roll in. To the would-be buyer, however, it sucks! It just plain sucks!

Here's my latest experience with on-line shopping. I needed a part for my truck - nothing big, just a replacement knob for the AC control switch on a 10-year old Chevy truck. It should be easy, now that the internet brings the world to my fingertips. "Should" was the critical word ... what should have been easy was not easy, and it was all because of affiliate marketing.

Could I find the right knob using Google or Yahoo? No! All I found were swarms of badly designed affiliate sites clogging the search engines, each claiming to have the part I need. They only had a link to a site that perhaps might have had what I needed. The affiliates were preventing me from getting to the site they were affiliated with by their sheer numbers. It was like wading through a mob of aggressive panhandlers near the subway station ... all of them saying "ME! ME! CLICK ME DAMMIT!"

Let's not even talk about the "optimized" ad farm sites that had all the keywords I was looking for, but no products, just lots of ads they were getting page view money for. Many of them may not be ad-farm sites by now, because I took URLs and Google will kick butt.

Frustrated by the clogs of affiliates, all selling the same crap knobs (I do not want a skull AC switch knob, really I don't, nor does a blue glow-in-the-dark Iron Cross appeal to me) finally I searched Froogle for: AC switch knob chevy

I found one on the second page of results. I found one car parts dealer selling aftermarket equipment. That was all I needed: one legitimate parts dealer, no affiliates, no swarming beggars shouting for clicks, and the seller didn't pay a commission to anyone. I'll definitely be using Froogle instead of Google from now on. Sod off, you annoying affiliates!

Does affiliate marketing ever make sense? Yes, provided both the affiliate and the merchant are selective. If you have a website about chocolate, being an affiliate of Godiva or even Hershey's would make sense. I might even click that affiliate link if your site had useful or entertaining information. If your site sells custom rocking horses (in the shape of cottontail rabbits) setting up an affiliate program for sites about children and children's toys would help sales.

What does not make sense for a seller is signing up with the big affiliate networks, because you have so little control over who your affiliates are and what other ads they are running next to yours. Would you want your hand-carved cottontail rabbits sandwiched between an ad for an on-line pharmacy selling knock-off Viagra and the Cottontail Ranch brothel in Nevada?