Affiliate marketing is all about change and innovation – that’s what’s fun about it. If you enjoy stability and stultifying boredom – get a job watching grass grow, cos this simply ain’t for you bucko!

Sometimes a good pruning results in amazing growth!

An Affiliate Business Is Like An Apple Tree

It gets pruned every now and again, but patient affiliate gardeners will be rewarded with greatly enhanced crops. Each and every time any changes outwith my control have impacted my business it’s come back bigger, better, and stronger than before.

Why? Because I’ve always viewed change as an opportunity for my business – not a threat.  I just get the old affiliate gardening overalls out, and look at what I need to do to satisfy Google, or find a new revenue stream. Like most hard gardening, the actual mechanics and sheer volume of work required is not fun at all – but the end result is always well worth it.

How My Business Has Been Pruned In The Past

• At the end of September 2003 I set off on my first ever affiliate marketing funded adventure with a year long trip to Australia.  November 15th 2003? Florida Update. For those of you who’ve never heard of it, here’s a description of what happened.  In a nutshell, Google blew the entire methodology I was relying upon to pay for all my antipodean adventuring right out of the water – all the rules changed. My mass produced spammy pages no longer cut the mustard, so I moved on to be heavily reliant upon direct to merchant PPC.
• Adwords Display URL Rule Changes – this was so long ago I can’t even remember when it happened!  Aaaaages ago, Google allowed multiple repetitions of the same display URL in their results. Google decided (correctly) that this gave a poor user experience.  Unsurprisingly several merchants banned affiliates from using their display URL to keep them from driving their in house marketing costs up. This happened fairly slowly but it meant that I repeatedly went out and found new merchants to work with in this way only to have them close off use of the display URL after a while. It was very difficult to get ahead. To cope with this I started to build my own landing sites using merchant’s feeds.
• The Death of Brand Name Bidding. At one stage I was heavily reliant on this income stream (ahhh…. back in the day!). Some programme terms were changed, and – shazam!! No more easy money.
• Adwords Quality Score Rules Are Changed (Announced February 14th 2007. I love you too guys!!)  Just as I was finally getting to grips with my feed type landing sites and Adwords, the goalposts were moved again.  Adwords put the bite on thin affiliate sites and, yep you guessed it all my lovely campaigns got zapped again. This time I took a good few months to work out what sort of content Adwords would want from my sites whilst cheekily “churning and burning” domains to buy me time.
• Mayday Update – unaffected. Finally I’d gotten ahead of the Google game!

Far From Being A Tale of Affiliate Disaster…

Throughout all of the above my business still grew nicely.  I must confess though, it’s only since 2007 when I ventured properly into creating my own genuinely useful websites packed with unique content that I’ve seen true income stability and excellent growth. I’ve created a few really good sites with healthy organic traffic.

Dealing with the changes above combined with the usual programme closures, network hassles, and commission reductions has always made me consider my setup and look at ways to strengthen my position and income. I not only enjoyed dealing with them (in a grim sort of way!) but I’m glad they happened.

It’s All Part of The Job Description

An affiliate can and should expect all manner of change and adversity to be thrown at their progress. I hate the success stories that seem to crop up all over the place where a super affiliate charts their meteoric rise into fabulous wealth and totally fails to mention what a complete and utter shit fight it can feel like at times.

This is not an easy job, but it is an interesting one. Even when things are going boobies up I’m constantly learning, growing and loving my job. If you’re just starting out and think you could deal with this – welcome to the club. If you’ve been in the game for a while – my sincere respects to you. If you’re an account manager or other industry bod who has to deal with affiliates and moans about them being a bunch of grumpy buggers – wouldn’t you be too??!!

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