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Ask HN: Is affiliate marketing really legit?

• olalonde 17y ago
  In my experience, most "Get rich quick with affiliate marketing" e-books are total BS, but actual affiliate programs are legit.
  • marcamillion 17y ago
    What would be an example of 'actual affiliate programs'? Is 5days2freedom.com legit? I am tempted to buy the eBook for '$5' trial. Should I even bother? I am afraid that I will have to do some crap like call then in less than 5 days to cancel or they will charge me for the remaining $45. Has anyone bought that book and got good results?
    • ErrantX 17y ago
      > Is 5days2freedom.com legit? I am tempted to buy the eBook for '$5' trial. Should I even bother? That's not an affiliate program.... (it looks a lot like a scam..) By actual affiliate program I am sure he meant Amazon affiliates etc.
    • _delirium 17y ago
      I wouldn't go for that kind of affiliate marketing. If the things the affiliate program is selling are mainly e-books about affiliate programs, that isn't a very good sign. Actually, I'm sort of wary of affiliate programs that sell almost exclusively e-books of any kind, although some people seem to like Clickbank, which is sort of like that. More mainstream affiliate programs are things like: those from bookstores (Amazon, Powell's), the eBay affiliate program, most of the stuff that goes through LinkSynergy (e.g. iTunes affiliate links), etc. There's scammy stuff that happens with sites targeting those too (there's a whole sub-culture of JS exploits trying to illicitly shove your affiliate cookies into people's browsers), but the programs themselves are above-board. I can't speak to whether it can get you rich, but for the time I invest in it, I make decent beer money from some Amazon links, and they're pretty transparent about how the program's operated. I have a site mostly dedicated to other things, but where it was useful to mention a book, I mention it with an Amazon link, and now and then someone who clicks through buys stuff. There's a different approach, where you build a whole site around landing pages pointing to specific affiliate links, as opposed to using affiliate links to monetize an existing site, but I don't know much about the ins and outs of that one.
• iamelgringo 17y ago
  I've looked into it. The idea behind "Affiliate Marketing" has nothing to do with scams. At it's core, the idea is simply to pay people a sales commission to sell your product online. The scammyness varies directly with the scammyness of the product that you are selling times the scammyness of the website doing the selling. Or scam(project) = scam(product*execution)
• robryan 17y ago
  Affiliate Marketing can deliver excellent value to both the affiliate and the merchant in some cases. A merchant only has to pay when they make a sale and are being sent more business than they otherwise would and the affiliate is making money from their marketing and web application skills without having a large initial outlay and all the other areas you need to deal with being a merchant. Of course the stuff you hear the most about is usually the scams people are trying to pull to make a quick buck.
• minouye 17y ago
  Yes affiliate marketing is legit. Nearly every major online merchant has an affiliate program (Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Overtstock, Apple, Best Buy, etc). There are numerous companies that utilize affiliate marketing to monetize their content--FatWallet, Woot (on deals.woot.com), theFind, Like.com, and so on. Affiliate marketing gets a bad wrap because of PPC arbitrage (sometimes provides a value-add), lead gen/offers for low quality products, thin landing pages, cookie-stuffing, and so on. I think Forrester projected affiliate marketing will be something like a $4.7B industry by 2013 (my best recollection), so it is clearly a huge part of any ecommerce company's marketing strategy. IMO, if you have a product oriented site, it is one of your better monetization options.
• Matti 17y ago
  5days2freedom.com redirects to 5daystofreedom.com with the affiliate ID "curt505" appended to the URL. I think the landing page looks pretty decent. Information marketers and copywriters don't care about creating websites that look pretty -- they care about conversions and sales. Note the two upsell attempts that are presented to you when you want to buy the ebook for $5. The guys behind the site know what they are doing and they probably make a fair bit of money.
• jacquesm 17y ago
  Affiliate marketing is real, the payouts are real, but they're a lot lower than people usually want to make you believe. If you plan on making a living on affiliate marketing then you should be prepared to work very hard. Occasionally someone gets rich, but then again, occasionally someone wins the lottery.