
Ask HN: Is affiliate marketing really legit? - marcamillion
I see lots of sites up that just look scammy as hell, and Andrew Warner recently did an interview with the guy behind theinternettimemachine.com and he seems legit and the interview was really cool and all...but theinternettimemachine.com just has the look of a scam waiting to happen.<p>He also recommended 5days2freedom.com in a YouTube video and that landing page looks even worse.<p>So I would love to hear war stories of affiliate marketing (from learning it from scratch) to being ripped off, to making tons of money.<p>Thanks.
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minouye
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.

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olalonde
In my experience, most "Get rich quick with affiliate marketing" e-books are
total BS, but actual affiliate programs are legit.

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marcamillion
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?

~~~
_delirium
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.

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jacquesm
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.

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iamelgringo
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)

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robryan
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.

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Matti
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.

