As cited in the article, Epic follows the bankruptcy of COPEAC and rides closely on the coattails  of the collapse of AKMG.  The fall of an affiliate network can strand hundreds and thousands of affiliates, network employees and advertisers.  With these events, the destabilization of the affiliate marketing industry has become more obvious in 2012 than perhaps ever before.

As financial failures, search engine updates and tax initiatives threaten to pummel internet marketing, growth still exists.  Social commerce and affiliate marketing are estimated to climb to a $30 billion industry in just a few years, according to affiliate marketing expert Sarah Bundy.

Undoubtedly, there are still more “fails” to come, as Pace predicts, but maybe the question posed shouldn’t be “Who is Next?”

What is Next?

Sure, the network you primarily work with could be next on the list of long lost affiliate networks.  How would you know that though, unless they stopped paying you?  By then, it may be too late to react and the time you spent earning traffic, driving leads, climbing page ranks, branding products and sharpening conversions has already been wasted.

Instead of hoping you’ve diversified enough to save your income and crossing your fingers that your network isn’t the next to crash, you should be looking ahead.  Look beyond your next campaign, the next big social network, the next payout.

Instead, take in the revolution of the e-commerce world on the whole and ask yourself four questions:

• How are consumers shopping and why?
• How is my strategy helping or inhibiting that?
• What “old school” tactics am I dependent on?
• How can I make my income last?

eConsumers’ Shopping Habits

If you’ve been in affiliate marketing for a while, presumably you’ve asked yourself this question many times throughout your career.  Let’s face it, it’s vital to your entire operation.  However, if you’ve had a long term campaign working for you, then maybe it’s been a while since you last evaluated your surroundings.

Are there up and coming replacements that threaten to push the products you’re promoting out of the spotlight? Has the technology wave pushed a need for you to go mobile quickly?  Do your visitors seek a comparison feature on site that you don’t have?

Start reevaluating the shopping habits of your target audiences.  Desire and functionality can change so quickly.  Those who remain complacent and content with “steady” income are typically the first to be annihilated by slight shifts in direction.

Enabled or Disabled

It can be difficult to see the trees when you’re inside the forest.  Take the time to step out and really look at the properties within the affiliate campaigns you’re running.  If need be, hire someone or ask a friend to assist you.  If you’ve been building an email list or website for years, you likely have a web of madness at the core of your success.

Though you may have some default income, assess whether you are truly enabling your target audience or disabling them.  Regardless of what medium you use to promote your affiliate products, you’re likely disabling your audience to some extent and can reduce that impact by cutting out excess marketing strategies.

If you’re a master of content marketing, are you still bringing the core value to your readers?  Even the best of them can overdo it on the eBooks or webinars.  Your audience needs you as much as they need a break from you.  Make sure you’re still striking the balance between being present and being omnipresent.

For those whose bread and butter is social, have you built an audience too big to communicate with?  Is following 24,000 allowing you enough chance to observe, study and engage?  A vast Twitter community and Facebook following is often highly revered, but it can also be exceedingly distracting.  When you’re distracted, you can be guaranteed that your audience isn’t getting what they need from you, which means you aren’t going to get what you need from them.

Creature of Habit

It can be easy to fall into a comfortable pattern with anything.  We do it in relationships, car ownership, diets and in our work.  There are a lot of “old school” affiliate marketing tactics that are still skating by and earning people money.  That ride won’t last forever, though.

Determine which of your techniques and tools are perhaps outdated.  Is there a way to revamp your strategy without losing the output?

Now’s the time to decide where there’s room for improvements and upgrades.  Whether you need to further develop your branding strategy or you’ve been putting off diving into alternative forms of content delivery, don’t wait until you’re forced to change.  Make the changes now that can help secure your future and leave behind the methods that will only weigh you down.

Stability within an Unstable Climate

All of the approaches above will help you to further secure your earnings, but there is a need for extreme change within the affiliate space.  Poor management and corrupt practices are usually pinned to the bankruptcy of companies, but that’s not the whole story with the recent collapse of networks.

The truth is, the failure lies within a poor business model.  Third party offers, under researched advertisers, inability to control affiliate fraud, fly-by-night products are all leading to the demise of affiliate networks.  “Who is Next?” is a valid question because at the end of the day, anyone can fall victim to the COPEAC fate because everyone is following the same book of guidelines.

The shift has to occur on both ends of the spectrum in order for all to survive.  Affiliates have to start seeking out branded offers with longevity.  Meaning deep research of the advertisers, products and economic layout has to go into every campaign selection.

For affiliate networks, virtually the same rules apply.  Networks can’t continue to take on third party offers and blindly run with them until they fail or take off.  They have to become selective and heavily scrutinize everything they offer.  Additionally, they have to ensure that money isn’t being lost on shady deals with advertisers and affiliate fraud.

This industry has immense resilience and genuine capability to thrive, but following the same pattern and operating by the founding rules of affiliate marketing isn’t going to work for anyone anymore.  It’s time to dig in, segment and get picky.  Otherwise, we’re all next.

Google calls their Penguin update a “success,” but those caught in those pesky penguin talons would beg to differ. In fact, many are still trying to figure out how to recover from Penguin’s fury.

Like the Panda update, Penguin is yet another effort made by Google to improve the quality of search results, and even though it happens at the expense of some largely compliant individuals, it does help weed out the bad eggs.

Penguin slapped fewer sites than Panda, but one of the largest offenses caught by Penguin were sites that had a few too many bad linking practices.

Recovery According to Cutts

So, once your site is Panda-lized or in this case Penguin-slapped, how do you begin the post-penguin road to ranking recovery? Google’s own Matt Cutts has some answers.

According to Cutts, once your site is penalized, you can – and should – correct the aspects that triggered the Penguin senses. He warns against things like keyword stuffing and bad linking. After you make those changes, and Google has the chance to re-crawl your site, it can re-process your site and the changes within the newest algorithm.

How will you know when Penguin re-processes your site? Well, you should see your site’s ranking improve and receive more traffic. Penguin does not run and filter sites continuously; the algorithm goes through a refresh similar to the series of Panda updates.

So there’s really no telling how long it will take, but one thing’s for sure, you’ll see it splattered all over industry news outlets and niche blogs.

Cutts clarifies that if your sites don’t improve after your changes and following an obvious Penguin refresh, you may need to bite the bullet and start over with a new site entirely.

Some Bad Linking Practices to Seek and Remove

If your site got caught by Penguin, and you’re still trying to figure out why or how to fix the matter in time for the next update, consider these bad linking no-no’s and do your best to revert them.

• Make natural connections – If your company has links from a completely unnatural site that in no way, shape or form relates to what your site or company offers, that’s just plain illogical.
• Fix anything that’s too matchy-matchy – If you have too many inner pages that have identical title tags, heading text and anchor text that all use the same keyword phrase you’re sending up a red flag.
• Diversify your link profile – When your site has a ton of links coming from a small number of sites, the Google Penguin will get angry.
• Choose pingbacks wisely – look at your backlinks and notice if they all come from blog networks, article databases, and link directories (many of which have nothing to do with your niche), you may as well smother your site in Penguin bait.

There are so many other types of unnatural and bad linking practices, but these are just a few to get your mind going. Not to mention there are plenty of resources and experts out there willing to share their knowledge and impart their wisdom onto you. Even Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz is dabbling into the web spam crusade.

How long does it take to recover? There’s no exact answer for this, it could take anywhere from one week to two months, or you may have to accept the unfortunate fact that the damage is irreversible. Whatever the case, if your site fell victim to the Penguin update, go back on a reconnaissance mission, re-work your links, and wait for a refresh.

The old ways tell us we don’t need it, while the voice inside our heads tells us we can’t do it.  At the end of the day though, it’s essential to the survival of this industry.  Some may skate by for a little while longer without it, but eventually they will fizzle out.

Without branding, the affiliate marketing industry won’t survive.

Consumers want to trust where their products are coming from.  They want a name that they remember.  They want consistency and quality.

The best way you can do that for your affiliate strategy is to become a brand and align with brands that already have that clout.  Believe it or not, there are big branding tips to learn from comic book characters of this summer’s flick, The Avengers.

The Tony Stark Charisma

Love him or hate him, it’s undeniable that people pay attention to weapons mogul Tony Stark.  He is revered and popular despite his arrogance and questionable business practices.

Not every product you promote is going to be the apple of a consumer’s eye.  People were up in arms about the invention of the Ironman suit, but Stark’s charisma and enthusiasm kept it alive and his desire to do good with it slowly drew people in.

Unless you’re selling boxes of puppies, you may have to throw a little flair into your branding strategy.  Never cross the line into being deceptive, but in true Tony Stark tradition, make people believe in your product.

The Captain America Cliché

It doesn’t get much cheesier than Captain America.  No matter how patriotic you are, a stars and stripes clad super hero who fights terrorists, Nazis and any other international scum reads a little corny.  However, what he lacks in originality, he makes up for in reputation by association.

Sometimes, it’s okay to align yourself with something that’s already trusted and build around it.  As Amazon affiliates can confirm, when consumer’s see something they recognize, they automatically feel more at ease.

Finding the balance between successfully coat tailing an established brand and building your brand further can put you on a quick road to success.

The Hidden Hulk Quality

Most people wouldn’t want to stumble across a large, angry, shirt-less monster with poor communication skills.  The Hulk is not someone you take to dinner or stroll down the beach with, but just because he’s unpleasant doesn’t mean he’s useless.

The Hulk comes in real handy when there are bad guys on roof tops or armored helicopters trying to ruin your day.  The fact that he lacks manners and hygiene skills becomes inconsequential in these situations.  He is a necessary evil.

You don’t have to be a picture perfect brand to be effective.  Know your best traits and find circumstances where they are not only helpful, but essential.  Not everyone will like you, but they may one day need you.  Demonstrate that the quality of what you can accomplish is legitimate and you’ll build more brand loyalists than expected.

The Natural Thor Ability

Thor is at an extreme advantage when it comes to super hero abilities.  He didn’t have to get used to a clunky armored suit, he didn’t have to be a lab rat for a military experiment and he doesn’t rip through shirts just because he stubbed a toe.

He was born perfect.  All the tools he needed to be an epic comic book hero came naturally to him.

Identify the characteristics you were born with that are unique and fantastic and apply them to your business.  Everyone’s strengths are different, so leverage the ones that come most naturally to you.  If Thor tried to boomerang-throw Captain America’s shield, he’d probably fail horribly because he’s only ever thrown a hammer.

Essentially, branding is a combination of all of these traits and more.  But it isn’t a trend that will fade away or get steamrolled by some new idea.  A branded product has always been favored to its generic counterpart.  No matter how big or small your affiliate business may be, it’s essential that you find a way to be trusted and recognized amongst your audience.  Anyone can be a hero, they just have to know their strengths and apply them properly.

Many affiliates and advertisers faced the harsh realities of a Google-run internet in the past week.  Whether they experienced a drop in rankings or a complete deindexing, the sites using “unnatural link building” saw the hammer drop.

Despite the 700,000 notifications sent out to webmasters, the move shocked site owners and confused many in the SEO world.

The Wrong Step in the Right Direction

A collective “Yes” can be heard amongst the anguished sighs on the Internet.  While the update harmed undeserving sites, most can feel hope about the move Google attempted to make.  Wanting quality content instead of SEO-packed pages is an honorable request that serves searchers well.

The action didn’t mimic the intentions, unfortunately.  Perhaps the algorithms that came with this update were immature.  Maybe the plan was not fully mapped out before it was launched.  Either way, reports of poor websites climbing the ranks and genuinely good sites dropping into the abyss indicate potentially fatal flaws in the Penguin update.

Google’s Lack of Consideration

While it’s understandable that webmasters are supposed to follow a certain set of rules, it’s hard to oblige Google when it risks the survival of a business.  Since Google has struggled to keep black hatters off of page one, legitimate businesses have always felt the pressure to bend the rules.

Using blog networks was one of the major gray hat areas online entrepreneurs turned to when they saw scum rising above them.  It didn’t feel slimy or unsavory and Google seemed less worried about those links.

The problem with this attack on blog networks and the sites that used their services is that it fails to consider one major reality:using blog networks doesn’t mean that the site lacks quality.  By making the two synonymous, Google overlooked their biggest standard.  Quality should come first.

In many cases, those using blog networks as an SEO tactic were looking for a boost, not a free ride up the SERPs.  Since Google’s algorithm still isn’t sophisticated enough to truly assess quality from a human perspective, assumptions are sometimes made that are just flat out wrong.

Older Sites Suffer Most

The sites that will feel the biggest impact are the ones with longer histories.  People who have spent years testing and trying to succeed at SEO are likely to have a trail of rotten breadcrumbs leading to their site.  With each update rules shift and actions that were passable are rendered unforgivable.

The reality is, that no matter how many notifications were sent out or how much warning is given, some things simply can’t be undone.  A site that once used paid links or blog networks or other tactics deemed “evil” likely contain thousands of pages and more links than could feasibly be tracked down.

Webmasters who relentlessly pursued these tactics likely deserve to be taken down a few pages or possibly deindexed.  Unfortunately, those who dabbled in old school attempts to win over search engines and reformed as time moved forward, still felt the force of Google in the update.

Quality content was lost and whole businesses were destroyed by Penguin, but it served as a steady reminder that Google can’t be your boss.  To truly make a living online you have to depend on other resources to supply you with customers and conversions.

We can all cross our arms and puff our chests and swear to never use Google again, but what will that do?  Your customers will still use Google.  The best strategy for moving forward will be to adhere as closely as possible to Google rules, but find another means of drawing people into your sites.

For affiliate marketers, that’s plenty of opportunity, but the path to the future isn’t paved in gold and brightly lit. It’s rocky and crumbling at times. It runs into dead-ends and forks in the road. Simply, the path to the future of affiliate marketing isn’t the same one that got us to this point.

Where to Go From Here

With legal battles in more states and an online marketing environment that often discourages the affiliate marketing model, performance marketing is in desperate need of sustainability.

Affiliate offers come and go as quickly as fledging affiliates enter and leave the industry, and as more affiliate networks bow out, it’s clear that the core business model itself needs to be seen in a new light.

And that new light may be as simple as seeing where performance marketing fits within the online marketing ecosystem as a whole. Trends and changes that are seemingly unrelated to affiliate marketing may have a trickle-down effect, and for performance marketers to survive, they need to pay attention to what’s going on outside the affiliate marketing bubble.

Looking at the changes Google has made to its platform over the last three years, we see an emphasis on quality and relevance, both in respect to the consumer. So why not start there? Sustainability in affiliate marketing is dependent on quality, relevance and value. And more often than not, companies – rather than individuals, say bloggers, critics – provide these characteristics.

Turning Offers into Brands

Many times, affiliate offers resemble these things – they may seem to be high-quality, relevant campaigns – but they fail to deliver because they’re based on short-term gains and not long-term growth. This is the core problem: too many offers are created for quick profits. Networks and advertisers want to see offers set up quickly. They want to get straight to the traffic.

But this approach doesn’t always work. And when an offer dissolves, it leaves affiliates wondering what happened and advertisers scratching their heads as to why everything went south.

If traditional businesses approached their startup periods like this, their rate of success would be astronomically low. That’s why there are executive summaries and business schools and five-year business plans. There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into building and branding a successful product, whether it’s a bank account, a book, or an affiliate marketing offer.

What if we took the same approach to performance marketing? We’d have offers turned into brands and campaigns turned into partnerships. We’d have sustainable, profitable products that were built on practical insight and held the consumer’s satisfaction as the ultimate objective.

We’d have brands of value, the type of products that could be relied upon for years without worry or stress. No Google update or upcoming social network would change our approach: we’d keep focused on the long-term goal.

Building Brands on All Sides of the Equation

This emphasis on brand-building can work for every side of the affiliate marketing formula. It’s most successful when it starts with an advertiser that builds a strong affiliate campaign around a branded, valuable product.

But it continues from there: affiliates can market their own endeavors in much the same way. Sites built on providing a branded experience – sites like RetailMeNot, FatWallet – offer value that doesn’t exist with an affiliate site that focuses solely on conversions and revenue.

Brands inherently grow because they’re recognized and built on reputation. Advertisers, affiliates and networks can build their brands and become reputable simply by changing their mindset from quick profit to long-term, sustainable success.

It’s a shift that requires an intense focus on providing real, practical value to a defined audience. And it’s a shift more marketers will be forced to make if they want to stay relevant in today’s affiliate industry.

Delivering Something of Ultimate Value

Verdict Research reported that along with the growth in ecommerce will come a 65% increase in money spent on luxury goods. Affiliate marketing and luxury good don’t always go hand in hand, but it’s clear that more than ever, consumers are looking toward high-end brands because they know it means quality, renown and status: everything someone wants to associate themselves with.

If you’re in affiliate marketing, you don’t have to deliver luxury goods to succeed. But you do have to provide a luxurious experience to the customer – making it as simple, easy and trusted as possible for consumers to get what they need online.

Affiliate brands deliver on this promise more than fly-by-night offers, and it’s these same brands that will take affiliate marketing into its next era.

At the end of the day, if you’re trying to sell a product on your site – whether it’s an affiliate offer or your own product – the right type of content can pay your bills.  Figuring out how to master the “How-to post” can send your sales from lukewarm to off the charts.

Attract New Followers

If you’re doing well with SEO and you have great products, how-to posts can lure in new visitors to your site and turn them into instant customers.

Consider the reasons why you Google information.  Usually it’s because you need answers.  If you’re product provides an answer or solution to someone’s problems, you need to make sure that is conveyed.

A review will give visitors a solid break down of what the product does, but a how-to will personalize that information.

Expose Everything

Despite the overall cheesiness of infomercials there is something to be learned from the way they present a product.  Infomercials don’t just say what it does and show you the basics then ask for your card.

They break down every facet of how it’s used, why it’s better than competitors, and – more importantly – they show you why it matters to the viewers.

Find the bare bones specifics of a product that relate most to your visitors.

Let them have that “Slap Chop moment” when they realize they no longer have to dice anything ever again.

Reveal the reason why their life was virtually unlivable before your product came along.  While not everyone will feel the urge, you’re going to strike a major cord if you know you’re audience as well as you know your product.

Strong CTA

All the information in the world doesn’t do anything if your visitors don’t know where to go next.  This is the part that differs from the infomercial strategy, though.

Instead of shouting to your customers “Buy Now for the Low, Low Price of Nothing” you need to be a little more coy about your call to action.

Give clear direction for where your reader can go to buy the product, but don’t push too hard.  If they’re sold, they’re sold.  All caps and flashing buttons aren’t going to change their mind.  Let them take the desired steps as needed.

If you have validated your product enough in your content, your audience doesn’t need any more coaxing.  Give them direction, then get out of the way and let the sale take place.

There are a lot of methods that tie into conversion.  The design, technical function and quality of your product will all be a part of the equation.  Take content just as seriously, though.  The right words can mean the difference between a product that falls flat and big time income.

When you hear the old proverb, “too much of a good thing,” odds are you don’t consider SEO.  However, one facet of Google’s new algorithm changes may force some search engine marketers to dial things back a notch.  Matt Cutts, Google’s tea-leaf reader of all things search engine related, divulged some interesting news at SXSW about what’s being coined as “over-optimization”:

We are trying to level the playing field a bit. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t do SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect.

Before you descend into a massive panic and strip the optimization from your site, understand the meaning of what lies beneath Cutts’ words.  It’s essential for affiliates and advertisers to recognize that all websites worth their weight need the right foundation before they’re decorated with all the glitter of SEO.

And where does it all start?  With the content and the methodical development of a brand.

Man vs. Machine: Keep Your Humanity

Over-optimization is only hurting your potential as an affiliate.  When you focus on making the GoogleBot happy, you’re almost guaranteed to lose the human connection needed to attract an actual visitor.

When the topic is relevant and useful, you won’t have to force your keywords.

Google’s new revelation could also indicate that creating a generic keyword domain needs to have more substance if it doesn’t want Google’s algorithm to shove it beyond page one, where few visitors venture.

When SEO Verges On Overkill

-          When quantity of suspicious links outweighs natural, quality links

-          When you write for search engines and not your visitors

-          When blog comments and forums have more spam than genuine user input

How To Stay On Track

For affiliates who rely on organic traffic, it’s vital to eliminate spammy above the fold ads, inspect the value of incoming and paid links, and reduce the repetition of anchor texts that could link to a single page.  Boost the value of your page with social media, multimedia and news resources.

One great infographic that’s worth printing out and tacking above your workspace is Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors. Use this table as a checklist to see where you could be over-optimizing your site.

You’ll clearly see what you need to work on in terms of links, keyword density, HTML, architecture and potential violations.

While it won’t crack Google’s secret formula, it’s an invaluable resource to refer to when you need a little reminder on what’s truly important for your website.

King Content To The Rescue

We understand that Google’s announcements always instill a bit of fear, but they don’t always have to.

-          Know that there is a difference between working hard on good content and trying too hard with SEO.

-          Provide value to your audience to gain favor and authority with Google before you focus on SEO.

Search engine success is earned and diligently working on great content will always win over the latest trendy SEO tactic.  It takes time to build well written sites with a cultivated brand, but the wait will always be worth the reward, no matter what algorithm change comes up next.

How do you interpret Google’s latest algorithm update?  In your opinion where does good SEO start and bad SEO begin?

Rather than writing an entire article, I could tell you in 3 simple words:  People are happy.  Just let that sink in.

Sure, I could run you through our expansive list of perks (monthly profit sharing, free catered lunch daily, corporate retreats, awesome benefits, kickball), but these are not the things that keep people happy.

Those things give us employees great bragging rights and we are extremely appreciative.  However, what keeps people here and happy is a little more intrinsic.

Ever work for a company where you didn’t really feel like what you did made any difference?  Ever feel stifled in an organization that did not reward you for being the rock star you are?  Ever present great ideas to your company that just never seemed to go anywhere?  Are you wondering what I meant by kickball?

The Blue Global Media Culture

Blue Global Media is a family oriented organization that fosters creativity and innovation.  Without it, we could not excel in the marketplace.

Take Nicole, a Call Center Representative at Blue Global Media who had a marketing idea that was spawned from her conversations day in and day out with our customers.  She took that idea to the CEO and, within days, she was leading a marketing initiative for the organization; managing the project that she created.

Or, take the fact that the Human Resources Director can moonlight as a blogger (how am I doing?).

It is remarkable how fulfilling a job can be when you know your ideas and contributions are valued.  Employees at Blue Global Media thrive in an environment motivated by an entrepreneurial spirit that encourages freedom, collaborative growth and innovation.

The bottom line: Nobody gets put in a box… and with no red tape or office politics, it’s amazing to see what people are capable of creating.

Think you have what it takes?  Learn more about how to become a member of the BGM team.

Technical Compatibility

With new technology coming out of the woodworks on a seemingly daily basis, formatting and testing email templates to ensure it displays properly across all service providers is virtually impossible to keep pace with. This is becoming even more apparent with mobile device usage and development – many of which only support text-based email.

The only way to keep an email service provider from contorting your email message, is to deliver it as a text optimized message because no matter what service the client uses, it will always look the same.

Circumvent the SPAM

Sometimes the hardest part of email deliverability is making it into the recipient’s inbox. So many SPAM blockers are in place to combat those unwanted messages that sometimes mistakenly moderated messages that aren’t SPAM at all.

Text only emails have fewer hurdles to jump over to reach the inbox folder and escape SPAM filters. Many email marketers find that by simply decreasing the number of HTML components in their email template, deliverability problems drop off significantly.

Time Efficient

Not all companies have an in-house design team ready at-will to create email templates. For these organizations, especially, text-base emails are an efficient and cost-effective use of resources to reach a large number of recipients.

Deliver Maximum Impact

Recently, conversion optimization and analytics service ProImpact7 conducted a split test to determine whether text-based emails perform better than HTML based email templates. Using their own services, the A/B split test was sent to an opt-in list of more than 100,000 recipients with an even 50/50 split at the same time on the same day.

Each version of the A/B email in the split test contained the same subject lines and directed to identical landing pages. The only difference between the two versions was the layout and copy style of each email. Email version A was HTML heavy and communicated its message almost completely through visual impact, while version B was entirely communicated through text.

So what happened? The clear winner of this A/B split test was version B. Version B increased the client’s revenue by a monumental 303.8% and drove 194.51% more visits to the website.

How Do Your Emails Measure Up?

It’s hard to argue with results like that. How do these numbers stand up to your own email marketing efforts? If you agree with the impact of text-base email optimization, and even if you feel otherwise, let us know in the comments section below.

And affiliates have the right to be concerned.

Legal issues and the passing of laws threaten to unexpectedly cut affiliates off at the knees.  While it should always be the goal to diversify revenue streams, affiliates feel unsure about when or where the iron may strike next.

So the question becomes, how do you create a sustainable income in affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing Debacles of 2012

This year’s occurrences have threatened thousands of affiliates.  Something new and more devastating seems to have popped up every month and hardworking publishers are left to hope that their income isn’t hit next.

In January, COPEAC shut its doors, cutting a major source of income for hundreds of affiliates.  Almost instantly, reports surfaced about their inability to pay publishers.  Allegedly, legal fees spent on FTC lawsuits ate up their resources and paying hard-earned commissions fell to the wayside.

Next, the gnat that is the “affiliate nexus tax” continues to buzz in the face of affiliates, advertisers and networks alike.  In March, Georgia and Utah joined the slew of states eager to get their hands on affiliate dollars. Uninformed politicians are continuing to make major decisions that impact – and sometimes destroy – affiliates’ income.

(Shout out to Colorado.  Someone finally took the time to understand the affiliate nexus tax and ruled it unconstitutional.  Hopefully others take note.)

On Monday, Neverblue’s parent company announced that they were filing bankruptcy.  Though, Neverblue responded promptly and has tried to reassure their partner’s that they would not be affected by this filing, doubt likely lingers in the minds of their thousands of affiliates.

Also this week, major legal allegations were brought against Groupon.  According to a consumer advocate site, the mega daily deals site “failed to disclose negative trends in [its] business and made false statements as to Groupon’s financial results.”  So, as action against the company is pursued, what happens to their affiliates?

As the hits keep coming, many affiliates are left to wonder if their program will be next.  It can often be hard to tell what the inner struggles of a network or business are, but some research and pre-planning can help.

Finding Sustainability in Affiliate Marketing

Regardless of what line of work you’re in, the number one desire for that job is usually to have stability.  Though getting paid a lot is nice, you want to know that it will be there long-term.  Making $10,000 today doesn’t mean much if your revenue flow stops tomorrow.

Affiliates’ main focus will always be making money, but the importance of sustainability needs to become a priority.

It’s becoming more crucial than ever to partner with the right companies and the products.  The payout and conversion of an offer will continue to be important, but further research will be required on the parts of affiliates to find reliability and consistency.

Working With the Right Partners

Finding the offers that provide you with an income that you can depend on isn’t going to be easy, but it’s necessary.

Here are a few ways you can do this:

• Examine the History – Look at the history of the offer (duration, performance, etc.), but also the history of the company it’s associated with.  Whether it is a network or a direct advertiser, do some digging.  Have they pursued other ventures and failed?  Is this their first attempt at working with affiliates?  What are people saying about their business practices?  Who have they partnered with in the past? Do some Google snooping.
• Seek In-House Support – There are a lot of ways to outsource working with affiliates and sometimes it works well.  Often though, it turns real people (the affiliates) into dollar signs.  Having a direct human connection with the products and businesses you work with can help make sure you’re more than a number.
• Testing and Optimizing – Don’t be a guinea pig for networks and advertisers.  Sometimes, the testing and optimizing occurs at the affiliates’ expense, but that doesn’t have to happen.  Find a company to work with that is working out the kinks before they release the offer to affiliates.

There are companies out there with affiliates’ best interests at heart.  You may have to do some work to find them though.  At Blue Global Media, we create products that are built to last the tests of [Internet] time.  All our work is in-house and our offers go through rigorous testing and optimizing.

The future of our company is about providing offers for our affiliates that are permanent, stable and profitable.  It’s what every affiliate deserves for the work they put into their business.  At the end of the day, you can make the quickest, easiest buck and risk losing it all or you can research and align yourself with a company and products that provide you with life-long earnings.