There's a lot of things that used to work in affiliate marketing, that don't work anymore. There are a lot of things that you used to be able to do as an affiliate, that you can't do anymore.
Same goes for the search engines. The game's just different now.
It's almost impossible to create traditional “minisites” now – like, 5 page sites – and expect to get decent traffic from the search engines. It's almost impossible to use nothing but scraped content and expect it to generate rankings. You can't just submit articles to directories and get overnight search engine rankings anymore. It's almost impossible to quickly slap up PPC
campaigns and be generating profits overnight now either. Heck it's tough to get traffic just BEING an affiliate at Adwords anymore.
Copyright www.UnstoppableAffiliate.com - Page 4
Yeah, it's tough. Affiliate marketing used to be so easy that affiliates in all their zest, spammed the crap out of the internet with their lazy content and crappy websites. Same with the Adsense publishers of old. Now search engines, with a vested interest in presenting quality to their users, are trying to weed out those sites, and the people making them OUT.
That's all “algorithm updates” are. Whether it's Panda, Farmer, Caffeine, you name it... You can go into all the detail learning about each new update as it comes along, but every one has the same purpose: to improve the quality of the search results by weeding out crappy websites.
Unfortunately that weeding process isn't smooth, and a lot of the time it isn't fair. Whether it's a slap in the paid search listings, or a de-indexing/sandboxing in the organic listings, affiliates have gotten beaten up in this last 12 months. Many a good and decent affiliate has fallen victim to this process and most of the time, nothing can be done about it. This kind of thing has caused affiliates or potential affiliates to take an overly negative view of the business model in general. That's a view I believe to be unfounded.
Because guess what? There are still millions of affiliate sites ranking in the search engines.
Search the keyword of any popular niche (say from Clickbank), and you'll more than likely find an affiliate site somewhere on page 1 of those search results.
No one hates affiliate marketers. They only hate idiot affiliates who are trying to put out crappy content and game the system. If you understand this, you have a bright future in online business.