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Affiliate Marketing Many hard times is comming

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Well I’ve been noticing this a lot lately. Now that the holidays are nearly amongst us, a few niches have tanked recently. Over the last two weeks Acai has been dropping steadily. Sure there are those who are still hitting combined caps, but caps at 2k leads a day for each offer are pretty easy to hit when you have hundreds of affiliates all hitting the same type of traffic sources, using the same damn landing page for the same damn offer. The big and lucky few have even reported large drops in revenue and profit and many have decided to get out altogether or wait until the holidays are over (diet typically sucks during the holiday because people like to gorge themselves with food). After New Years (good ‘ol New Years resolutions to lose weight) it should pick up, but I’m still wary about it all.

Reasons to be wary are because our typical traffic watering holes are drying up. Recently Facebook decided to nuke all ads pertaining to diet and Google is bitch slapping the shit out of those blog landing pages for Acai too. You can try to cloak but so far everyone doing so claims to be getting hit, and hard too, faster and faster so they are just giving up and looking for greener pastures elsewhere. But where do you go? Those are two of the three best places for diet traffic. Myspace is still the only one left, but bids have been on a steady increase since other niches like Grants have taken in bidders that are half retarded by bidding pretty damn high (some say high enough so that margins are reduced to 10% and less!).

Then there is the financial niche where bids across the board have absolutely skyrocketed over the last two weeks, and are at all time highs. Keywords that were costing me $2 are now going for $9 per click. Those aren’t even the major keywords, but niche ones too!

So with all of these niches swelling up with higher prices to play, or drying up due to lack of traffic sources I feel we’re heading into our own industry bear market. One without that “next big thing” that usually occurs after one or two niches blow up and make everyone loads of cash.

This Jan will mark my 15th year in online marketing, and as I look back I’ve been able to survive many affiliate marketing bear and bull markets, but also one US recession (back in 99-02). To do so takes a little bit of luck, some good timing and a lot of savings and planning for the next move. For me, I plan to beat the recession and affiliate marketing slump we’re heading into by becoming an advertiser and giving up the daily grind of being an affiliate. I know, I’ve said I wanted to quit and all that junk many times, but I’m not quitting, I’m just going to the other side of things. I’m still going to do the daily grind, but for my own offers as being an advertiser/merchant during tough times is far safer and easier than being an affiliate. Although both have their perks, pros and cons, I hope I’m just reading the market both online and offline correctly and we’ll see if its the right decision or not. I’ve made enough these last two months to sock away and keep myself afloat if rough times come down the road, but I don’t like to just sit around and wait. So by launching our own sites, my partner and I hope to really leverage the workload (we’re both super affs, him more than me these days) of two affiliates banding together to launch offers we know have proven success records and add a spin of hope to them by creating one offer no one has ever done before.

For you affiliates reading this, my best advice to you on how to survive an upcoming slump is to poke around at only a few new niches but mostly dig in to niches that have been working over and over again. Your affiliate managers can tell you right away which offers do well no matter what season or holiday it is. Take your cash and use it in those. Don’t invest as aggressively until you’re making enough cash from it to know you won’t lose your shirt. Basically what you want to do is ALWAYS keep reserves on hand just in case one offer tanks, this is NOT the time you want to be losing money in. Many of you may not think we’re heading towards rough times, but I’ve seen this happen so many times I’m pretty damn sure of it happening again now. So stop waiting around for that next big thing, poke around at a few new niches, read the forums and see if you can find new traffic sources that are cheap enough to get into early on, and just promote offers that typically do well no matter what.

Good Luck every one

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