Affiliate programy - InetMedia

As meinnoted in some of the posts here, the main problem I have with affiliate deals are the facts that:1. You are reliant on the ability of the program to successfully convert your traffic. From my experience most programs do a crappy job of this with poorly designed conversion pages and action navigation.2. I’m convinced some programs deliberately design their sites to close a lower amount of sales so that they can just grab as much “free” traffic as possible from affiliates and then resale that traffic to other paid advertisers and ppc advertisers on their sites. I’ve also found programs routing traffic out to other programs they own or control where obviously by doing so the affiliate won’t get paid then.3. Most shoppers don’t buy on the first trip to a site. Most shoppers do extensive product or service research first and will visit many sites and then go back to the site with the best price, value, credibility and quality in the mind of the consumer. Now the programs always claim your affiliate code is protected by a cookie to be credited for any sales from that visitor within a certain time period usually 30 days to 90 days. But I just don’t have much confidence in this. People delete their cookies all the time. So considering most don’t buy right away, but do bookmark, the affiliate loses out most always from traffic sent like this, where the bulk are not instant buyers, but may be future buyers.4. Trusting programs to be honest in their sales reporting is another concern as an affiliate. How do we really know the company is honestly reporting sales? They all claim they do, but how do we really know? My experience is if people have the opportunity to be greedy many will take advantage of that opportunity and “shave” sales. In the adult arena, this has always been a hotly debated topic and most program owners now admit shaving is a fact of business so they can stay competitive.In summary, I’m a big believer in the old fashioned advertising model. If someone wants to advertise their product or service, then they should pay for the impressions and branding you give them. It’s their job to close sales from those ad impressions, not the advertisers.When I’ve been on the other side of the fence as a buyer of this kind of advertising its been a sometimes good and sometimes not so good experience (i.e. when your print ads don’t work and pull.) I’ve advertised in print magazines for many years, and that’s how publishers operate and make so much money, and you have to pay upfront and months in advance of the actual publication. If you get no response from your magazine ads that’s your fault they’ll tell you. The publishers take no responsibility. Despite, its a well known fact that print publishers, including magazines and newspapers both, almost always overstate their circulation by huge amounts. And they’ve been laughing all the way to the bank for decades. So of all the ways to sell traffic, this is by far the best way to go as a publisher and seller of traffic in my opinion, getting paid for the impressions and/or clicks you provide, not the sales generated.