Do Affiliate Marketers Need a Reality Check?

Affiliate Marketing Programs :: Do Affiliate Marketers Need a Reality Check?

I came across this article Affiliate Marketers Need a Reality Check a couple of days ago. I have a couple of opinions about the comments within that article.

They stated in the article that 91% of merchants and 82% of affiliates expect to see revenue growth over the next year, but they imply that this is somehow wrong-headed. I haven't done a survey, but I don't think that there are very many publicly-traded corporations who come out and predict that their revenue and sales are going to decrease over the coming year. And since many affiliate are relatively small business people, growing their revenue would certainly be easier than it would for a large company. Achieving 25% growth on a $50,000 a year business is much easier than achieving 25% growth on a $5,000,000 a year business.

The article also asserts that Google is going to 'crack down' on advertisers bidding on certain keywords. I think they've misinterpreted what Google is going to be doing. Overture has never allowed advertisers to send traffic directly to an affiliate link; they've always required that the traffic be sent to someone's website. Google is, in all likelihood, going to take the same approach--no more sending traffic straight to affiliate links. This is by no means going to slow most affiliates down at all.

It was an interesting article, but the content of the article really didn't do much to support their premise that affiliate marketers need some kind of 'reality check'. Most of the affiliate marketers I know are smart and are very much realists.