Commission Junction just expired me

[Andy]

These people once sent me a Toot Toot whistle and had me flagged as a super affiliate LOL! Last month eBay finally dumped them at the same time CJ.com dumped me. What a bunch of losers CJ are.

CJ just treat you like a robot and just because they can't convert your traffic to sales with their fake EPC creatives, they just change your outstanding commission which you earned to zero and expire you like you never existed even when you drove them many many thousands of leads and made them a ton of money in the past. Folks, what ever you do, avoid these people that treat their affiliates like a piece of dirt and follow eBay's example and avoid these scammers.

They display these green bars by the banners that claim that you will make X dollars per click and you never make anything like they claim. Even when you send them 1000's of targeted visitors (because they clicked the creatives) you don't make any sales. We webmasters waste our time copying and pasting their javascript code to our sites and make hardly any sales. They are lying about the conversion rate of nearly all of their offers IMHO possibly by a factor of 10 or more!

A couple of years ago they had an affiliate discussion forum which they suddenly terminated. They don't give a stuff for affiliates, so avoid them at all costs. The talk of the affiliate community is that their payouts are low compared to other programs too. Translated, this means that you cannot make a profit from them.

You may have made money in the past from CJ.com but you will waste your time with them now IMHO. I read all over the affiliate blogs that CJ pay is no good and since they were dumped by eBay, why not dump them too and go with affiliate marketing companies that don't treat you like a machine?

[Teflon]

I was looking at my stats the other day and wondering why revenue was so low and in some cases zilch compared to reasonably high clicks.

What are your thoughts on tradedoubler are they just as bad?

[Andy]

What are your thoughts on tradedoubler are they just as bad?

I was with Tradedoubler a few years ago and made some good money but had to quit due to employment conditions. So I don't know what they are like now.

Recently I signed up with buy.at which are UK based and have some good offers. But it is early days so can't make a judgement yet.

It seems like whatever you advertise requires a lot of traffic to convert. Banners on their own are terrible. With CJ I was exposing banners 10,000's of times to get a trickle of sales.

For clickbank, I set up a complete site to target a weight loss offer with up to 100 unique visitors per day and it only made 1 sale in a few months.

This month is really bad, I think people must be in the holiday mood and not buying anything.

Adsense is the best earner at the moment for me.

So now I am building a site for listing property for sale i.e. a membership site, I hope this works out a lot better than affiliate marketing.

Of course, you can try PPC but that is risky where you can easily burn a ton of money on wasted clicks as your buddies in the PPC community check out your landing page with a view to copying it .

@Teflon I think you should work on a way to create a membership site around your love of Football. Membership sites are the way to make big money I think. I am not sure how you could personally pull it off but one way may be to get a relationship going with a football club where you can offer discount tickets or memorabilia to members. Also, there are T-shirt printing services available online like cafe express.

[Teflon]

Interesting thanks for that I must confess I have not really given memebership type sites much consideration but I will be racking my brains now.

[Queen Bee]

Well that's a shame. Good looking out.

I read all over the affiliate blogs that CJ pay is no good and since they were dumped by eBay, why not dump them too and go with affiliate marketing companies that don't treat you like a machine?

Ebay would be an excellent authority on the issue, I think.

What really burns me up is the fact that they are stealing from their affiliates. I don't use the term loosely, either.  Sounds to me like someone needs to step in and shut down this "business."

[Andy]

There seems to be different classes of affiliate networks from the elitest down to the small time. So you maybe need to find a point of balance that makes it work for you.

I respect eBay since they have always been on the side of the everyday people selling their stuff online. And now we have the ebay partner network supporting us small time affiliates.

I think it is bad that CJ labelled me as a Super Affiliate and even sent me a Christmas gift and then dumped me when my site traffic dropped with no personal message via email.

I get the impression that the PPC affiliate industry is now like day trading and a bubble waiting to burst. You can get this feeling by spotting the Super affiliates creating blogs and more content rich sites to give them a cushion to bail out to when the bubble bursts. Also, it seems like the average age of a PPC affiliate using say NeverBlue Ads is about 25 years old with a maxed out credit card.

Hopefully I don't come across as jealous or something but I just suspect a bubble about to burst where the successful people bail out and the newbies are wasted on the beach.