Hacker News Reader

Comment by contravert | Hacker News Reader

I've worked for an affiliate marketing company, and some of the highest earners do truly earn impressive amounts (tens of thousands of dollars a month). You are also incredibly right about the shady business that goes on in this industry. In my opinion, the most profitable and highest conversion campaigns are always the most gray. The fact that many advertisers usually require a landing page (rather than a direct link) is really fishy by itself.

View on HN

I used to make a healthy living designing landing pages for affiliates. Several of my clients were making several million a year (all made a "healthy" living) and I was bringing in several hundred a day from just designing landing pages. I left because I couldn't handle that "gray area" people talk about, but I swear those are some of the most intelligent and hardest working people I've met. Shame many are missing that deep entrepreneurial spirit many here on HN have.

I'm not too familiar with this field, can you explain what the "gray area" is?

Is it people linking to the affiliate without disclosing they are getting something from it? Or is it more blackhat SEO and spam?

I could talk for hours on this. Some things which amused even a jaded SEO:

1) Rebill scams. (Theft, basically.)

2) As a reward for winning this trivia quiz, here is a one month free subscription to $OFFER.

3) Review site: stars awarded based solely on affiliate commission.

4) Brand arbitrage. Many ways to do it. The easiest is "$BRAND is a scam. Don't buy until you read this!"

5) "This offer is only available if you subscribe via this special link before 12pm on [script returning today's date]"

6) Essentially worthless "make money fast" products that are little more than product-based pyramid schemes shilling the opportunity to make money by signing up themselves to marketing the "product" to other suckers

7) Virtually anything related to casinos - especially the ones purporting to explain how to "beat" them (and amongst those, especially those providing information on how to churn casino bonuses playing blackjack that's actually accurate)

Can you talk about this in a blog or something? This is interesting stuff.

I was referring more to the black hat tactics many affiliate employ successfully. That as well as how many affiliates can easily shark a product with negative smear campaigns and SEO tactics to remove their competition from top Google spots. A reason you see many sites with generic Google listings in the first 10 results.

Go to any mainstream web site frequented by an older, less tech-savvy audience like weather.com. Take a look at the text ads on the right side and the landing pages they link to.

There's your crash course in the current state of the affiliate marketing industry.

I see one that is disguised like a news article. Isn't this just like the infomercials in magazines like time?

The other ad is just a plain landing page.

In that case, you might have a bright future in affiliate marketing ahead of you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com