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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to me the degree to which Teespring has become part of the affiliate marketing community. The same group of people that normally spend all their time pushing "get rich quick" schemes, MLM programs, dating site ads on social networks and fake news articles about diet pills have really embraced t-shirts for some reason. There's a whole ecosystem of products around Teespring marketing businesses -- landing page builders, ebooks, video courses, mentorship and coaching, case studies, mastermind groups, etc. There's a hundred variations of "How I made $6,123 with Teespring and Facebook ads" posts out there, usually in connection with some other product. I wonder how they made inroads with that community, and whether those marketers ever create trouble for Teespring.

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I'm an affiliate marketeer. Couple of points:

1) Not sure why all the hate towards us. We can take a company from zero to millions overnight. I get that there are some shady stuff floating around but that's not 100% of the industry.

2) Facebook + Teespring is almost a perfect combination.

3) Aff. Marketeers have created some issues in FB using Custom Audiences (T-shirts that said stuff like "This was made specifically for Joe"). Those sold like hot-cakes but FB went down hard on them.

4) Everyone wants a piece of the action, that's why you see so much tutorials and stuff around it. It's also a great way to learn Aff. Marketing if you are into that.

As someone well versed in the affiliate space, I can say that a lot of the hate comes from the highly-visible low-quality affiliates out there.

People associate it with the most intrusive forms of online advertising including spam, toolbars, pop-ups/unders, misleading ads, annoying banners, and much scummier stuff.

It also doesn't help that is a strong association and overlap with the "get rich quick" folks.

There are definitely affiliates out there that add value, and affiliate programs in general can be a very profitable channel when managed properly. But there are MANY bad actors out there, and just as many eager newbies ready to take what they say as gospel based on promises of quick cash.

Mind sharing any resources to affiliate marketing the right way? (non spamy)

we work with <leading_affiliate_marketplace> and it is really hard for us to find quality affiliates. it feels like they do whatever they can to get us trapped into browser software and coupon websites, our profits are just completely cannibalized. can you please email me at dsugarman @ zentail, we would love to work with you!

Great, I'll shoot you guys an email :)

Fabian, I'd like to chat as well. We too have had troubles finding reliable affiliate traction and have worked with companies like CJ to no success. jason@allscreenhq.com

Same here Fabian :) Shoot me an email - jonathan@alternativemedia.com.au and let's chat.

We're in the space and I can say that affiliate marketing can be an unnecessarily shady industry from the top to the bottom.

It doesn't just come from the affiliate side. It can also come from the retailers and networks.

What kinds of things do you do to go from zero to millions? What is affiliate marketing if not the spammy stuff?

Affiliate marketing at its core is simply selling someone else's product for a cut of the profits.

Possibly the largest affiliate network would be Amazon Associates. You sign up for an AA account, and you share your affiliate link for products with other people. If you do it casually (e.g. just recommending to friends and family on FB), then you can get some extra pocket change. If you do it professionally (e.g. actually finding a niche, doing market research, building a website w/ a capture page, etc), then you really need to work on promoting the products, which can be a full-time job in itself.

Of course, Amazon doesn't rely on its affiliate program to be big, but that's also what's great about being an Amazon affiliate--you don't really need to "sell" since everyone knows Amazon.

I can't think of any legit affiliate websites off the top of my head, but just imagine a site about dog training (a very popular affiliate niche). It has some free content on how to effectively train your dog (which could be valid or invalid), and in the content are some affiliate links. If the content is actually valid, and it works, and it's actually good content, I don't see how putting affiliate links on the article is spammy. I always appreciate it when a blog post links to a product it mentions because it saves me from having to Google it (but I will anyway to get a best price).

Of course, you can have complete spammy people, who have fake websites with false content (or crappily outsourced content) and comment random people's blogs for link bait, and unfortunately that's a practice that some "mega affiliates" promote in their "how i became a rockstar affiliate" products, but it's not fair to judge affiliate marketing as an industry based on a few bad eggs, no matter how numerous they may be.

As someone with over 14 years of experience in the industry, as an affiliate marketer and then the maintainer of the most widely used open source tracking and analytics software for affiliates, it's surprising to me how many startups choose to not leverage the affiliate marketing community as a powerful traction and growth channel.

I don't post much, but based on what I see here, many startups would be 10x more likely to succeed if they knew how to correctly leverage the affiliate channel for traction and growth.

One of many things Teespring did right was to build features into the platform that enabled affiliates/marketers to profitably test, optimize and scale their tee shirt campaigns.

For example, the ability for marketers to easily place their Facebook conversion/retargeting pixels on the Teespring site, meant that affiliates now had the visibility needed to profitably spend their own money promoting Teespring campaigns via paid acquisition channels (mainly Facebook ads).

I'll agree partly with you and say that there's a segment of the affiliate community that you want to stay away from, and I'm sure Teespring has their share of trouble affiliates. Unfortunately, the rotten apples are usually the most visible and make the whole community look bad.

Here's what I see is needed to help solve some of these problems:

1. More transparency into the affiliate marketing channel. Startups need to feel comfortable knowing that they are not working with affiliates that use unauthorized marketing methods and messaging.

2. Affiliates need to be more comfortable knowing that they are not going to be cut out once a business sees the successful methods being used by affiliates to drive sales, leads, growth etc. Teespring's model actually does a lot to protect affiliates and the designers that use their platform because the interests of both parties are closely aligned.

3. Startups need more education about the affiliate marketing community and the best ways to leverage affiliates as a traction channel. It's unfortunate, but the comment from @dsugarman is a perfect example of what can go wrong while Teespring shows what can go right. They basically turned every single person who designs a shirt on their platform into an affiliate, and gave them all the tools and support they needed to succeed.

> For example, the ability for marketers to easily place their Facebook conversion/retargeting pixels on the Teespring site, meant that affiliates now had the visibility needed to profitably spend their own money promoting Teespring campaigns via paid acquisition channels (mainly Facebook ads).

Out of pure curiosity, can someone decode this into non-marketer speak for me? Not trying to be rude, I just genuinely have no clue what it means (I'm a developer who knows nothing about marketing).

Teespring allows users to place certain devices (tracking pixels, etc) on their Teespring site. This allows individuals to know which campaigns their conversions are coming from, and therefor where they should allocate most of their marketing funds.

^^^ This is correct, but I will break it down further with the assumption you are starting from zero knowledge.

Let's say you are buying ads from FB. It's common practice to test multiple ads. (Images, Headlines, Ad copy in the body, targeting (who the ads will be shown to).

The hope and idea is that one or more of these ads will work better than the rest. It's a bit like how YC invests in a lot of startups, not all succeed, the ones that do get more money, the rest run out of cash and go out of business.

To help you see which ads are working FB cookies and tracks everyone who clicks your ads. However they don't know if a click results in a sale/lead unless you send them confirmation that a sale/lead happened.

That's where the pixels come in. The term pixel can sometimes be confusing, because these days it's usually a snippet of javascript that makes a call to FB. I haven't looked at the back end implementation, but I assume the JS loads an image.

In short, this allows FB to attribute the sale/lead to a particular ad. With enough data, you can then weed out the ads that are wasting money, and focus on the ones that work. Al lot of time you can optimize further by building out variations of the winning combination.

All this is cool, but if you don't control the conversion page, and this is the case for 99.999% of affiliates you can't place your FB pixel unless the company you are working with provides a means for you to do so. Sometimes it's manually done, other times it's automate like what Teespring did.

QUICK PRIVACY WARNING: Placing a 3rd party pixel code on a conversion page has to potential to leak private information to the 3rd party. This usually happens if your customer's info is in the url variables of the page hosting the pixel. When the page loads, all the info is passed to the 3rd party pixel in the referer info.

a lot of the get rich quick and work from home schemes are illegal in one way or another, pyramid schemes, black market underground parcel shipping networks, etc. seems to me like teespring has a much better business model which can help people make money making something people want.

>It's surprising to me the degree to which Teespring has become part of the affiliate marketing community.

Actually, with Teespring, the "designers" are affiliates.

Surprised that no one seems to have noticed this.

You become popular enough, you will attract all kinds of people to your platform/service. Including ones you may not want to be associated with.

But this is great news for Teespring. Congrats to the team.

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