Okay, if I asked you what brand of coffee I liked most… you’d know the answer. I’ve been proselytizing it for several years now. I’ve sold more of it to people without ever taking a bounty or asking for something in return. I just like the coffee THAT much.

So, you’re about to hear me say something I never thought I’d say:

Screw you, Peet’s Coffee.

I logged into my CJ account this afternoon to check on some stats, only to discover that my earlier Peet’s Coffee and Tea affiliate application was declined. This, in a tidy little nutshell, is why affiliate programs suck.

1. Affiliate programs completely ignore and devalue branding.
2. Affiliate program managers are typically morons hired straight out of college (if they even went to college) who have no idea how to manage relationships, or who are afraid to dig in and help balance the workload.
3. Affiliate programs tend to favor search engine gamers over smart placement with valid content.
4. Affiliate programs are akin to free advertising.
5. Affiliate programs are a pain in the ass to manage en masse.
6. Every single affiliate program network is beyond a kludge.
7. Affiliate programs offer no value add for each affiliate.
8. Affiliate programs are a commodity.
9. Affiliate IDs aren’t foolproof – they can be hijacked and are too often circumvented.

Am I going to stop drinking Peet’s? No. Am I going to stop recommending Peet’s? No. Am I pretty damn upset that Peet’s declined the application? Hell yes. Can Peet’s rectify this situation? Likely. Does somone important at Peet’s care? Doubtful. Would I bother to promote the affiliate links actively were I ever to be accepted? Who knows.

FirstRSS ERROR: "http://shop.tagjag.com/products/affiliate+marketing" NOT FOUND!

Why Affiliate Programs Suck

I’m not much of an affiliate program fan, largely because they’re designed to benefit the vendor (not the affiliate). Moreover, to be a top performing affiliate, you have to do a lot of legwork, and the affiliate networks don’t make it easy to pull specific programs on-demand.

A reworked TagJag.com helped prove my point. But it’s not just about being able to drive affiliate revenue for myself, but for other publishers and bloggers as well (at least, those who use affiliate programs).

I’m not claiming that every item in the Clickbank database is reputable (or worth promoting), but finding and promoting legit items is still somewhat of a time drain. There are a lot of good eBooks in there!

Let’s say I was writing a post about digital photography (which I do, on occasion). If I wanted to find related products somewhere, I’d have to jump through all sorts of flaming hoops – and even then, if I included the links as static links in the page itself, they might be out of date at some point. The time and futureproofing solution is found in RSS:

http://shop.tagjag.com/products/photography+ebook

Results in a feed that currently outputs:

FirstRSS ERROR: "http://shop.tagjag.com/products/photography+ebook" NOT FOUND!

I’m currently using FirstRSS to render this feed in this particular blog post. Now, if YOU have a Clickbank membership, you can generate the feed just as easily by appending your affiliate ID to the end of this URL:

http://shop.tagjag.com/products/photography+ebook?affilid=YourClickbankID

Nice, eh? You can do it on-demand. It’s free for you to use anywhere you see fit, with the full understanding that 25% of the traffic generated through these links will always fall back to Lockergnome’s affiliate ID. If nothing else, this is an easier way of discovering the products in Clickbank’s database (and potentially rendering them, so long as you have something that can handle RSS feeds on your blog / Web site).

We’re working on re-working simple affiliate feeds for Amazon, eBay, etc.

Free Clickbank Affiliate RSS Feeds