Hidden Danger in Affiliate Marketing

Everywhere you look you can read about the joys of affiliate marketing.  An affiliate program allows you to make money on the internet by recommending products and services of reputable businesses.   A great way to get the traffic you need to make money is to launch a blog.

Blogs are an essential marketing tool in your affiliate marketing toolbox.  Affiliate marketing program are definitely a cornerstone of any plan to make money on the internet.

Affiliate marketing has played a big role in my online business.  Over 8 years ago, I signed up for my first affiliate marketing program.  I chose a domain name registration service that I used in my business and one that I recommend to my clients.

At the time, that domain name registration was known as Its Your Domain.  It didn’t take long for me to “graduate” from an affiliate to a reseller.

An affiliate makes a small commission based on the sale.  In this case, at IYD, resellers were able to set prices and set DNS settings by default for domain names registered through the reseller site.

To be honest, when I first signed up as a reseller, I was more interested in the ability to set the DNS than the money.  With the IYD program,  when my clients would register their domain names, I wouldn’t have to worry about securing access to their domain name registration account which was ALWAYS a chore.  They simply registered their domain name and we were off and running.

However, somewhere along the way, the money from the affiliate marketing program started to grow.

Turns out domain name registration is a great affiliate marketing program to get into, especially if you’re a web developer.  Every client registers a domain name and has to renew the domain name annually.  That means it’s an affiliate marketing program with recurring commissions.  No wonder my commission checks continued to grow over the years.  Checks that were originally sent every three months or so (because the minimum payout threshold was $50) started to arrive monthly.  After a few more years, the checks started to not only arrive monthly but also be enough to make a difference in a bottom line.

I have to confess, the domain name affiliate checks make up a large portion of my “passive” online income.

A while back, Tucows purchased IYD.  I worried at the time for fear that Tucows wouldn’t care about me as a reseller.  After all, I was a BIG fish in the IYD pond and Tucows was a much bigger fish.

This month, my worst fears finally became reality.  Tucows has announced their new reseller program.  Gone are the “word wizard” domain name search function that not only my clients but my random site visitors used to find domain names that contained essential keyword combinations.  Gone is the Domain Twist that allowed you to add a geograhic location to a domain name and check availability.  Gone are all the tools that made me so much money over so many years.

Over the past year, I’ve been transitioning from making money by being an affiliate marketing affiliate to making money by offering products for sale via affiliate marketing.  I still think it’s a GREAT way to make money online – and as for my affiliates, I’ll be sure to keep their financial health in mind as I develop my programs – something Tucows has NOT done with their program.