Affiliate Marketing, Modeling, and Money

Modeling and affiliate marketing have some things in common.

First, there’s a sense in which both are easy money. A client of ours writes a blog about football. People come to read his blog and enjoy the photos, and they can also buy tickets to the game. It’s a convenience for his readers, Ticketmaster makes a bit of money, and my client makes a little bit of money, too. It’s a side venture, not his day job, and he enjoys it. Easy money.

When I was a student, I made a little money by modeling. I worked for commercial artists who needed models for their work, and when I say I worked for them, I was basically standing or sitting around. It was easy money.

There’s something else that affiliate marketing and modeling have in common: most people don’t make much money with either one. Most people, in fact, give up, the same way I gave up modeling as soon as I developed some other skills. Those who stick with it generally keep their day jobs, enjoy it, and earn enough with it to support their hobby. Some — those who work hard at it — earn a comfortable living. A very few make a lot of money that way.

Watch out for scams

The third shared characteristic of modeling and affiliate marketing is that there are scam artists prepared to earn money off the unreasonable hopes and dreams of people who imagine that they can easily become one of the special few. When my daughters were younger, it was common for people to come up to them with cards touting modeling schools. The object was to get them to come and pay money to learn to be models, with the hope of becoming one of the lucky few supermodels who really earn well.

Affiliate marketing has this type of “school” racket, too — and you don’t have to be pretty to get the sales pitch. Below you will see details from a bill from one of the companies offering to teach people to become affiliate marketing millionaires, kindly shared by someone who was taken in by their trickery.

Note the claim that they’ve made a Home Page. The sites created by this company, and the others like it, are invariably content-free, poorly designed ad pages. With thousands of cool places to shop on the internet, few of us would choose to shop at such a site — and those sites won’t be offered to us by the search engines anyway. Note also the claim that they’ve submitted the site to thousands of search engines. There are three search engines worth submitting to, unless there is a good specialized search engine in your niche, in which case there are four. Note the paid traffic. Ask yourself: the last time you bought something online, was it at a site you were paid to go to? I didn’t think so.

Note the total, too. This person has paid $4,000 for “training.” The victim of this scam could have gotten a functional website for that amount of money. This person instead has a worthless website, does not feel trained, and will earn nothing. Don’t let this happen to you.