The longer you practice affiliate marketing, the more recommendations you would have made. The thing is, time has a way of changing things, even the best stuff.
- You could have ‘fallen out of love’ with a product
- Found something even better
- The product’s seller did something bad and you decide not to support them anymore
- The sellers did not do something and you feel you can’t recommend people to them because of that
- The sellers close the affiliate program
- And hundreds of other reasons
It is a good idea to schedule in an affiliate program audit every so often. This way you can weed out the bad programs or the ones you just don’t want to support anymore. You can tell people why if the reason is a compelling one that your readers should know about (and create more content from that).
Would people still buy from you after that? I believe that is a resounding yes. I think people are looking for honest feedback. They understand that sometimes things go wrong or we have a change of views that cause us to ‘flip flop’. That’s life. Surely you have changed your mind on a variety of things over the years. As long as you are genuine and transparent about it, they would probably place more weight to your recommendations in future.
But how do you ‘take back’ all those affiliate links? Ah! Good question. That is one reason why you should use redirected links so you can ‘save’ that traffic. I’ll show you how to do an affiliate redirect on this blog next week.
Meanwhile… when will you schedule your affiliate program audit?
