Use Caution When Building Sites Around CPA Offers
October 3, 2007
One of my worst nightmares came to reality today for my #2 revenue site. The site is built around an Azoogle CPA offer that was “paused”. Basically this means that visitors who click on my affiliate link are no longer taken to the offer page. They are instead redirected to a similar offer at Azoogle’s discretion.
This really sucks because I have been working on this site since April. It probably has about 80 posts and I spent quite a bit of time on the design. I got the idea to build the site because there were 4 separate offers available for 4 different products from the same vendor. This created an opportunity to build a wide range of content and cater to a broader audience. When I first started, all of the offers had an expiration date in summer 2008. I knew I was taking a risk to build traffic to a site that would eventually be worthless, but I figured I could either sell the site or find an alternate affiliate provider if the offer wasn’t renewed.
I have been with Azoogle long enough to know that they arbitrarily pause or cancel offers with little or no warning, so I shouldn’t be too surprised. Of course you tend to blow-off the fact that it will happen to you. Now I am stuck with a website in the health/beauty niche that redirects to foreclosure listings and hoodia pills. I sent an email to my account rep to find out how long the pause will last, but I haven’t heard back yet. In the meantime I am trying to find another program that carries the same offer. This would be ideal since I could just swap out the affiliate links and not waste my precious traffic.
So the lesson of the day is to be careful when building entire websites around one offer. You need to recognize the risk involved and if you’re smart (unlike me) you’ll have a backup plan.
