What's Your Worst Experience As An Affiliate Marketer?

Here is my worst experience : Between 2001 and 2005 I joined quite a number of Affiliate Programs at the and the number of programs that were performing somewhat were around 50 or so. Here is where the challenge was with each - I couldn't collect a dime due to the high minimum threshhold that was in place for each of these programs at the time.
Anyone remembers "Sign up today and we credit your account $25" ? and in some cases $50 offer to sign up and I think there was one among the lot with a $100 sign up bonus.

The problem was at the time that no matter how I tried I couldn't make the $300 minimum commision I need to earn to get paid from these programs. Google Adsense at the time was the lowest of the lot with a $100 payment threshhold. The point is I was running out of money to continue promoting these programs as most of the traffic in the day was generated mainly from Overture.com along with Yahoo Search Marketing and boy I tell you traffic generating was expensive just to set a campaign as most PPC services at the time were charging an upfront fee of at least $97 to get your campaign going.

In the end I lost out on around Six to Seven Grand worth of Affiliate commissions at the time and some of the programs went with the times and I never collected a dime.

What was your worst experience with Affiliate programs do you think it was as bad as mine?

Throwing 2k into DNTX, getting caught cloaking (immediately), losing every penny with 0 conversions to show for it.

Oh and getting perma banned from their network, obviously.

Hi DNTX!

I was recently promoting a Facebook store app and Pinterest marketing app which paid very well. I had been promoting the Facebook store app for over three years getting $3 - $5 per signup and getting 10 - 15 signups a day which I'll be honest came in really handy when I was travelling and equated to same amount I was paying in rent so I always loved it. They then offered a pinterest app that they wanted me to promote. I was made an offer but asked for more, they surprisingly went from $0.75 up to $3 the same I was getting for the majority of the Facebook signups. I went ahead and started to promote and got over 4,000 people to sign up. The first payment was sent to me with no problems for 2200 of the people and then over the following 4 months I had little response to my emails and got worried. Long story short In the end the company made me sign a form saying that I would not get paid any further money for any more signups but would get paid for everything up to that point so in a sense they were making me redundant. I had to agree to get the the other $7k they owed me for the other 2k signups and some Facebook signups.

They claimed they only made $50k from the whole Pinterest app and over 12k of that went to me so their accounting department got in and told them to get rid of me. I worked myself out of a job. partly my fault though for asking for more money but I was surprised they increased it four fold. They could have told me that the amount did not work and renegotiate but I just did what they wanted to get what they owed me. I cant complain as they did treat me fair over the time we did business but I am still a bit gutted as the facebook app money was a nice consistent income while it lasted and I lost that too.

I'm sure I will find something that converts as well to makeup for it in the future though

Amazon suspended my affiliate account claiming that an item purchased from my link was not for personal use! Evidently, when someone buys something from my link, I'm suppose to sit at their house and keep an eye on the item to make sure the buyer doesn't do anything with the item that violates the affiliate TOS. This seems a bit silly, but there is no other way an affiliate can avoid possibly violating the TOS! I'm still fighting with my friends at Amazon over this absurdity!

WSl

Trying to out fox Adsense and getting banned twice.

My worst is the first time I started Internet marketing, Mobe Make me lose all my money trying to promote offers and no single sale to be made, I was mock feeling like I'm not going to make it again. Cut story short I broke till the stage I can afford to buy my baby pampers. I can't forget that period for the rest of my life.