You’re Not the Affiliate, You’re the Product

The Inbox Never Sleeps

Even out here, with the signal coming and going like a nervous cat and the nearest town a good drive down a road that eats suspension for breakfast, the emails still find me. They arrive with subject lines in shouty capitals and the occasional fire emoji, promising that this time, finally, someone has cracked it. Passive income while you sleep. Commissions landing in your account before your coffee’s gone cold. A “done-for-you” system so simple that a reasonably motivated Labrador could run it, assuming the Labrador had a laptop and an unexamined relationship with hope.

I know where these emails come from because I put myself on the lists. Some years back I played the affiliate game, the way plenty of people do when they first realise the internet is less a library and more a very large, very noisy market. I signed up to the programmes, sat through the webinars with the countdown timers, and learned the vocabulary of funnels, bridge pages and “high-ticket offers”. I wasn’t a fool about it, or at least I like to think I was a suspicious fool, which is the most a career in the RAF Police leaves you capable of being. But I was in it, and being in it is the only way you ever really see how the machine works.

What I eventually saw, once the shine wore off, was simple enough to fit on the back of a beer mat. Most of the products that promise to make you a profitable affiliate are not really designed to make you anything. They are designed to recruit you.

The Hall of Mirrors

Here’s how it tends to work, once you strip away the sunsets and the rented sports cars. Someone builds a course, a software tool or a “blueprint” that teaches you how to earn commission by promoting other people’s products. You buy it through a cheap front-end offer, priced low enough to slip past the sensible part of your brain… seven quid, seventeen, thirty-seven, the magic numbers that feel more like a coffee than a decision. Then come the upsells, the “one-time offers” that turn up with remarkable regularity, the coaching tier, the inner circle, the mastermind. And somewhere in the welcome email, or module three, or the private Facebook group, you discover that the very best product to promote, the one with the juiciest commission and the ready-made swipe copy, is… the course you’ve just bought.

At that point the snake has its tail firmly in its mouth. The course teaches you to sell, and the thing it teaches you to sell is the course. The buyers become the sales force, the sales force bring in more buyers, and the only people reliably making money are the ones sitting at the top of the funnel who actually own the product. If that shape looks familiar, it should. It’s the same basic structure as the multi-level marketing schemes that have been hollowing out friendships and spare bedrooms for decades, only with nicer fonts, better lighting, and a laptop balanced on somebody’s knees beside an infinity pool.

My old job taught me one rule that has never once let me down: when the story doesn’t add up, follow the money. Ask who gets paid, when, and for doing what. In the affiliate-training world the answer barely changes. The seller gets paid when you buy, again when you upgrade, and a third time when you persuade your mates to buy, at which point you get a slice of that third payment… minus whatever you’ve spent on ads, tools, hosting, and the next course you were told you needed because the first one “didn’t quite cover traffic”. The success stories on the sales page come largely from people who could sell before they ever arrived, or who have since gone on to sell their own version of the same course. Everyone else goes quiet, and you never hear from the quiet ones, because quiet makes for a lousy testimonial.

Rented, Not Owned

Let’s be generous for a moment and park the cynical stuff. Assume you find an honest affiliate programme, attached to a decent product, from a company that pays on time and doesn’t treat its partners like a cost centre. Even then there’s a structural problem that most of the training glosses over, largely because pointing it out isn’t great for business.

As an affiliate, you do the selling. You build the audience, write the reviews, earn the trust, and carry the reputational risk if the product turns out to be rubbish. Yet at the end of it you own almost nothing. You don’t get the customer’s name or email address. You don’t control the price, the product, the refund policy or the checkout, and you don’t decide how long your tracking cookie lives or what counts as a qualifying sale. The merchant can trim your commission, rewrite the terms or close the programme altogether with one polite email, and your income walks out of the door with it. Plenty of people who had built whole websites around one of the world’s biggest online retailers learned that lesson in 2020, when commission rates on entire product categories were cut more or less overnight.

That isn’t a business. It’s a commission-only sales job without the company car, the pension, or anyone obliged to warn you before they move the goalposts. It can pay, and for a small number of people it pays handsomely, but it is rented income. You’re a tenant in someone else’s house, and the landlord keeps a spare set of keys.

Now compare that with making something of your own, even something small and slightly wonky. A guide, a template, a workbook, a short ebook, a set of recipes, a course on the one thing you know better than most people in the room. When someone buys it, they buy it from you. You know who they are, you can thank them, ask what they thought, make the next version better and offer them the next thing. Every sale builds an asset instead of renting one out. The platforms you sell through will have their own landlord instincts, of course, which is exactly why owning your mailing list matters more than owning a shop window. The money might be smaller at first, possibly embarrassingly so, but the thing you’ve built is still yours.

Fair’s Fair

Before anyone writes in to accuse me of tarring an entire industry with one brush, let me hand out a few exemptions, because they’ve been earned. Not everyone who makes money anywhere near this world is part of the con, and pretending otherwise would turn me into exactly the kind of lazy pundit I can’t stand.

There are affiliates doing genuinely honest work. The specialist who tests kit, uses it for years and writes properly about what breaks and what doesn’t. The niche reviewer whose readers trust them precisely because they’ll tell you when something isn’t worth the money. Those people are providing a real service, and the commission is a fair fee for it. What I’m arguing against isn’t the existence of affiliate links. It’s the industry that sells affiliate marketing itself as an easy road to financial freedom, aimed squarely at people who don’t yet have the expertise, the audience or the trust that makes it work.

The same courtesy goes to the people who create PLR, or private label rights, products… the packs of articles, ebooks, templates and courses that buyers are licensed to rebrand and sell as their own. A good PLR creator puts serious hours into research, writing and design, and the best of it is decent raw material for anyone prepared to rework it properly. I’ve no quarrel with the makers. My quarrel is with the front-end offers that wrap PLR up as a business in a box: buy this bundle, put your name on the cover, watch the sales roll in. Thousands of other people have bought the same bundle, put their names on the same cover, and are now all competing to sell an identical ebook to a market that has seen it forty times already. That isn’t a product. It’s a lottery ticket with a cover image.

And here’s the awkward bit for my own argument. The “build your own product” crowd has its gurus too, and some of them are selling courses on how to create courses, which is the affiliate snake in a different hat. Swap one shiny promise for another and you haven’t escaped the funnel, you’ve just moved to a different floor of the same building. So I won’t tell you that creating your own product is easy money, because it isn’t. Plenty of digital products sell a handful of copies to friends and family and then sit quietly on a sales page, gathering the internet’s equivalent of dust. The difference is that when yours sits there, at least it’s yours, and at least you learned how to make one.

What the Machines Actually Changed

This is where the timing matters. Twenty-odd years ago, creating your own product was genuinely hard work. You needed a designer for the cover, a developer for the website, a merchant account for payments, and quite often a printer, a warehouse and a high tolerance for boxes in the hallway. Becoming an affiliate made a certain kind of sense back then, because someone else had already done all the expensive, technical bits and you could simply point people towards them.

That excuse has more or less evaporated. Today you can write an ebook in a word processor, knock up a passable cover with a free design tool, sell it through any number of platforms that handle payment and delivery for a modest cut, and build a mailing list for nothing until it grows big enough to matter. AI tools will help you outline, edit, format and proofread, and they’ll do it at three in the morning without a word of complaint. The gap between having an idea and having a product has shrunk to roughly the width of your own nerve.

But, and it’s a sizeable but, when the tools are free for everyone they stop being an advantage for anyone. The same technology that lets you make an ebook in a weekend lets ten thousand other people do it too, and a fair few of them won’t bother to make it any good. The internet is filling up with competent, forgettable stuff, produced at speed by people who mistook having the tools for having something to say. If your product sounds like everything else, it will sell like everything else, which is to say barely.

What technology can’t manufacture is the thing you actually know. The decades you spent in a trade. The way you raised a family on a budget that would make a chancellor wince. The odd, specific, hard-won knowledge of how to keep a vegetable patch alive through a drought, run a night shift without anyone getting hurt, or bring a frightened rescue dog back round to trusting people. That knowledge, delivered in your own voice with your own scars showing, is the one thing nobody else can sell on your behalf. The affiliate model asks you to put your voice in service of someone else’s product, while making your own asks whether your voice is worth anything on its own. The second question is far more frightening than the first, which is probably why so many people would rather buy another course.

So Where Does That Leave You?

I’d love to finish with a tidy promise. Make your own product and the money will follow. Ditch the affiliate links and freedom awaits. But that would make me just another voice in your inbox selling you a sunset, and I’ve no interest in joining that particular choir. For the record, I don’t make a penny from this blog, and there’s no course waiting for you at the bottom of this page… no upsell, no inner circle, no countdown timer quietly ticking away in the corner.

What I can offer is what I believe after watching this game from both sides of the counter. The affiliate-training industry is, for the most part, selling you the job of salesman for someone else’s business and dressing it up as ownership. Technology has removed almost every practical reason you couldn’t build something of your own instead. What it hasn’t removed is the risk, the effort, or the deeply uncomfortable possibility that you’ll make the thing and nobody will buy it.

That possibility is real, and I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise. Personally, I’d rather fail at building something that’s mine than succeed at renting out my trust, one commission at a time, to people who’ll never know my name. You might feel differently. You might have done the sums and decided that a few dollars from someone else’s product is a perfectly sensible trade for your time, and that’s your call to make, not mine.

Just do me one small favour before you buy the next “proven system” that lands in your inbox. Follow the money. Ask who gets paid when you click that button, and then ask yourself, honestly, whether the answer is you. If it isn’t, you already know who the product is.

Until Next Time