We’ve all heard the story of the ant and the grasshopper, right? The ant spends his days building up stores for the winter while the grasshopper spends all summer having a grand frolic. Winter comes and the ant is cozy and fat and the grasshopper likely dies of exposure or some other ghastly fate.

In my experience, some affiliates are ants and some grasshoppers. The ants are industrious, hard-working and talented, producing original content, powerful sales messages and quality traffic. The grasshoppers slap the merchant name, domain and link into a database that populates a crap template page - the same crap template page, with the same crap “insert name here” content for every single merchant they ever join. Example:

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URL: domain.com/[merchant name]/[merchant domain]

Title: [merchant name] coupon codes, [merchant domain], discount sale offers

Meta Description: Click here for [merchant name] coupons and discount offer codes from [merchant domain].

Meta Keywords: [merchant name], [merchant name] coupons, coupon, codes, [merchant domain], offers

Body: <H1>[merchant name] coupons and discount offer codes, shop [merchant domain]<H1>

Click here to active [merchant name] shopping codes and save big at [merchant domain] with these great offers for shopping online and buying at the best price from [merchant name].

Also check out these related stores:

[Adsense]

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Okay, they spent 20 minutes setting up the database and 5 more tweaking the design and another 2 joining the program and adding the info, but affiliate marketing, the J.O.B. of it anyway, is the marketing. Grasshoppers do f*ck all to market the programs they join and must, in the end, face the same ghastly fate as our little hopper from the story. 

Honestly, they will.

You can’t go forever in this industry without bringing value to the table, so longevity is definitely a risk for anyone avoiding the marketing. Unfortunately, merchants on auto-approve drag out the inevitable. I have to ask why? I’ve heard the justification for not being picky about who joins, and one of the most common reasons given is that they may someday become great affiliates.

No they won’t.

They are inherently lazy and that won’t change. They have some tech savvy though, so they may get more sophisticated at trying to get something for nothing, but they aren’t ants (the good kind from the story, not the ones trodding across your kitchen) and never will be (the good kind). Okay, the analogy is getting confusing. What I mean to say is: they will never impact your bottom line in a positive fashion.

I’d rather work with 1 newbie affiliate interested in marketing our products than 100 who want to do everything but market.