I used to make a healthy living designing landing pages for affiliates. Several of my clients were making several million a year (all made a "healthy" living) and I was bringing in several hundred a day from just designing landing pages. I left because I couldn't handle that "gray area" people talk about, but I swear those are some of the most intelligent and hardest working people I've met. Shame many are missing that deep entrepreneurial spirit many here on HN have.
5) "This offer is only available if you subscribe via this special link before 12pm on [script returning today's date]"
6) Essentially worthless "make money fast" products that are little more than product-based pyramid schemes shilling the opportunity to make money by signing up themselves to marketing the "product" to other suckers
7) Virtually anything related to casinos - especially the ones purporting to explain how to "beat" them (and amongst those, especially those providing information on how to churn casino bonuses playing blackjack that's actually accurate)
I was referring more to the black hat tactics many affiliate employ successfully. That as well as how many affiliates can easily shark a product with negative smear campaigns and SEO tactics to remove their competition from top Google spots. A reason you see many sites with generic Google listings in the first 10 results.
Go to any mainstream web site frequented by an older, less tech-savvy audience like weather.com. Take a look at the text ads on the right side and the landing pages they link to.
There's your crash course in the current state of the affiliate marketing industry.
