Blackhat v.s. whitehat

When getting into affiliate marketing you’ll notice there are two camps, whitehat and blackhat. As a newbie, you may be wondering which is best to pursue, and what the key differences are.  In this article, we’ll be looking at the pros and cons of whitehat vs blackhat.

Blackhat

Blackhat is becoming increasingly difficult to enter and the barrier to entry is only getting higher. In order to get started, you need to know how to cloak, how to farm accounts (or have a reliable provider), how to create genuine-looking sites and more.

AI is consistently being improved so it’s becoming more difficult for affiliates to fly undetected. There’s a high chance of getting banned, which means that it’s quite stressful to manage – What’s working one day might not work the next. It’s a very volatile method and required a lot of maintenance. With all that considered, and with the steep learning curve, many new affiliates are struggling to recoup their investments.

That being said it can make money extremely fast, but it can die just as quickly. ROIs are much higher than with whitehat, but with it being more volatile, it’s not easy to scale unless you have a team.

Whitehat

Whitehat is stable and allows affiliates to build long term relationships. It takes longer to longer to build up but can scale very well. It enables affiliates to build a long-term reputable business and assets that can be sold. Not only that, if you focus on building a brand that customers can believe in, you can build a strong client base that you can repeatably sell to.

The downside of whitehat is that there is more stringent compliance in place but is easily navigated, because of this there are minimal chances of getting banned. To find new angles that work well, you need to be more creative than you would be with blackhat, where you’d focus on aggressive offers and landers.

All in all, whitehat is better for newbies and those that want to focus on building a long term, reliable source of income. There is a lower barrier of entry, but in order to stay competitive you need to always be learning (the same could be said for blackhat though).

We offer intensive whitehat affiliate marketing training etc.

TL;DR? Here’s a summary of the pros can cons of whitehat vs blackhat:

Whitehat

Pros

• Build long term relationships
• Stable
• Can produce assets that can be sold
• Good for big money
• Minimal chance of getting banned
• Can build a brand and a following that you can repeatably sell to

Cons

• Takes more creativity to find angles that work well
• More stringent compliance

Blackhat

Pros

• can make money extremely fast
• very high ROIs

Cons

• AI is getting better every year, so it’s becoming more difficult to fly undetected
• High chance of getting banned
• Relies on accounts
• Very volatile, can make money extremely fast but it can die just as quickly
• Stressful
• Time-consuming, requires a lot of maintenance
• Costly to maintain blackhat infrastructure
• Requires high investment to get started, reliable accounts provider. genuine looking safe sites, an effective cloaker etc
• Difficult to manage by yourself, you’ll require a team if you want to achieve scale