Affiliate Marketing | Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation

Merchants: How Does Your Cost-Per-Sale Affiliate Program Stack Up? August 19, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , add a comment

In parallel to developing my own products and promoting CPA offers, I’ve been promoting CPS (Cost-Per-Sale) offers since 2006.

I’ve been looking into doing more of such programs recently and have set up some sites which will be trafficked via SEO and social-based traffic. There will be more such sites being launched further down the pipeline.

Which the affiliate can do everything possible to bring the traffic over and pre-sell the product, it just feels that some merchants are going out of their way to sabotage their own success.

Here’s some examples:

Failing to benchmark your affiliate program: Whatever you may think, your affiliate program does not exist in isolation. Most diligent affiliates will compare affiliate programs across the variety of product providers, especially if it’s a commodity items like a beauty product, computer equipment or a musical instrument. Offering a 5% commission on the sale value when your competitors are offering a 10% or 15% payout makes you uncompetitive. There are some exceptions, where if you are the only merchant offering a particular product or your prices are low enough that the majority of buyers would buy through you, rather than another merchant.
Failing to offer appropriate affiliate tools: If you have 1,000 products in your inventory, whether books, music or movies, isn’t it silly to give a link to your root domain? Don’t you think it makes more sense to provide product-specific links, or even better, the ability to deep link to any page within your website? This gives affiliates the option to use creative marketing techniques.
Offering invalid URLs, expired coupon codes, failing to give what you’re supposed to give: If you claim to give product specific links, having that link (complete with a “productID=” field) go to the root domain is a “FAIL” in my book. Even worse is having the link go to a 404 page. What were you thinking? Same goes with giving coupon codes which have expired, exceeded the number of uses. Ditto for failing to reply to email, or if you’re away, failing to set up an “away” message or give an alternative contact.

There are probably some of the sins that’ve been irritating as I’ve been putting together campaigns. The cardinal sin that some merchants are making is failing to realize that you’ll probably never get a second chance to make a first impression once you’ve lost your affiliates for good.

If that’s the case, why’re you even offering an affiliate program?

PS: I’m documenting a couple of sites I’ve been working on at David Ford’s PPV Playbook forum. If you’re not a member yet, be sure to check out the PPV Playbook discount code too.

Popularity: 3%

PPV Playbook Discount Code August 11, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 4 comments

To get a discount on the monthly subscription at PPV Playbook, click on the “more” link below to access the PPV Playbook discount code/PPV Playbook promotion code:

(more…)

Popularity: 5%

Figuring out your long-term Internet Marketing game August 10, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 2 comments

I’ve probably had this conversation multiple times over the last month: Why aren’t I more actively using PPV in my marketing campaigns now?

I think the answer is philosophical.

Really.

The type of traffic you use and marketing offers, campaigns you plan and implement are an extension of your approach to Internet Marketing and in the broader picture, business.

I favor social traffic, organic search traffic and branded/word-of-mouth traffic more because I like long-term, consistent businesses that generate similar forms of revenue.

I think PPV is very suited for CPA traffic, especially for short form leading generation. I’ve not excluded being more aggressive with PPV, especially once I have some opt-in forms with a pre-sell email sequence behind it. But for now, I’m building out those sales funnels.

It may seem strange that I’d recommend David Ford’s PPV Playbook, since the perception is that it’s all focused on PPV.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll find the media buy, ppc and usefully for me, the SEO and social media sections (with some great strategies and ideas by Stefanie Hutson).

Be sure to check it out.

And if you’d like a promo code, drop me an email. (the email is stored on my other computer…).

EDIT: Click here to get the access code.

Popularity: 5%

Merchants, you need to bring your affiliate program to the next level July 29, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 11 comments

They say that first impressions are made within seconds of meeting someone face-to-face. You take a look at them, get a sense of the vibe they’re sending out and make a snap decision whether they’re a potential friend, partner or you might just decide to write them off entirely.

It’s the same with affiliate programs.

I was looking at developing a new niche and found one with multiple spikes in search volume and transactions multiple times a year. The incumbent had a decent affiliate program though their affiliate management leave much to be desired and training resources? Forget about it.

The problem is that it’s a niche with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of items within the space. Coupled with the fact that these are items that constantly need to be replaced and the consumers have to buy their products from somewhere and it’s not hard to imagine a longterm business resulting from this.

The sad thing is that the other merchants in the space didn’t provide deep links. I was looking for product-specific links because the competition (search results) for some of these terms were in the thousands. So what do you do if the merchant only provides links to their root domain? You could move on, though there aren’t many merchants in this space.

It’d be an unwise thing to link to their root domain via an affiliate link, then expect the lead to somehow figure out that they need to type the product name into the search engine, then click on a result.

If I were one of the users, I’d want to type the product name into the search engine and find a direct link to the product and if the price was right, buy it immediately.

If merchants don’t get the affiliate picture, it’d be smarter to hire an experienced affiliate manager or have an outsourced program manager (OPM) on at least a six month engagement (ideally longer) to get things working. Else you’re just wasting your time, and more significantly, the affiliates.

PS: You might notice that I’ve not mentioned video tools or XML datafeeds, especially with a catalog that contains more than 100,000 items. If you can’t get the basics right, there’s no point trying to run before you can crawl.

Popularity: 8%

How Affiliate Managers Should Get Their Act Together July 14, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 12 comments

Some affiliate managers might not confess to it, but when it comes to dealing with affiliates, more than half of them are noobs.

The turnover in the affiliate marketing industry is high, whether you’re talking about networks, affiliate managers or affiliate marketers.

From the affiliate side, it seems like a constant merry-go-round at some networks (particularly the struggling ones) with a new affiliate manager assigned to my accounts every 2-3 months. Maybe they’re having difficulty hitting their monthly or quarterly quotas? I don’t know, but their experience or lack of it shows especially when new affiliate managers inherit the accounts for the AM who left.

Here’s a typical bone-headed intro email.

“Hi, how are you doing? I’m your new affiliate manager/strategist/consultant/partner. What type of offers do you promote? What traffic types do you use? How long have you been in the industry?”

These are danger signs, especially if you’re getting these emails.

Firstly, unless the affiliate is operating under the radar/underground, or one of those super-secretive Israeli affiliates operating with mossad-like secrecy, it’s not too difficult to find their footprints, whether on an affiliate forum like WickedFire or ABestWeb. From their postings you should be able to tell whether they’re noobs or experienced affiliates. You should be able to check out their posts to look at the types of questions they’re asking to get a gauge of their experience level and possibly traffic promotion strategies too.

Many will also have an online presence, whether it’s listed on AffBuzz, else you should be able to find their WordPress blog, Twitter or Facebook account. Failing which, you could talk to your regular group of affiliates to see if they know who the “new guy” or girl is. I know it’s probably easier to send a mass email (personalizing the recipient name), but that’s as good as throwing your list of prospects at the wall and hoping that something sticks.

I’m not going to say that going through a list of 200-300 affiliates that you’ve been handed is easy, especially since the bulk of them might be inactive. But if you’re going to make this more than just a 2-3 month gig, getting by on your $2,000/month base salary, then you need to do a little investment. In this case, it’s not even any cash out of your own pocket (although the better AMs do invest in researching their affiliates), just a little time and company time at that.

It’s time to break out your Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet and do a little affiliate human resources management. Based on your preliminary research, give each affiliate a rating. I like to give them either a A/B/C grade or 1/2/3. Your choice.

You need at least 50 prospects in the A/B basket to make any decent overriding off their efforts, since you might only get 10% of them active.

Once you’ve got your 50 producers, in your next column is where you list some the background information, such as where they’re based, what type of traffic promotion they use, what types of offers they like.

It’s always weird for me that so few affiliate managers are willing to invest something like $67 bucks a month to sign up for a membership at sites like David Ford’s PPV Playbook. You have new and experienced affiliates who’re learning marketing techniques, applying them and building their affiliate income to $100/day and in some cases much more than that.

Then you only have 1-2 network owners who’re active in there and I believe there’ve been less than 3 affiliate managers, including EWA’s Ryan Eagle and GetAds’ Josh Todd, that I’ve seen on there.

So let’s take a stock-take:

Hundreds of active affiliates on a paid forum, which prequalifies them as high value leads
Experienced marketers like David Ford, Mr Green and other less high profile affiliates doing walkthroughs of campaigns, including keywords, URL targets, offers. Basically everything
Few affiliate managers to recruit these affiliates

If you are an affiliate manager or network owner, is this short-sightedness not to invest $67/month to pick up a few good producers?

The slogan “It takes money to make money” applies here.

If you’re an affiliate, you’ll pick up a thing or two at PPV Playbook too.

Popularity: 10%

CPA Affiliates going into ebook guru promos? June 30, 2010

Posted by Andrew Wee in : affiliate marketing , 30 comments

One trend that’s been bubbling to the surface in recent weeks has been seeing a number of affiliate bloggers (typically practising or at one time practising CPA affiliates) branch into the list building/ebook promotion game.

I’m not sure that this is exactly a good thing.

But first, let’s look at when it might be a good thing.

If your business was heavily dependent on rebills and some of your favorite offers got nuked due to the change in Wells Fargo bank and other payment processors cancelling merchant accounts for some of these rebill offer owners, you’re left with either promoting short form lead gen offers at about 5-10% of the payout of your rebill offers or branching into other areas of internet marketing like domain development/site flipping through flippa, pay-per-sale affiliate programs, promoting/dropshipping physical products or joining the ebook promotion game. Nothing wrong with any of these options.

But here’s the rub. With ebook promos, it can be a guru clusterfrack, especially when everyone is promoting the same offer. That’s already what happens in the information marketing world, especially in the make money online niche. Everyone and his half-sister and dog is suddenly promotion Jeff Johnson’s Product Launch Formula 3.0 making it sounds like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. If so, what’re you going to do when the next product comes along? Again, proclaim that it’s the “bestest” thing you’re ever seen?

What some bloggers or wannabee experts don’t realize is that you have a social goodwill bank to draw upon. Each time you “sell out”, you withdraw some goodwill out of that bank. If you go overboard, you’re not going to have anything to draw upon and will probably lose the respect of your peers and others in the industry.

If you do choose to go down this path, choose wisely because it’s pretty difficult to turn back.

Popularity: 14%