affiliate marketing

Time for a program reboot?

by Joe Sousa on April 18, 2013

in Affiliate Stuff

You have all probably heard by now that GAN (Google Affiliate Network) is closing down. Personally I am happy to see them go. I don’t really think they brought anything to the table for this industry that you couldn’t get elsewhere, I never really used them, and I have never heard anything good about them.

That said I know there are thousands of affiliates and merchants who are affected by this. Affiliates will need to find new merchants to work with, figure out where their GAN merchants are going, and deal with all the hassles of changing links.

Merchants have some tough decisions ahead of them but in many ways this could be a blessing in disguise. For many of them this could be a perfect time for a “program reboot”. Talking to a number of affiliates and other affiliate managers I have heard the same thing: most of the affiliate traffic coming from GAN is toolbars, trademark bidders, and in general “bad” affiliates who don’t bring much in the way of real value.

Once an affiliate program gets caught in the trap of working with some of these sites it is hard to get rid of them. They do produce sales so the numbers can look good and it is hard for some people to look beyond the raw numbers and see what is really happening. But with GAN closing down these merchants can take some time to reexamine what they really hope to accomplish with their affiliate program. Do they just want any sale they can get through their affiliate channel? Are they wanting affiliates who can produce new customers? Are they seeing the affiliate channel as a compliment to their other marketing efforts? Do they want to approve everyone who applies to their program or do they want to limit which affiliates they work with going forward?

This can be a great opportunity for a merchant to wipe the slate clean, examine their affiliate agreements and policies, rethink what they want their affiliate program to accomplish, and rethink who they want to be working with.

GAN merchants: Don’t just jump to the next network without thinking through some of these issues. This is a great opportunity to talk to some experienced affiliate managers, talk to some other merchants, talk to some of your affiliates, and talk to some of the other affiliate networks to see what they would recommend.

My personal recommendations? Work with a network that strives to be free of bad performers. Shareasale.com is my personal recommendation when it comes to that. Also, find an affiliate manager who can help you grow your program by working with affiliates who can actually add sales rather than just poaching them from other sources. Contact me and I can give you a list of people who can do this for you.

If you want to find out more about GAN closing and what you should do now here are a few other blog posts you will find helpful:

What To Do Now that Google Affiliate Network is Closing – Tricia Meyer

Thoughts on the Google Affiliate Network Shutdown – Scott Jangro

Affiliate Migration – Three Immediate Action Items – Carolyn Kmet

Migrating Affiliate Programs from Google – Greg Hoffman

Make An Easy Transition From Google Affiliate Network – Shareasale

How To Move Your Affiliate Program To A New Network – Vinny O’hare and Deb Carney

5 Reasons Google Shut Down Its Affiliate Network – Angel Djambazov

Beware though, vultures are circling. If you are a GAN merchant there is a good chance you have gotten emails from different affiliate managers who just want to move you over to another networks full of toolbars, parasites, and trademark poachers. Take your time to ask around and talk to different affiliate managers to see what they can actually do for you. I would be happy to take a look at your program and make some recommendations. I know and have worked with most of the good affiliate managers in this industry. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and I would be happy to point you in the right direction.

Take this great opportunity to clean up your program.

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Two Great Resources For Affiliates

by Joe Sousa on February 27, 2013

in Affiliate Stuff

It takes quite a bit to get my off my lazy butt and write a blog post nowadays but recently there are two resources that have been released for affiliates, particularly new affiliates, that I thought you might want to read about. These two resources are from some of the more respected and experienced people in this industry.

There are so many affiliate marketing courses or online marketing training programs out there that are absolute garbage. So it is rare when some quality training material comes out and is worth sharing but with either of these two resources I am convinced you can take them and start earning an income from affiliate marketing. Neither of these courses in and of themselves will make you rich but if you take the ideas they are teaching, follow them, make them your own, learn from them, and put the work in you can make a few extra bucks.

Don’t go into these thinking you can quit your job in a month. Set your goals somewhat small to start out. Maybe something like $100 a month to pay my phone bill or $200 a month to cover the electricity or something like that. Once you achieve that goal bump it up to your $500 car payment or your $1500 mortgage payment. It will take a lot of work, a lot of mistakes, and a lot of failure to reach those goals so I would encourage you to give affiliate marketing 6 solid months before you decide if it will work for you or not.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Here are these two great resources:

 Affplan.com

Affplan.com is the brainchild of Todd Farmer. What? You haven’t heard of Todd Farmer? Well, back in 1996 Todd founded Kowabunga Marketing Inc. which was one of the first affiliate tracking platforms and he has been in the industry ever since. I can only think of maybe 1 or 2 other people who have been in the industry as long as Todd and there are very, very few with as much experience and knowledge of the industry as a whole. When Todd says something you would do well to listen.

Along with his experience and knowledge Todd is one of the “nice guys” as well. He will take the time to talk to anyone who needs help and really wants to help people succeed in this industry.

And if that isn’t enough Todd brought in Tricia Meyer to drop some knowledge as well. If you can’t learn from these two there is something wrong with you.

Affplan.com is full of great videos, walkthroughs, cheat sheets, tutorials, and much much more. It takes you from the very beginning of the process where you brainstorm niches, domains, do your keyword research, and goes from there. Some of this info may seem a bit simplistic but it is very necessary if you are going to succeed as an affiliate. From there it moves on into how to build your site, how to develop content, and how to develop your overall plan for your site. There are some great checklists and worksheets to help you walk through the whole system.

One of the best parts? It is only $10! Not $10 per month, not $10 per module but $10 for everything. The price will be going up so if you don’t read this in the next day or two you might have to pay more so if you are thinking about it jump in now. Sign up today and take advantage of this great deal. Below is a quick screenshot of the members dashboard.

Extra Money Answer

The second great resource is Extra Money Answer from Shawn Collins. Shawn is one of the founders of the Affiliate Summit conferences which are the largest conferences in the affiliate industry.

Shawn originally put this information out on his website but recently moved it into an ebook available on Kindle. Right now the book is free but the price could go up at any time  the book is only $2.99 which is a great deal so I would encourage you to download it soon.

In this ebook Shawn starts at the beginning with Pick a Topic for Your Site and moves on to chapters about How to Creat Content for YOur Site, Driving Traffic to Your Website, Finding Affiliate Programs, and more. It walks you step by step through the process of going from an idea to a site that will make you $20, $50, or maybe $100 a month.

All in all it is a great resource for someone looking to get started in affiliate marketing and it is also a good refresher for industry veterans.  Download it today and take a look.

Hopefully one or both of these resources will be helpful to you and give you an idea of where to get started. If you need more help please drop me an email and let me know how I can help you. Also if you have used either of these resources leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

 

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What makes a good affiliate bonus campaign?

by Joe Sousa on August 31, 2012

in Uncategorized

As an affiliate for many years and now as an affiliate manager I have seen both sides of what it takes to have a successful affiliate program. Much of the success come from balancing the needs and wants of the affiliates with the needs and wants of the merchant. We need to give the affiliates what they need to be successful and profitable but also give the merchant what they need to be profitable.

If one side wins and the other loses this isn’t a partnership but a parasitic relationship. Either the affiliates are taking too much from the merchant or the merchant isn’t giving enough to the affiliates. Both sides need to come out ahead on whatever deal is in place. If it favors the merchant too much an affiliate will look elsewhere. If it favors the affiliate too much the merchant will lose money and go out of business.

This is true for any affiliate program and it is even more true when it comes to bonus campaigns. Whether it is a campaign designed at recruiting new affiliates, helping existing affiliates increase their sales, or just rewarding affiliates for their hard work these campaigns need to strike the balance of being attractive to affiliates but also provide long term growth to the affiliate program and ultimately profit for the merchant.

As an affiliate I can think back to many times where I started promoting a merchant strictly because of the bonus campaign that was running. They were attractive to me as an affiliate because I could earn more money for the same amount of work which is always nice.

Here are a couple aspects of a successful affiliate bonus campaign:

1. It is attainable – I have seen many affiliate promos in the past where the sales tiers or overall numbers are just way too high for any significant number of affiliates to achieve. If your top 5 affiliates are averaging $5,000 in sales and you make the top sales tier at $20,000 there is very little chance anyone will hit that.

2. It is accessable – By this I mean that it is open and achievable to many affiliates. There is a place to reward the top 3 affiliates in a program or something like that or give a bonus to the first affiliate who can reach $10,000 or whatever but to really get a large number of affiliates excited about a bonus I think it needs to be open to as many affiliates as possible.

3. It needs to provide proper incentive – For an affiliate to take the time to ramp up their sales or get active with a program or whatever the bonus is trying to accomplish it needs to be a bonus that will give the affiliates proper motivation to put in the extra work. There are so many variables that it is hard to give specific figures as to what is reasonable but I kind of go off the idea that I want to increase an affiliate’s commission by around 20% with any bonus campaign. So if the standard payout on a program is 10% I would want to give out a $20 bonus on $1000 in sales or somewhere around there.

4. It needs to lead to growth of the affiliate program and profit for the merchant – If the bonus payouts don’t benefit the merchant in the long run it won’t be worth it for them. For most content and organic search affiliates if they make one sale there is a very good chance they will keep making sales since the blog post or site or product review or whatever they have on their site will still be there after the bonus campaign is over. If they add more content about a merchant to get from $500 to $1000 in sales there is a good chance their sales will stay up in subsequent months. If an affiliate gets active there is a very good chance they will stay active. So paying out a bit more up front to get the long term growth can be very worth it.

With that said, I want to share a few of the affiliate bonus campaigns the Snow Consulting team has going for the month of September. There are a couple merchants we are still waiting to hear back from so there might be some more added next Tuesday:

CompAndSave.com: In CJ and SAS (Top 100 PowerRank Merchant):

For affiliates making their first sale: $30 bonus for 3 sales – 3 sales shouldn’t be hard to make.

For active affiliates: $50 bonus for $200+ in sales, $70 bonus for $500 in sales, and $100+ for $1000+ in sales.

DiscountWatchStore.com: In CJ and SAS

$20 bonus on $1000 in sales, $50 bonus for $2500 in sales, $80 bonus for $5000 in sales, and $200 bonus for $25,000 in sales

HFLSolutions.com: In CJ and SAS (Top 100 PowerRank Merchant)

For the Shareasale program: $100 bonus on $1000 in sales and $300 bonus on $2500 in sales

This program already pays out 35% commission (15% for coupon affiliates) so with $1000 in sales you are already making $350 and you get an extra $100 on top of that. Pretty sweet deal.

For the CJ program: Make 3 sales get a $20 bonus. Make 10 sales get a $100 bonus.

Hyperwear.com: In SAS

$25 bonus for $500 in sales – with a high AOV this shouldn’t be too hard to hit.

Lightake.com: In CJ and SAS

Increase sales over your August sales $500-999 – $25 bonus
Increase sales $1000-1999 – $50 bonus
Increase sales $2000-$4999 – $100 bonus
Increase sales $5000-9999 – $150 bonus
Increase sales $10,000 – $200 bonus

Maps.com: In CJ

$20 bonus for $500 in sales, $50 bonus for $1000+

OnlineSports.com: In CJ and SAS

For SAS affiliates: $5 bonus for first sale of the month, $20 bonus for 5 sales

For CJ affiliates: $20 bonus for $500 in sales, $50 bonus for $1000 in sales

ProHealth.com: In CJ

$50 bonus for $500 in sales.

SupplementsToGo.com: In CJ

Get a $1 bonus on every sale over the number of sales in August. So if you made 10 sales in August and 20 in September you get a $10 bonus. If you made 0 sales in August and make 5 in September you get $5.

Ties.com: In CJ

Increase sales over your August sales $500-999 – $25 bonus
Increase sales $1000-1999 – $50 bonus
Increase sales $2000-$4999 – $200 bonus
Increase sales $5000-9999 – $400 bonus
Increase sales $10,000 – $500 bonus

WorldClassNutrition.com: In SAS

Get a $1 bonus on every sale over the number of sales in August. So if you made 10 sales in August and 20 in September you get a $10 bonus. If you made 0 sales in August and make 5 in September you get $5.

We will probably add a few more on Tuesday as well. We really want to push for growth with these merchants in September to get affiliates ramped up for holiday shopping season and Q4.

If you have any questions about any of these merchants please drop me an email at joe@snow-consulting.com and either I can help you or I will pass you off to the affiliate manager in charge of that program.

The merchants want to pay these great bonuses. Earn them and take their money!!! In the words of Blake (Alec Baldwin’s character) from Glengarry Glen Ross: “The money’s out there, you pick it up, it’s yours”. Join up to some of these programs and earn some of these bonuses!

So affiliates, what do you think of these bonuses? What, in your mind, is a good, effective bonus that will get you active in a program? Merchants and affiliate managers, what makes a good bonus campaign from your side of things? Leave a comment and let me know.

Also, join up for our NFL Football Pick ‘em contest and win some great weekly prizes from our merchants.

 

 

 

 

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Labels in the Affiliate Marketing Industry

by Joe Sousa on May 30, 2012

in Affiliate Stuff

Over the past couple weeks there have been a couple different articles about affiliate marketing that wrongly label or categorize affiliates.

The first one that comes to mind is Anne Howard’s article (sorry Anne, your linkbait won’t work with me) which you can read about on Revenews. Basically she painted the entire affiliate industry with the “spammers” brush citing examples of “Punch the Monkey” ads on Facebook.

Are there spammers in the affiliate industry? Of course.
Are there great business people who bring value to their customers in the affiliate industry? Of course.

Are there shady insurance salesmen that try to rip people off? Of course.
Are there legitimate insurance salesmen who provide a great service to their customers? Of course.

Are there crooked nursing homes? Or course
Are there well managed care facilities who help families and the elderly? Of course.

Are there terrible journalists who don’t do their research and don’t get the facts right? Of course.
Are there quality journalists who provide accurate reports on their topic? Of course.

When you start using broad terms to describe any group of people or any industry there will usually be a shred of truth to it but as a whole there is no way I would categorize the affiliate industry as “spammers”. I have been in this industry for 14 years or so and I have met many, many more quality people in this industry and great businessmen and women than I have met scammers and scumbags.

The second article is on MediaPost.com and is about the Top 10 Cookie Stuffers. The go on to list 10 companies and while some may or may not be cookie stuffers in some aspect of their business for the most part I wouldn’t classify most of them as “cookie stuffers”.

When I hear “cookie stuffing” I first think of my reaction when I get a pack of Oreos but then I think of cookies that are placed on a users computer when there was no click to the merchant. I haven’t done any exhaustive research into all these sites but from what I have seen and what I know about these sites, many of the sites listed there require a click before the cookie is set.

Are these sites the shining examples of ethics in the affiliate industry? Probably not. Some of them use parasitic tactics to overwrite other affiliates cookies, some of them “trick” the customer to click on a link before they can see a coupon, and some of them just turn text from participating sites into affiliate links. But none of those tactics are what most of the affiliate industry considers “cookie stuffing”.

I don’t know if there is a way to properly educate everyone on the planet about all facets of the affiliate industry so from time to time we will all be explaining affiliate marketing to someone and they will equate it with unethical practices, spamming, or deception and there is really nothing we can do about it. But when stuff like this comes from journalists and researchers that have done no apparent research. There is plenty of information out there on both these issues and these “journalists” just need to do a bit of simple research and fact checking.

Example 1: If you say “Maybe a clue is Facebook’s large presence at the Affiliate Summit and other events for “affiliate marketers,” often referred to as “spammers” in the online marketing world.” maybe you want to do some research and send an email to Shawn Collins or Missy Ward who run the Affiliate Summit conferences and see if Facebook has a big presence there. Maybe you want to find a few affiliate bloggers and ask them about “spammers” and what does constitute affiliate spam. Maybe you want to see if “Punch the Monkey” ads really do run or have ever run on Facebook.

Example 2: If you want to know about “cookie stuffing” maybe you should search for “cookie stuffing” and if you find the Wikipedia page you will see the definition “Cookie stuffing occurs when a user visits a website, and as a result of that visit receives a third-party cookie from an entirely different website”. That definition implies that no further action other than visiting a website is required to get stuffed with a cookie. If you then look at the sites listed and see that they do require a click you might think about not labeling them as “cookie stuffers”

There is no doubt there will be more articles like these in years to come as there has been in years past. This industry still has a lot of growing to do and there is still a lot of education that needs to be done to the public about this industry and what it can offer to the end consumer. But it is very frustrating when articles like these two go out when it is clear there has been no research done or no background work done from the writers.

I have no problem with articles about the negative aspects of this industry and there are plenty more of those that need to be written but it would be nice to see some positive ones from the media now and then as well. There are plenty of good things happening in the affiliate industry and we need to see more written about that. If you want to accurately label the affiliate industry here are some better ideas:

Charitable Fund Raisers

Incredibly smart marketers

Great businessmen

People willing to help beginners

Ethical marketers

Ethical Affiliate Networks

Affiliates who add value to their merchant partners

Those are a couple to start with anyway…

 

 

 

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I Hate Being Right

by Joe Sousa on March 27, 2012

in Affiliate Stuff

Back in January when Pinterest was the talk of the town (it kind of still is) I wrote this:

“With Pinterest it really wouldn’t be hard for an affiliate to take a merchant datafeed, write some sort of auto-pin script, and flood Pinterest with thousands or even millions of pins. It wouldn’t take long before Pinterest becomes useless.” 

That was from my post “Can Pinterest and Affiliates Have a Happy Marriage”

Then this morning I was reading on BusinessInsider.com about an affiliate who is making over a grand a day using some automatic pinning scripts and Amazon. Basically he is posting thousands of products from Amazon with his affiliate links and then repinning and liking from multiple accounts to push the items to the top of the listings and on to the popular items.

You can see kind of what he is doing in this article on Total Pinterest and read more of the interview with him on Daily Dot.

So when I predicted some affiliate somewhere would start using some sort of automated script to flood Pinterest I was correct. But in no way am I surprised. If there is money to be made some affiliate somewhere will figure out how to do it. It has happened with other sites before and it will happen again.

In some ways it makes me mad when affiliates do things like this and the public equates “affiliate” with “spammer”. Just this morning I was having a conversation with a web developer for a large retailer who said something to the effect of “I have seem some affiliate sites and they just post some amazon links and spam the page everywhere”. I can’t remember the exact words but something to that effect. The sad part is that is the public perception of what an affiliate does assuming someone even knows the term affiliate.

But there is also another side of me that is jealous of this guy who came up with these scripts. I kinda wish I would have figured out how to do it months ago. And I am guessing most other affiliates out there had a flash of “dang, why didn’t I think of that” when they read this article as well. That is part of the problem though.

It does get so tempting sometimes to tread into murky waters when there is money involved. It will usually involve breaking some terms of service or at least breaking the intent of some terms or an agreement. It will sometimes involve some sort of deception of the consumer or breaking of consumer trust. All in all it will probably be something that would be deemed “unethical” but usually not illegal.

I don’t think there is any way to get around the fact that there will always be people that end up giving the word “affiliate” a bad name. Rebranding the industry to something like “performance marketing” isn’t the answer and I don’t think there is an effective way to properly educate the world on all the issues that are in play.

Maybe we will have to think of it like they way used car salesmen are thought of. The common perception is they are a bunch of cheats and will do and say anything to make the sale. But the truth of the matter is it is a multi-billion dollar business and while there are some crooked used car salesmen there are also many, many more who are legitimate salesmen just trying to put food on the table for their families and really do want to help their customers.

Affiliate marketing could be one of those industries that always has a black eye but I know for a fact that some of the best people I have ever met are in the affiliate marketing industry and I would trust them completely. So yeah, there are some people who give this industry a bad name but there are many more people who do great things for this industry, for their customers, for their families, for charity, and for society everyday.

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Changing Agreements Mid-Stream

by Joe Sousa on May 10, 2011

in Affiliate Stuff

Yesterday I got an email from one of the merchants I work with that said in order for the affiliate program to remain profitable they needed to cut the commissions. They were paying 6% with some performance tiers (commission bumps at $750, $3500, and $6000). Now they are at 5% with commission bumps at $6000, $12,000, and $24,00o in sales. And the cookie was going from 20 days to 7.

Today I got an email from another merchant that was cutting their commission from 10% down to 5% and adding in the performance tiers at $6000, $12,000, and $24,000.

Yeah, I know there is a statement in the affiliate agreement that says the merchant can change the terms at any time. So yeah, legally they are entitled to do this and there is pretty much nothing I can do to fight it (that is if you consider sending traffic to a competitor “nothing).

But the thing is I have already done the work to promote this merchant with the understanding I would be getting a certain commission. Now they cut that in half? That just doesn’t seem right. Can companies buy some ads in a magazine and after 4 issues decide to only pay half of the agreed upon rate? What would happen if I was getting some teeth pulled at the dentist and halfway through the procedure I told the dentist I would only be paying him half of what we he was owed? Sure, if he raised his prices before I came in again I would have to decide if I wanted to stick with him or find a different dentist but you can’t change mid-stream. Doesn’t make sense.

Once I have done the work and have the links and websites up it doesn’t seem to be good form for a merchant to change the terms. If they want to change their commissons or terms going forward that is fine. At that point I can choose not to build any more links for that merchant or join your program but the links I already have up were put up under the previous agreement. Of course there would be tracking issues to deal with and I know that it isn’t really realistic but based on common sense (which really isn’t too common) there is something messed up about this.

Of course I know I won’t be changing the merchant’s mind here but I just wanted to give this as a warning to other merchants and affiliate managers. In my opinion lowering a commission is a no-no. If the merchant had the 5% commission to start I never would have promoted them (plenty of viable competitors in this market) in the first place.

Not really angry here since I don’t have a ton of traffic going to these merchants and it won’t really do anything to my checks. I have started integrating them more and more into some of my sites though in hopes of sending some decent traffic to them. Not now though.

And if you will excuse me I have to take down some banners and update some datafeeds…

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Are we really independent?

March 15, 2011 Affiliate Stuff

One of the best things about working for myself is the “independence”. I get to work from home, I can work whenever I want, I can build whatever sites I want. Pretty much all the day to day decisions regarding my business are made by me. But am I really independent? I was thinking today [...]

2 comments You know you want to read more →

What is Traffic Geyser?

December 15, 2009 Affiliate Stuff

To start out let me get this out of the way: My company is one of the partners in Traffic Geyser. There are three of us partners so yeah, this post might be a bit biased. I will try to keep it objective and not make it totally sound like a sales pitch and hopefully [...]

0 comments You know you want to read more →