Affiliate Program Health Pt. 2

Last post I offered that an affiliate program would be a healthier overall program if the affiliate program manager was able to attract and focus on a number of smaller sale volume affiliates rather than just focus on “heavy hitter” super affiliates. It’s true that the best “bang for the buck” is to get these high volume producers into your program, there are a few reasons why it could hurt the program in the long term.
Consider-

• The super affiliate decides for some reason they no longer want to focus on or even work with your program. The reasons this could happen are too numerous to count. Perhaps they received an offer from a competitor to be exclusive (an offer the program manger is not able to match. Or perhaps they decide not to work in the merchant vertical any longer. Or perhaps they’ve decided to give up affiliate marketing and follow Lady Gaga around the world!
• The affiliate site in question gets an SEO penalty, wiping out their rankings for your vertical and all the traffic they were getting.
• The affiliate sells his or her site, and the new owner does not want to adhere to program policies.

Now, for any of the above reasons, the program big earner leave the program and no longer contributes. Program sales and stats take a walloping. Other affiliates notice (through stats like EPC dropping) the drop-off and decide to start staying away from the program to wait and see what happens.

Not a good situation, and definitely something a good experienced affiliate manager can avoid. How can this be avoided? By bringing on smaller affiliates, getting them up and active (with links up and traffic), and earning sales.

A few tools in the arsenal to accomplish this:

• Rather than just focus bonuses and higher commissions on a sales number, offer an option for a higher/bonus level commission for high quality / content created to promote your program.
• Actively recruiting non-typical affiliates in searching for blogs, forums and/or social networks for people writing about or interested in the area of the product.
• Being prepared to actively help these non-typical affiliates understand the value proposition of affiliate marketing and also step-by-step guidance in getting started.
• Being diligent to check each coupon transaction to make sure the site being credited with the sale is adhering to policies.

The extra work that’s needed to bring in these extra affiliates might only contribute an additional 20–30% of sales, but it’s still a much better situation that having 90% of sales dominated by just a couple of publishers.

The great thing is, AMWSO has been in the outsourced affiliate program management business for 10 years! And we’ve been able to build relationships with a staggering number of publishers across all the major networks and many independent affiliates. Check out the affiliate marketing services we offer if you need help growing and expanding your affiliate program, and getting it healthy and contributing value added sales to your bottom line.

Can you make BIG money in Affiliate Marketing?

Yes, you can! Paul from Uber Affiliate just put up a new site compiling some of the pictures and earnings from a few large affiliates over at S.eriously.com. Those checks and earnings reports can certainly be motivating (Granted there is some discussion and debate over how many are real and how many are...touched up). But either way, as a firm, AMWSO has issued some big checks over the past few years. Of course these aren't generally net earnings, as a lot of that traffic might have been paid for via paid search ads. So even though an affiliate gets a check for say $100,000, they might have to pay $99,000 to Google, Yahoo or MSN for search advertising. Then of course, there is this other tried and true method of "earning big money via onlne marketing" :)

However, who can argue with an extra $1000 in the pocket. Plus, there can be ancillary benefits. Imagine if you're paying for all of those search ads on a credit card that gives cash back, or rewards points. 99,000 rewards points can add up to some nice all paid vacations in a short amount of time, or cash back, or any other benefits offered by credit card companies.

How can you start earning some of these monster checks? It isn't easy, but it's attainable, however it does take effort and work to build sustainable protected earnings.

The first thing to do, is to decide what product and how you'll be promoting a product or program. Basically you can make a niche site that is content focused, or a more general type of site like a coupon site or reward site.

If you decide to go with a niche site, then you must decide on what that niche is. There are various recommended ways of deciding on a niche, some advise to start off doing keyword research. I would recommend to start writing down some topics that interest you. At least, while you're learning to be an elite affiliate marketer, you'll also be learning about a subject that inspires you. Find some affiliate programs centered around these niches, sign up, and ask the affiliate manager for a keyword list. Then do a bit of keyword research to see what kind of traffic the recommended keywords are getting. See if you can come up with your own long-tail keywords using the provided list as a base. I would do a review of keyword tools here, but I don't think I could be more comprehensive that this keyword tool review by Aaron Wall.

In another post here, we'll talk about what kind of costs you might incur when investing in a keyword tool, getting a web host, getting some design help, and promoting your site.

If looking for program ideas, sign up for one of the AMWSO programs and get some help from one of the AMWSO managers to get you on the fast track to receiving one of those monster checks!

Retailers not paying smaller commissions

A recent article from Internet Retailer, based on the recent 2007 AffStat Report, would have us believe that commissions are going down... to which I'd like to offer a more realistic reason for why the reports shows a drop in merchants that pay high commissions.

When the report first started the merchants that took part in the AffStat Report were more the larger merchants, with larger programs and larger pay outs. Over the past few years more and more merchants have participated in the report leading to a lot of middle sized and smaller merchant programs adding their data. This simply means that the results have tilted from a bias towards large merchant data towards a more balanced spread of affiliate programs from all types and sizes of merchant.

Commissions are not going down, there are just a lot more mid sized affiliate programs around today and they are not paying $5,000 a month to their top partners... not yet anyway!