Archive for the 'Affiliate Marketing' Category

Shimon has asked me if I could talk about the different types of affiliates, and I have shot a video for you to view. In it I discuss the five types of affiliates that I have found to be especially successful. They are:

1) Coupon Affiliates
2) Paid Search Affiliates
3) Content Affiliates
4) Data Feed Affiliates
5) Video Affiliates

I am also providing brief guidelines as to how one may get started in any of the above directions.

There is a lot of room for synergy between all of the above-mentioned types of affiliates, and I encourage you to compliment data feeds with coupons, content with video, and so on.

The things that predetermine affiliate success are uniqueness, helpfulness, and ability to engage the user. Look at things through that end user’s eyes. Think of what would engage you, and make it click in your mind and heart. Additionally, always be testing and improving. Testing and optimization should be a never-ending cycle for every affiliate.

Success itself is measured by sales/leads, or conversions. And do not narrow your marketing down to one merchant (or product) only. Diversify between products, merchants, and types of marketing. It is not unusual for a successful affiliate to have coupons, content and Google AdSense units on the same website, and promote several merchants (or an array of complimentary products) on it.

I wish you the best of luck, and should have any questions, please post them below, and I will happily entertain every one of them.

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Follow Geno on Twitter: @eprussakov

So you have started an affiliate program, and now one of the industry’s most frequently asked questions is your main concern. The question comes in many forms (Where do I find affiliates? What websites do affiliates hang around? Are there any good conferences at which I may recruit affiliates? Are there any tools to automatize affiliate recruitment?), but the essence is this: How can a merchant effectively recruit affiliates to promote his/her product/service?

The key is in a thorough and well-organized strategy. All tools and techniques that one can employ to serve the purpose of affiliate recruitment can be divided into six groups. Each group’s name on my list starts with the letter “S”, just as the number “six” does. I hope this will make it easy for you to remember them all.

1) Software

Software applications can help you find prospective affiliates that either (a) already work with competing affiliate programs, or (b) run websites that target the traffic you’re after.

I have personally used Arelis, and have heard of other affiliate managers successfully working with LinkCapture on the same objective. Both of these applications can be great when used wisely. Improper use of these applications can also ruin your affiliate recruitment campaign. That is if you end up spamming those who should be treated as potential business partners.

Once you have obtained the contact information of the prospective affiliates, do not rush to send out the same e-mail to thousands of them. Unsolicited e-mail is still called spam. First of all, do a careful pre-screening of all webmasters the software finds for you. Make sure you do not contact those that you do not want to contact. Secondly, take your time to personalize your e-mails, or even try to approach them via snail mail. Innovation pays off. Finally, remember to follow up by sending a reminder e-mail (or postcard) a week after the first one.

In addition to link exchange and website promotion software, and if your budget allows it, you may also want to have a look into an application called Syntryx. It claims to contain over 1.6 million of affiliate contacts in it, and I have heard of other outsourced program managers using it quite successfully.

2) Social Media

In addition to software, you should also dive into the social media of affiliate marketing. There are numerous blogs and forums, Facebook and Linkedin groups, and other online communities where affiliates “hang out.” Join all of the ones you find of interest and relevance, but again, do not spam any of them! If you’re on a forum, play by forum’s rules. Do not start off by blatantly promoting your affiliate program. Most forums will ban you. Similarly, your comments can be banned and removed from blogs and social network groups. The secret of successful social media usage is simple: you cannot take more than you yourself have contributed in the first place. If and when you are of genuine help to the community, blog or forum, you will be warmly accepted.

Another tool worth mentioning is Twitter. It can also be excellent for affiliate recruitment.

3) Search Engines

While you certainly want to automatize as much of the affiliate recruitment process as possible, do not forget about the good ole search engine ranking analysis. If you run across websites that rank high for relevant keywords, do approach them. You will often see that many of them monetize their traffic by using AdSense units. This tells you that they are familiar with at least one of the affiliate marketing payment models. And even though the CPC (cost-per-click) model is one of the less frequently used ones now, it is always a good sign to see a website already being monetized. It will make it easier for you to explain your CPL (cost-per-lead) or CPS (cost-per-sale) models (whichever your affiliate program is based on) to them.

4) Second-Tier Affiliates

While I normally do not recommend having a second tier commission, and pay as much as possible on the first tier, it makes sense paying a bounty on new affiliate referrals. In fact, some “affiliates” are making this their main business. I am talking about affiliate program directories. These directories are the references that affiliates go to when searching for affiliate programs, and they are normally very well positioned in search engines. Most of them do not charge you anything for listing an affiliate program, but, on obvious reasons, they generally prefer listing affiliate programs that pay a bounty on every new affiliate sign-up. There are also quite a few mainstream affiliates that are interested in similar relationships with merchants.

5) Summits and Symposiums

Any type of conference or convention attended by affiliates is a great place to recruit. Affiliate Summit is a must; and when you go, make sure you get at least a table at the Meet Market that is held on the first day of the Summit. In the USA the Affiliate Summit is being held bi-annually: in Las Vegas during the winter, and on the East Coast during the summer. Besides the Affiliate Summit, I have personally found the following conferences to be good for making connections with affiliates: ad:tech, PubCon, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Internet Marketing Conference, eMetrics Summit, and Search Engine Strategies (SES).

6) Symbiotic Recruitment

Webster’s Dictionary defines “symbiosis” as a “cooperative relationship (as between two persons or groups).” What I am referring to is promoting your affiliate program on cross-program basis. You can form short- or long-term cross-program recruitment relationships with affiliate programs run by merchants that sell related (but not competing) products or services. You announce their affiliate program to your pool of affiliates, while they do the same for you in the circular sent out to their affiliates. If you go with cross-program promotions, remember to respect your affiliates’ privacy, and not abuse their trust. When they agree to receive your affiliate newsletter, they agree to receive the information that will help them succeed with your program, and may consider your aggressive pushing of some other affiliate program a spam. So, if you do a cross-program promo with another affiliate program, make sure to handle it gently.

In addition to the above six, most affiliate networks offer their merchants an array of internal affiliate recruitment options. These can be utilized right from within your merchant interface, but often cost you additional money. Also, make sure you continuously work on building your own list of current and prospective affiliates both by hosting a “subscribe to affiliate newsletter” form on your website, and by asking those that aren’t yet ready to work with you if they would like to stay updated on the life of your affiliate program.

I hope you find the above information of practical use. If you have any questions, by all means, just post them as comments below, and I would be happy to entertain every one of them.

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Geno is the founder and CEO of AM Navigator, an outsourced affiliate program management company, and he was voted the “Best OPM of the Year” for two years in a row (2006 and 2007) by the largest online affiliate marketing community, ABestWeb.com. Follow him on Twitter.

Contrary to how it may appear on the façade of things, CPA networks are not affiliate networks. The “CPA” part in their name is what is misleading many. Generally meaning cost-per-action, a widely-spread affiliate payment model, the abbreviation “CPA” is actually not the best way to describe “CPA networks”. The more appropriate name for them is sub-affiliate networks. Whereas a traditional affiliate network (e.g. CommissionJunction or LinkShare) is functioning as a mediator between merchants/advertisers and affiliates/publishers, CPA networks are working as yet another link in the chain between the merchant and the affiliate. I have put together the following diagram to illustrate the difference between a traditional network and a CPA network:

If a merchant were running an in-house affiliate program, the sub-affiliate network will be a link between the merchant and the affiliate, receiving commissions from every sale that the affiliate sends. Be it with an in-house, or with an on-an-affiliate-network affiliate program, the affiliate becomes a sub-affiliate, while the “CPA network” is the affiliate that is paid a “preferred” or “private offer” (read: higher) commission (or per lead bounty, which is the preferred payment model for sub-affiliate networks), and can afford to pay their sub-affiliates a higher commission/bounty than the default commission/bounty that the affiliates would get if they went directly to the merchant. Why “preferred” commission? Because being an affiliate with a large volume of sub-affiliate traffic and sales, they are essentially perceived as power affiliates or “super affiliates”.

This raises several problems. I would like to touch upon the two main ones.

Conflict of Interest

Being an affiliate themselves, the “CPA network” is in direct competition with their sub-affiliates. The conflict of interest is there and no serious affiliate will disclose their techniques and methods to a competitor by working under them as a sub-affiliate. Hence, if a merchant decides to run their affiliate program on a “CPA network”, they should not expect any super-affiliates to join their program. Furthermore, they should be aware of the lower quality of leads they will receive through the CPA network, as opposed to a managed affiliate program on a traditional network.

Shady “Marketing” Practices

History testifies to the fact that it is not uncommon for “CPA networks” to tolerate (or even partake in) e-mail spam, adware, fraudulent “leads”, incentive websites (not the affiliate type you want to have in a program if you’re paying for leads), recruiting other sub-affiliate networks.

Much more can be written on the topic, and a simple search of online discussions on “CPA networks” will yield a plethora of enlightening blog posts and forum threads. To work, or not to work with sub-affiliate networks will ultimately be the affiliate’s and the merchant’s decision. One thing I hope they do is make an educated and well-weighted decision.

Additional Reading:
When Your Network Is An Affiliate And Adware Company.
Seriously considering advertise through a CPA Network.
We’re an “Affiliate Network”.
———–
Geno is the founder and CEO of AM Navigator, an outsourced affiliate program management company, and he was voted the “Best OPM of the Year” for two years in a row (2006 and 2007) by the largest online affiliate marketing community, ABestWeb.com.

Just a quick post today on some cheap sources of PPC traffic. Hopefully, you will find this useful regardless whether you are a large advertiser, or a small time operator just getting involved with Affiliate Marketing.

Obviously, you can generate & bid on a long tail keyword list, misspellings, and other not so competitive terms in the large Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask (I don’t consider Ask a 2nd tier search engine anymore). However, some of the more competitive keywords can be fairly inexpensive on 2nd & 3rd tier Search Engines like: enhance, Miva, Looksmart, 7Search, Search123, and Kanoodle.

Contextual Networks can be a good source of inexpensive PPC traffic also. Although, be vigilant about click fraud. Some good (smaller than Google and Yahoo) contextual networks are: Quigo, Adbrite, Kanoodle, clicksor, clickbooth, kontera.

Stumbleupon is an alternative source of cheap (somewhat targeted) PPC traffic. I say somewhat targeted, because people don’t actually click on an ad. They “stumble upon” your site when they use Stumbleupon.

Some key points to remember:
Bucket your keywords into tight knit adgroups ( for lack of a general term for all the search engines, I’m using Google language). Be vigilant about Click Fraud, and write Targeted PPC Ads to eliminate any “unnecessary” clicks.

In the new Google CPA (Cost-Per-Action) offering, Google charges the advertiser with a % markup on the cpa…just like traditional cpa networks. And, it’s obvious they are using their adsense network to get distribution.

However, I see some initial weaknesses in their ability to compete with the traditional CPA or affiliate networks like cj.com, linkshare, azoogle, etc. The traditional CPA networks let the advertiser have more control and relationships with the actual affiialtes (sending promotions, optimization tips, newsletters, contests, etc). That relationship has a direct correlation to performance metrics for both the advertiser and the affiliate.

Even though google will have the distribution, many other traditional affiliate networks have a better optimization model & an experienced affiliate base that make it work… that’s something Google doesn’t have. That is what will ultimately entice advertisers. Performance. Plus affiliate marketers usually seek higher payouts, and thats what the traditional cpa networks offer.

Traditional affiliate marketers want/need more control than the Google’s new CPA network (Content Referral Network) is offering. Affiliate marketers want control like product-specific landing pages, choice of creative, choice of promotional offers, choice of image sizes, etc.

I’m slamming it, huh? Well, the bottomline is that Google’s new CPA network provides advertisers the safety in a deeper metric that eliminates click fraud, will be fun to try ( like every other new google product), and is another digital channel to add to the marketing mix.

Affiliate Marketing management companies are also called, CPA networks: Cost Per Acquisition ( or Action ). They usually have a large amount of advertisers and publishers in their network. And the publishers can browse and choose for the advertiser that they want to promote.

Affiliate Marketing works this way: The merchant (advertiser) agrees to pay the affiliate (publisher) a finders fee for sending traffic to the merchant’s website, and if it converts to a sale (or other desired user action like a download, free trial, etc) the affiliate gets paid a commission. Usually a percent of the sale, or a specified dollar amount.

The CPA network manages the affiliate marketing process. The advertiser pays a retainer to the CPA network. The CPA network acts like the middleman in this scenario, and tracks all the traffic, click-thrus, and conversion data. Once the sale, or desired user action happens, the CPA network pays out the commission to the affiliate from the merchant’s retainer.

Affiliates drive traffic in many different ways. Some affiliates use their own permission based email lists. Some use search engine marketing, and, some only use banners on their websites. Others integrate the offering into their shopping carts. While others create some sort of review site.

How can affiliate marketing affect SEO? Link Connector has a unique offering called “naked links�?. Instead of using the affiliate network tracking url, they use the advertiser’s “naked�? url without any tracking code or parameters. This is a huge benefit for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Depending how many affiliates use the advertiser’s offer, this can be a huge lift for the advertiser’s link popularity and link relevancy by drastically increasing the amount of inbound links, (or backlinks).

Below is a list of a few affiliate marketing networks.

1) Link Connector
2) Linkshare
3) Commission Junction
4) Azoogle
5) NetBlue
6) The Useful
7) CyberBounty
AdDrive
9) OptInBig / CPA Empire
10) SubscriberBase
11) MaxMedia Marketing
12) Search Cactus
13) Vendare Media
14) Web Cannon
15) eUniverse

As the Merchant, you want your affiliate program to be successful.
So how do you get affiliates to promote your product?

Your job is to make it easy for the affiliates to make money. When they make money, they’ll promote your product more. They’ll give your banner better placement on their webpage, and they’ll send out your emails promoting your product.

First get all your creatives ready. Banners, emails, and landing pages.

Create some banners that are animated, and some that are stills. Start by having all the creative ready for them to copy and paste in all the standard sizes. Sizes should include:
728×90 Leaderboard, 300×250, 160×600 Skyscraper, 125×125, 250×250, 120×240, 120×60, and the standard 468×60 banner.

Also, have ready at least 2 HTML emails and 1 Text email creatives.
For the email, give them multiple choices for the Subject line, and From line. All they should have to do is copy and paste the code. Keep it sweet and simple (KISS). Allow them to run their own campaigns via Email, Search, Banners, Contextual and Pops.

After your chosen Affiliate Management company has all your creatives, it’s time to reach out to the affiliates. Most of these networks will do this for you with a standard announcement email. However, I highly recommend that you send an additional personalized email to them, introducing yourself, and how much you will bend over backwards to help make them successful.

In your introduction email, show them some of your banners. Intice them. Tell them how much they can earn with each sale. Share conversion rates (if you have them, and they are good). Give them incentives. Maybe increase the payouts after they reach a certain amount of sales in a given month, or other time period. Connect their incentive with a holiday. Make it a contest. But, whatever you do keep reaching out to the affiliates on a regular basis. Make them aware of you. Maybe an affiliate decided not to use you on your first announcement, but, maybe on your second or third time reaching out to him, he’ll promote your product. Maybe the affiliate just wants to try something new. Whatever the reason, keep emailing them creative ways to make money from you. Refresh your creative once per month. Let them know with an email update. Why not send them a weekly newsletter?

It’s a lot of work, but an active affiliate manager can make your affiliate program successful.

PS: If you want to do-it-yourself instead of using an Affiliate Network, then look into using MYAP, or a related affiliate management software.