Part X of the series in the January 25 issue of the Weekly Q investigated the various strategies affiliates employ to acquire traffic and in this class we’ll advise where to send those visitors to enjoy a generous bounty. Here are our top ten tips on finding the right affiliate program:

1. Is it completely free to join?

Most get-rich-quick business opportunities will fail this test. They usually require a sign-up or monthly investment and work by transferring money from the majorities to the minorities. The old saying of early bird catches the worms applies here. Those who join the program early will make money from those who join at a later stage. In a finite population, if someone makes $50,000 from this program, 1000 people stand to lose $50 each.

Legitimate businesses usually do not ask people to work for them, although there are exceptions. Unlike companies which generate most of their revenue from recruiting other affiliates and agents, legitimate enterprises make their money from selling tangible products or providing value-added services.

2. How much commission does the merchant pay?

This may seem obvious, but the amount of commission you earn per sale is critical. There is no point in spending time and money promoting a product that doesn't pay well. You could end up spending more on marketing than you are likely to make on sales. It is probably best to stick with marketing products with a high commission value unless you have found a niche market where you can sell vast quantities of product, and make substantial commissions on your volume of sales.

The profit margin many merchants make on items is as high as 50% to 60% and paying affiliates 10% commission in such cases is not on. A merchant selling a t-shirt for $15 may have acquired from it a sweatshop in China for 40 cents. His mark-up is massive and offering the person who generates the sale, the hard-working affiliate, $1 or $1.50 in such a scenario is not a fair share of the profit. Would you sprint down to the mall to sell t-shirts if somebody offered to pay you $1 for each one sold? Would you set up a DVD store if somebody offered you 70 cents for each one you flogged - two months later? If not, then why do it online?

Don't get sucked in by advertisers who claim their brand value leads to higher conversion rates and compensates for miserly commmission rates. Having a big, reputable brand can result in superior conversion rates, but this is not always the case.

An experiment done by one of the UK's top affiliates, Kieron Donoghue, in February 2006 demonstrated how, despite their claims, brand name advertisers can convert worse than non-brand ones. Not only were the likes of Tesco and Marks & Spencer paying 2% and 3% commission on Valentine flowers, but they were weaker at converting traffic than less well-known merchants such as Bunches and Flowers Direct who were paying 10% and 15%:

Tesco Flowers - 11% conversion rate - 31 sales - £21.04 commission
Bunches - 16% conversion rate - 35 sales - £98.54 commission

As Kieron comments: "Kind of puts paid to the 'brand' argument doesn't it? So not only have I made more sales with the 'no-brand' Bunches, but I've also made 4 times the commission and it converts a lot better too."

3. How relevant is the merchant to your site?

You probably won't make much money if you market affiliate programs that don't have much to do with your site. A lot of novice webmasters join a whole bunch of affiliate programs and figure that if enough of them pay off they'll make a buckload of money. They'll probably actually end up canceling each other out: the affiliate site will just look like a huge advertisement.

Your main assets as a content website is your content, your traffic and your knowledge of that traffic, so it's a much better strategy to use the information you have and pick affiliate programs that would best serve your visitors and best supplement your content. If the programs you choose match the content of your site, it should be fairly easy to lead your visitors to participate in them. If you've reviewed a DVD on your site, for example, you could simply link to the page selling that DVD on an online movie store's site. This is an excellent way both to serve your visitors and to make money off your website's traffic.

4. How much traffic is the merchant's website getting?

Try to discover the amount of traffic the merchant's website is already receiving. Alexa.com could be a useful tool for doing this research. If the website is ranked in the top 100,000, the merchant is getting a signficant amount of traffic and there may already be too many affiliates. If it is ranked below 500,000 it is either no good or it could just be a golden opportunity to make some real money.

Always research a merchant's product if their website has a low traffic ranking. It may be a good idea to buy the product yourself if you can afford to. Otherwise you could do a search to find out if there are any adverse comments about it on the internet. If all is well and the product is good, you may have found a gold mine!

5. Will they serve your appetite for cookies?

How long is the merchant's cookie period? Many customers do not buy on their first visit to a merchant's website. It is important therefore that the merchant provides a reasonable cookie period for their affiliate program so that you get credit if the customer returns and buys at a later date. Check out how long the cookies last. The longer the cookies lasts; the better the chances of you getting paid.

6. Does the merchant track non-cookie sales?

Cookies are not always a reliable method of tracking sales back to affiliates. People often delete them or have cookies turned off in their browser; they may use a different computer from when they first clicked through to a merchant. Quite a few networks such as Paid on Results UK can now track a sale even if cookies are turned off and most programs on Cognigen pay you even if a customer signs-up on the phone. In terms of paying affiliates for repeat purchases, some merchants employ database-tracking. This tags a customer to an affiliate when he or she makes a purchase or opens an account at the merchant's site. You then get paid on future purchases, no matter which computer the customer logs in from and whether the original cookie has been deleted or not.

7. Does the merchant pay lifetime commmission?

Few businesses can survive just on generating new customers each time. Yet the way most affiliate programs are structured, you earn commission for sending a customer to a merchant's site and then, even though the customer is added to the store's mailing list, is constantly bombared with emails promoting 'special offers' and is likely to shop with them again and again, you'll only ever get paid on the first purchase. In exchange for gifting you a few dollars, a merchant has sometimes gained a customer for years to come.

Easyflirt is an example of an affiliate program paying recurring commissions, offering an incredible 55% of members' membership fees for life.

8. Does the merchant have a dedicated affiliate manager? Does the network it is on have enthusiastic account managers?

Many merchants don't bother invest in a full-time in-house staff member or external network or agency staff to manage their affiliate program. Try to avoid these companies unless their commission rates are exceptionally high. The reason is that, when problems occur - which they often do in cyberspace - it can be nigh possible to get things resolved. As Brad Wilson, a Houston-based affiliate with five niche travel sites told the Weekly Q: "Your email will get passed on from person to person in the company and may never get responded to. It is unlikely general staff will know what an affiliate program is nevermind have the time, skill, know-how or enthusiasm to fix tracking issues or advise you on deep-linking changes".

PrimeQ is a network which has a reputation for providing dedicated, high quality account management. Emails enquiries are responded to within a few hours and the network provides telephone and Instant Messenger support for over 12 hours a day – which is not the case with most other networks.

9. What marketing materials and linking options does the affiliate program offer?

Look at the type and quality of the marketing resources they provide. Make sure banners have strong call-to-action messages and have not been created to promote the merchant's name or URL. Do they provide well-written text copy and dynamically-updated creative that promotes seasonal campaigns? Do they provide coupon codes, co-registration boxes, email marketing creative and deep-linking methods for affiliates? Are they willing to put together creative specifically for their online sales team i.e. their affiliates? If the marketing material and linking options they provide is good then it demonstrates they are serious about affiliate marketing.

10. How well do they convert?

One of the advantages of certain affiliate networks such as Commission Junction is they provide conversion metrics. You can see which merchants are great at converting visitors to sales/leads and which ones are not so good. As most affiliate programs only pay if a visitor becomes a customer, how well a site converts is critical.

If a network does not publish conversion rates because a merchant has just joined them, then be smart and wait a while. Let other affiliates spend their precious money on determining whether the merchant converts or not. When the metrics are eventually released, you will be able to determine whether you are going to plaster their links over your sites or not.

If conversion statistics are not provided, then email the Affiliate Manager and ask for them: many of them are surprisingly forthcoming. You can also try asking other affiliates on discussion boards.

You can read previous tutorials in the Master Class series on this section of the PrimeQ website. They are on the yellow strip on the right-hand side of the page, with Part I in the October 10 issue of the Weekly Q.

Groundbreaking Partnership Between the BBC and YouTube

The BBC and YouTube have announced a partnership which will result in BBC content being shown through YouTube, the first international broadcaster to enter such a tie-up.

The Beeb has now begun showing excerpts from its news and entertainment programs on the YouTube. Of late, the Google owned video sharing service has mostly been in the news for criticism related to digital piracy.

Market analysts believe this is a key step for both the BBC and YouTube. The BBC is now hosting three branded channels on the site and the deal will give them a wider presence on the net, with an access to millions more viewers. The BBC has been losing younger viewers to websites like YouTube.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson added in a statement: “It’s essential that the BBC embraces new ways of reaching wider audiences with non-exclusive partnerships such as these.” They are hoping that these shows would bring more traffic to their services.

The three channels being run by the corporate include: BBC Worldwide, BBC and BBC News. These would bring clips from shows like ‘Top Gear’ and ‘Spooks’ in addition to news items, trailers and short features.

Whereas the BBC entertainment channel will be a "public service" proposition, featuring no advertising, the BBC Worldwide and News channel will carry advertising such as banner adverts, and possibly pre-roll adverts (shown as part of the video clip) as well.

Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of future media and technology added: “We don’t want to be overzealous. A lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us.”

Dating Services Love Online Advertising

Companies offering dating services are investing increasing amounts in advertising, according to a new study, with online advertising seeing phenomenal growth.

Research carried out by Nielsen Monitor-Plus found that such firms in the US, in particular online dating sites, spent $127.3 million advertising online in 2006.

This is up from $88.9 million spent the previous year and the second highest area of investment for dating services.

Of the 12 dating services firms advertising online, seven companies were "almost exclusively using the internet for advertising", the report found.

The top ten dating services firms accounted for 96 per cent of the total advertising spend for the industry, some $290 million of $302 million.

"The dating services industry has shown tremendous growth in terms of ad spending across all media," said Brian Lane of Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

A recent study revealed online advertising now accounts for around 20 per cent of total online ad spend in the UK, and is expected to grow 5.8 per cent this year.

 

We are pleased to announce the next PrimeQ University will start on March 12 and take place in Covent Garden, London. If you are interested in working in online advertising and wish to find out more about the groundbreaking course, please contact PrimeQ UK’s Receptionist/Administrator Michelle Birkett on mbirkett@primeq.com or call her on 020 7061 3190 during office hours.

Finally, would you like to contribute to the Weekly Q? With a fast-growing subscription base of thousands of readers, we have become one of the world’s leading publications on affiliate marketing and online advertising. Email Nadeem with examples of your writing and what you feel we can do to make the Weekly Q even better!

 

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