You’ve done all you can to attract potential affiliate candidates to your program using the strategies in Chapter 6, “Step Three—Getting the Word Out.” You now have hundreds, probably thousands, of Web sites all expressing interest in joining your affiliate network.
Do you automatically approve all of them and place them in your program? If it is at all possible, you should manually approve your affiliates, but this is a slippery slope, because affiliates want and expect instant access to links when they apply to your program. If you use all the strategies in Chapter 6, many of your candidate sites will come from what Marcia Kadanoff, chief marketing officer of IQ.com (www.iq.com), calls the “drive-by” model: Someone at a Web site drives by the merchant’s site or visits one of the affiliate solution providers or affiliate directories and picks up the latest and greatest affiliate program offered by a merchant. Here’s the problem with drive-bys. According to an affiliate survey conducted by Refer-it.com, 54% of Web sites that joined a program either were not sure or definitely did not add a link after joining a program. That is to say over one half of those who want to join your program will sign-up, and then never put you on their Web site.
That’s why affiliates must be chosen carefully, as any business partner would. It’s much better from both a management and cost perspective to have a few hundred-quality affiliates than thousands of non-performing affiliates that are a drain on your program’s resources.
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