Chapter 7. Step Four—Choosing the Right Affiliates

Chapter Summary

A good, effective promotion strategy will net you thousands and thousands of affiliate sign-ups. But quality—not quantity—guarantees a successful program.

Accepting applications sight unseen is not the best way to acquire quality affiliates in your program, but it’s the most feasible given the staffing constraints for most affiliate programs. Affiliates must be chosen carefully, just like any business partner. Look at the content of their site, their traffic, and especially the image they portray to visitors. As affiliate partners of your business, their image will be your image.

Stay away from those sites that stack program upon program on their Web site with no original or useful content for visitors or those that try to sell everything to everybody. Selling to everyone is selling to no one. Five percent of your affiliate sites will generate 95% of your revenue from the program, and 1% will be your best revenue generators. This 1% comprises your super affiliates. Find them first, then learn how to evolve your other affiliates into them. Finally, don’t ignore your non-participating affiliates. There are reasons why they sign up for your program but do not place your links on their sites. It could be the lack of information you provide to build enthusiasm and trust in selling your product or service.

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.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
52.15.99.7