Acquiring the Super Affiliate
Affiliate programs are about marketingnot technology—about partnerships, not cheap advertising. You are building a reputable, effective extension of your sales force and must choose business partners whose Web site operations have similar practices and standards as your own. Yes, you should start your affiliate program as soon as you can, but it pays to start slow. Why? First of all, for every capable and well-chosen site you are on, the volume of your business will increase. Second, you need to be deliberate in choosing the best affiliate you can.
You can acquire your super affiliates in two ways—find them or mold them from your average affiliates. First, though, you need to know what makes a super affiliate, where do you find her, and what are her needs?
Besides being in the top 1% of your revenue-generating affiliate sites, how do you recognize super affiliates and what makes them so successful? First of all, a super affiliate is a very good e-mail marketer. A super affiliate has built a large database of people using an opt-in e-mail list or newsletter. He uses this list to market the products and services of the affiliate programs he has joined. As soon as he is informed of a new promotion, the super affiliate sends out an e-mail to his subscribers informing them immediately of the new offer. In a way, the super affiliate probably knows what works in affiliate marketing better than you do. Super affiliates have learned that they must take an offer to the customer, not wait for the customer to visit their site.
The downside to e-mail marketing, of course, is the potential for spam. Check with the affiliate who plans to use e-mail marketing and make sure he uses opt-in lists. Another way around this problem is to provide a way for affiliates to sign up subscribers to your list. That way you know that the people have signed up voluntarily. You could pay the affiliate a few cents for each e-mail subscriber directed your way. This not only helps curb spam, but also offers a way for affiliates that do not do e-mail marketing a chance to use this valuable promotional vehicle.
Do
| DO insist, but not require, that affiliates purchase your product or service. If possible, ask them to write about the product from their first-hand knowledge. This way, the affiliate becomes a respected, credible source of reliable information. |
Another indication of a super affiliate is her interest in testing different ways to offer a product or service. She has a knack with words and is a born marketer, knowing the value of testing to determine what message wording works and what does not. And if you offer a two-tier affiliate program, you’ll probably find that super affiliates use them. They love to groom the sub-affiliates under them to help them earn revenue for themselves and their sub-affiliates.
One powerful strategy that many super affiliates use is the Affinity Shopping Portal. Think about this: What’s the greatest challenge to an affiliate site trying to sell the same product or service as other affiliates in your network? She needs to find ways to set herself apart when offering your product or service. That’s exactly what some super affiliates do.
What’s an Affinity Shopping Portal?
| One type of super affiliate will join a number of affiliate programs that are compatible with each other and focus on a particular product type or service. A good example is Over-the-Counter.com (see Figure 7.2). It subdivides an affiliate merchant’s pharmaceutical products into separate categories, then creates a targeted site to sell them. Figure 7.2. Over-the-Counter.com has been very successful in taking one merchant’s affiliate program and dividing it up into specialized niche sites.
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The Specialized Affiliate
On the Net, content is king. And the more the content is targeted to a specific consumer group, the better. Some very successful super affiliates have discovered this and put it to use in some very creative ways. They either earn big commissions or referral fees by dedicating themselves to one program or set up an Affinity Shopping Portal.
A good example of a super affiliate dedicated to one affiliate program is Over-the-Counter.com (www.over-the-counter.com) (see Figure 7.2). It was created as a means for people to purchase embarrassing drugstore items online, such as pregnancy tests (www.over-the-counter.com/pregnancytest.html), gas-relief products (www.over-the-counter.com/gasrelief.html), and adult diapers (www.over-the-counter.com/adultincontinence.html). The Over-the-Counter.com site is an affiliate of Drugstore.com (www.drugstore.com) and subdivides the merchant’s pharmaceutical products into separate categories, then creates a targeted site to sell them.
An affiliate site can subdivide categories for almost any program that offers a wide variety of products from a merchant. If you sell books, CDs, movies, toys, clothing, and so on, you can identify affiliates who would make great candidates for the different categories of the products you sell and help set up a focused Web site or storefront. In a way, vstore does this seamlessly for their affiliates.
Another prime example of a super affiliate dedicating a site to one program is the American Web Ventures Network (www.awvn.com). Jeff Belton created his first singles personals site in 1995, and is now the top associate in the One & Only Personals Network (www.oneandonlynetwork.com) where he generates as much as $23,000 per month in commissions with no advertising cost, no employees, and only part-time effort.
Shopping Portals
Affinity Shopping Portals are another strategy that super affiliates use. A quick look at their sites show that they have aggregated many different affiliate programs under one roof and targeted the non-profit niche, offering consumers a way to help their schools or causes that they would like to support. In Chapter 2, “The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing,” we talked about these other uses for affiliate programs. Schoolpop (www.schoolpop.com) (see Figure 7.3) and ShopforSchool (www.shopforschool.com) identified the niche of school fund-raisers. The school fund-raiser sites enable parents, family, and friends to help their K–12 school when making online purchases.
Figure 7.3. SchoolPop is an affinity program that uses a number of affiliate program to offer products an services to its members.
These sites donate a portion of their commission to the school of the buyer’s choice. In a similar vein, other sites have sprung up to facilitate donations to causes and charities when consumers make their online purchases. A good example is GreaterGood.com (www.greatergood.com).
Treating the Super Affiliate Right
As for the special needs of the super affiliates, once identified, they should be treated differently from your other affiliate partners. For one thing, the super affiliates in the ClubMom affiliate program frequently request customized reporting by e-mail or fax in addition to the standard reporting system set up for the network. Also you should communicate personally with each super affiliate when there is a new promotion or offer, even sending him or her the new code instead of having him or her retrieve it from your site. The nature of the super affiliate is to take immediate action on any new promotion, so it’s worth the extra effort of contacting them personally.
Keep in mind that the supper affiliate may demand a higher payout rate than what’s standard in your program. If not handled properly, this can cause problems with your other affiliates. A safe way to deal with this is to create a fair compensation method as your standard plan, then add performance levels that pay higher as they’re reached. Your super affiliates should have no trouble reaching these higher performance levels.
Affiliate Discussion Boards
So where do you find these super affiliates? The answer is go where they go. And where they go is to the affiliate marketing discussion boards on the Net (see Table 7.1).
| AssociatePrograms.com | webwizards.net/AssociatePrograms/discus/ |
| CashPile | www.cashpile.com/cashcorner/index.cfm |
| iBoost | www.webdesignforums.com |
| ReveNews | www.revenews.com/opinion/ |
Before you post a message to these boards, remember that posting blatant advertisements for your program will not be tolerated, and will put your program and company in a bad light. Post well-thought-out messages in response to questions asked by the board’s participants. Make sure that you have a signature at the end of each post that plugs your program. This kind of promotion is acceptable. For a frequently updated list of affiliate message boards, visit www.affiliatemanager.net/boards.htm.
Sometimes the question is not necessarily how to find the super affiliates, but rather how you can help them to find you. In an attempt to bring merchants and super affiliates together to create a relationship, BeFree created its Performance Partner Program (www.befree.com/docs/partners/performance) (see Figure 7.4). BeFree offers eligible performance partners (super affiliates) special products and services on behalf of participating merchants.
Figure 7.4. BeFree brings merchants and super affiliates together to create a relationship with its Performance Partner Program.
Do
| If you use BeFree as your affiliate solution provider, DO encourage your affiliates to join BeFree’s Performance Partner Program. |
Another way for super affiliates to find you is the Affiliate Webinar. CashPile.com and the United States Affiliate Manager Coalition (www.usamc.org/) teamed up to present the first Affiliate Webinar (www.affiliatewebinar.com), which was an affiliate marketing seminar conducted entirely online to bring affiliates and merchants together (see Figure 7.5).
Figure 7.5. Affiliate Webinar brings affiliates and merchants together through an online seminar.
Super affiliates are an invaluable part of your program, and the special care and feeding of them is well worth the effort.
Up-and-Coming Super Affiliates
The other very important level of affiliate partners are the up-and-comers. Affiliate Advantage, a Web-based service from WebPartner (www.webpartner.com), helps merchants with affiliate programs to spot key Web site performance and merchandising trends on their affiliate sites. Online merchants can then use this information to develop ways to increase revenue from their affiliate channel. This is a very useful tool for identifying, tracking, and micro-managing the up-and-comer affiliates to bring them to the super affiliate level.