| LED Digest 1922: What's Your Dream Affiliate Program? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... January 20, 2005 Issue #1922 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Dream Affiliate Programs ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "Let's talk affiliate programs again." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Problems for Linkers ==-- ~ Martha Retallick "I think it's important to [think] about other reasons why one would offer links..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Dropped by Google ==-- ~ Tracy Coyle ======= NEW ====================================== From: Michael Martinez Subject: My dream affiliate program Let's talk affiliate programs again. I am always looking out for promising vendors, but I pass up even vendors with great merchandise because their affiliate programs don't meet my standards. Here is what I look for: 1) Selection. If you offer just a few products, I am not likely to join your program. I need a LOT of merchandise to pick from. 2) You accept online payments. Some merchants, just starting out I guess, still require payment through snail-mail. Sorry, that don't work for me. 3) NO 3rd-party affiliate program. I've had my fill of them. 4) Minimal reporting on: --Traffic I send to you (by day, by month, by year) --Items you sell through my account (by day, by month, by year) 5) Easy-to-create links. None of this, "Put our banner on your Web site and link to us in a specific manner". While I am not thrilled with Javascript, if that is the only way you can update a link database, then use it. You are killing yourselves by not putting in the time and effort. 6) INCLUDE PICTURES IN YOUR LINKS. I don't care how many merchants say on their Web sites, "Text links really sell well." Fine. If they sell well for you, you clearly don't need my help. I get better results from affiliate links which show the products to my visitors. 'Nuff said. 7) QUIT USING _TOP IN YOUR LINK TARGETS. Too many merchants insist that we affiliates replace our content with theirs. You can live with your own browser window. Let the user decide where he/she wants to be. 8) Flexibility. If you have a database of products and images, provide me with a CSV (Comma-Separated-Value) text data file that I can download FOR FREE. I am NOT going to pay you for the privilege of doing all your work for you so you can make more money than me. GIVE me that CSV file, and you can keep your Javascript. And UPDATE THE FILE REGULARLY AND CONSISTENTLY. 9) Provide search boxes. Search boxes sell. If your catalogue is not searchable, you are killing yourself. Think of King Sysiphus pushing that rock up the hill every day. That's you without your product search box. And make that search box flexible (offer different designs), attractive (SOME graphics, but don't go crazy), and usable by your affiliates. 10) Quick review of affiliate program applications. I like being approved in a few minutes. I'll accept being approved in less than a week. But keep in mind that I may have just applied because you have something seasonal I want to start selling NOW. 11) Don't offer a program you cannot support. I just signed up for a program, got accepted, and clicked on the FAQ link. All I got was, "Coming soon". That doesn't help me (or you) in the least. Do it right, because I cannot help you if you do it wrong. 12) LET ME FRAME YOUR SITE. Many Web sites forbid people from framing their content. I even include Javascript on some of my own pages to kill frames. But let me tell you, Buckwheat, if you want me to sell your merchandise, you had better be flexible with me. I don't kill your ads. I don't misrepresent who you are (or who I am). I don't mislead my visitors. I provide them with tons of options and selections. And framing your site is one way I do this. If you forbid me to frame your site, I MAY stay in your program, but I will probably pass you by. 13) LINK BACK TO MY SITE ON YOUR SALES PAGE. It won't kill you to offer to send your customers back to where they came from. 14) DIRECT DEPOSIT IS GREAT! I wish more merchants offered it. Does it cost money? Sure. I understand you have to make a profit. But if you are making direct deposit for your employees, I suspect you could easily add your affiliates (even if you have thousands). In the long run, Direct Deposit pays for itself. One day, everyone will be paying their affiliates that way. I will be grateful to any of my vendors who help speed us toward that day. ABOUT LINKING IN GENERAL I am well past the stage where I can make any serious use of a single product link or merchant logo on my Web sites. I promote products in many different ways. I run my own banner network (not yours, MINE) and sometimes put product banners in it. I create pages around specific product topics and include links to relevant content on my site. I embed merchant search boxes in pages. I embed specific product links on content pages. I frame merchant sites that let me add their sites in side frames. There are three kinds of affiliates. 1) There are the little personal Web page guys who, if you are lucky, spend all their spare time fixing up their 1-12 page sites every week. These people will devotedly push just a couple of your products at most, and they may send you a few sales each year. A few thousand of them could make or break your business. 2) There are the mid-size sites. Some of them are commercial, some of them are reseller product farms, some of them are non-commercial or non-profit megasites (in the science fiction community, these are the fan megasites that sometimes get media AND the secondary sites which the megasites help promote). 3) There are the large corporate sites with tons of content. These include media sites, news sites, etc. I fall into the second-tier. Few if any second-tier sites are going to make or break a merchant on their own. But they generate a fair amount of traffic and sales. They increase your visibility. Today, I passed up several affiliate programs because they didn't meet my criteria. If you want to work with guys like me, you have to be flexible and you cannot treat us like second-class citizens. Not unless you pay very, very well. FINALLY... I'll conclude with some comments about my current top vendor: AllPosters.Com. For the most part, I like working with AllPosters. They do many things right. They do many things well. Some things they do really irk me. For example, they update their CSV feed every month. That's good. But they almost always change a field size or the field order, forcing me to rewrite my programs. Maybe they think everyone just imports the data into Excel. Excel really cannot handle the full data feed (not efficiently). As their inventory grows, some ID codes will get larger. I can live with that. But including a "What we changed" note would be fantastic. Another example, you have to generate $1,000 a month in sales to get a link back from them. That is just plain tacky and unprofessional. Refusing to acknowledge who sent you $800 a month or $500 a month just proves you need to develop a little more class. I assure you all, it ain't no incentive for me to sell more. If I COULD make that $1,000 a month level, don't you think I WOULD? Does anyone seriously believe I am holding back? "Nope. Not this month. I just want to send them $995.00 because I don't like their policy." Come on. I know better. If your programmer says he cannot put a link back on your "You just paid $50.00 for our china doll!" page, you need a new programmer. After all, you have supposedly kept track of the affiliate's ID for commission purposes. Okay, why do I stay with AllPosters? Because people buy their products, because they pay me every month, because they have a pretty good reporting system (used to be better, but they "improved" it last year), because they have a good product selection, because they offer multiple linking strategies, and because I cannot find anyone else in the same category who will make as much money for me as they do. I have tried other poster vendors. They don't even compare to AllPosters. I dread the day Amazon buys AllPosters. Generally speaking, every time someone improves their system, they make it harder to work with. I wish merchants would leave well enough alone. I used to work with some vendors who did pretty good, but then they "improved" things and my sales fell through the floor. I could probably have hit that $1,000 a month with AllPosters by now if they hadn't improved the system. Or maybe not. We'll never know. But I know how much more difficult it is for me to work with them now than it used to be. If you can beat AllPosters' system, I'll eventually find you and join you. Be ready for me. Michael Martinez, Author Understanding Middle-earth, Parma Endorion, and Visualizing Middle-earth http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Martha Retallick Subject: Linking This has been an interesting discussion. However, before one goes in search of links to build traffic, I think it's important to devote some time to thinking about other reasons why one would offer links to other sites. Why? Because I've seen far too many links pages that seem to have no other purpose than to build traffic. And if this is blindingly obvious to Martha The Casual Visitor to your website, how is it going to go over with your target audience? Some have suggested offering a links page in order to provide useful reference information to visitors. Others have likened linking to a retailer's policy of offering bulletin board space for other business people's cards. I would like to add another suggestion: Offer links in order to establish your credibility. For example, if you're selling some product or service for which you've gathered testimonials, offer links to the sites of those who've offered glowing words of praise. Chances are good that some of your site visitors will actually follow those links and contact those Tommy and Tina Testimonial-Givers to ask if what they're recommending is as good as they say it is. Hope this helps! Martha Retallick "The Passionate Postcarder" http://www.postcardmarketingsecrets.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tracy Coyle Subject: Google From 2000 (just after building our site) until about 18 months ago we ranked #1 on Yahoo. For the months that Google used Yahoo's directory, we continued our high ranking. When Google stopped using the directory for search results, we disappeared from Google. I too have used many of the ideas here to try and get back into Google (we appear deep in the results). Today, I found something truly disheartening. Search: bankruptcy, madison, wi http://snipurl.com/c5g7 [law.wisc.edu] appeared on page 1. This page is less than a month old, and has no apparent optimizations. We were listed #60. Adding the qualifiers to our initial keyword Search: bankruptcy help, attorney, madison, wi this page was 21, we were # 59. The vast number of results were directories. We were the 9th attorney actually listed. The point to all this info? If a page like the conference page can get listed high and quickly, and a long time source is deep in the results, optimization is a grail.... Tracy Coyle Cazelaw.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. 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