| LED Digest 1923: Affiliate Dreamin' |
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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 25, 2005 Issue #1923 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Dream Affiliate Programs ==-- ~ Brad Waller "AffStat just set up a really quick survey asking affiliates to tell all." ~ Trevor Johnson "...banking costs at both ends for direct deposits can be prohibitive cross-border." ~ Ken Evoy "...I thought I'd comment on a few of your points." --== Problems for Linkers ==-- ~ Phil Tanny "...if a site is useful enough to merit an outgoing link, why not write an article about it?" ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Dropped by Google ==-- ~ Kathryn Martyn ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Brad Waller Subject: Dream affiliate > 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. - Michael Martinez, LED 1922 What timing! AffStat just set up a really quick survey asking affiliates to tell all. I think Michael might have been a bit more comprehensive than they expected, but all input is wanted. Here's the information I got from them: What do you think about the state of affiliate marketing? What is right or wrong these days? Opinions, ideas, complaints, suggestions and whatever else is on the minds of affiliates (through 2/28/05) are being compiled. Share your input for this report - it will be published in March and will be made free to all. No need to censor yourself - tell everybody what you truly think. If you are interested, you can also include your name and URL(s) - but that's totally optional. You can choose to be anonymous. Have your say at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=51586820368 Brad Waller, VP Affiliate & Business Development www.epage.com - Free Custom Classifieds waller, epage.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Trevor Johnson Subject: Dream affiliate While I agree with Michael Martinez's comment that he wants direct deposit of commissions into the bank accounts of affiliates by affiliate programs, let us not forget that the internet is an INTERNATIONAL medium, and that banking costs at both ends for direct deposits can be prohibitive cross-border. (Too many merchants and affiliates think the internet is all about the USA, ignoring the remaining 95% of the world's population.) To me a very useful feature that I seek in affiliate programs is the option to receive commissions into my PayPal account. More affiliate programs need to look seriously into this. It will even reduce their own operating costs as the transaction cost involved in PayPal's 'mass payment' system is much lower than the cost of the stationery and postage involved with posting cheques. Trevor Johnson Weight Loss, Dieting & Obesity http://dietwords.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Ken Evoy Subject: Dream affiliate Hi Michael, What a great post. As a manager of a rather successful affiliate program, one of the rare ones that has bootstrapped to play at the highest levels with our own proprietary technology, and one who relies 100% on affiliates as our ONLY marketing technique (aside from increasing pure word-of-mouth from small business owners), I thought I'd comment on a few of your points. Naturally, those will be the points we don't see eye-to-eye on. ;-) Let me preface my saying that I agreed with the rest of it, and thought it was a brilliant distillation of what makes a great program. My comments are just the "managers" viewpoint to provide a bit of counterbalance and in fact to support your really strong points towards the end... > 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. We pay a LOT of four and five-figure monthly checks, 95% based on ONE product, Site Build It!. While we do have a lot of lower-priced products that build our credibility with customers who then go on to buy our higher priced product, I would suggest that you modify this "spec" to make an exception for companies with one EXCELLENT product. At the end of the day, it's the QUALITY of the product, not the QUALITY, that counts... AND, of course, whether they can sell it. :-) > 12) Let me frame your site. Many Web sites forbid people > from framing their content... if you want me to sell your > merchandise, you had better be flexible with me. Although we actually go way beyond most of everything else in your dream listing, this is one we don't do. There are simply too many people who do not have such noble intentions as you, Michael. Frames can be used in a lot of ways that we would not want. That is just one reason. If you think this all the way through from the merchant's viewpoint, you might change on this, depending on the rest of a merchant's program's features. But this goes to control of one's business and brand. No serious, long-term-thinking merchant SHOULD give on this point. I hope you would not exclude a merchant just for this point, but if you do, then it's a simple matter of "no fit" philosophically, and that happens in business. Fair enough. > 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. Yes, it will. We study user behavior, both in human usability studies as well as in our own proprietary visitor pathway software (which we call VisitorX and wrote because no one delivered visitor flow streams the way we wanted). It definitely DOES hurt. Here's the basic way we see the affiliate model. We are partners-in-sales. Affiliates PREsell and send us visitors. We'll complete the sale. Trust me to do my job. But don't expect me to start writing all sorts of code to provide dynamic links back to the affiliate who sent us each of our hundreds of thousands of visitors per day, only to damage our visitor flow to the sale. Michael, I hope that you think this through from the merchant's viewpoint and you might strike a more fair balance on this one. :-) (Yes, I like emoticons -- they soften what can otherwise be perceived as unintentional harshness on points of disagreement. Michael's is one superb post, and I almost hate to disagree with any of it. My comments are just the "manager's" other side of things.) > 14) Direct deposit is great! I wish more > merchants offered it. We wire to our five-figure affiliates. And, once 95% of our affiliates have direct-bank-withdrawal ability at PayPal, we'll probably switch over to PayPal. We'll have to adjust our fraud mechanisms at that point -- you'd be amazed at the number of low-lifes who try to scam us for a few hundred dollars. But that's another story. ;-) > I am well past the stage where I can make any serious > use of a single product link or merchant logo... > Generally speaking, every time someone improves > their system, they make it harder to work with. I wish > merchants would leave well enough alone. I *LOVE* this point -- geeks sometimes run a company, not marketing. They like to do things because they *can* and they convince marketing that "it'd be cool." Hey... "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." (But don't ossify either.) I find that generally, especially in the space we are in, that a company is either pushed by marketing, design, tech... but very few are pushed by PRODUCT and customer success. It applies to affiliate programs, too -- make your affiliates successful and the marketing company does just fine, too. The key is to align interests in a WIN-WIN as much as possible while doing that. We've grown to where we are because of that attitude. The "5 Pillars" attract a large number of affiliates. Most don't pan out because it's work. There's no such thing as easy money, not long-term anyway. But along the way, the serious ones stick and build substantial income. Just ask my good friend, Allan Gardyne, who reads and loves this list as much as I do. :-) But I digress. Michael, THOSE are the ones we want, the serious people. And that brings me to this... Thanks for the best post I've read this month. P.S. Do check out our new page. It excites the heck out of me... http://specialprize.sitesell.com/ All the best, Ken Evoy, President SiteSell.com http://affiliates.sitesell.com/ ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Phil Tanny Subject: Linking Martha Retallick suggested [issue 1922] a way to link to other sites that is more creative, constructive and profitable than just a simple long list of links to anybody and everybody. Martha's suggestion illustrates a point that Dirk Johnson made earlier. There are better and worse ways to conduct one's link partnerships, just like any other web publishing technique. Saying that "reciprocal linking is dead" just because some people do it poorly is like saying we shouldn't read the LED Digest because some people spam. My suggestion is less creative, but will perhaps be useful to one of you. The principle I keep in mind is that if a site is useful enough to merit an outgoing link, why not write an article about it? Now I'm asking my link partner for a link, and giving what could be seen as a full page ad in exchange. I get more content for my site, the search engines find more content to crawl, my visitors get more information. And my link partner is easier to sell, and happier with the deal. Now I've made a friend, and opened the door to additional constructive partnership possibilities with that person. Thus, there's no "links page" on my site, and nothing that will trigger "link farm" alerts from either my visitors, the search engines, or critics of linking. Writing an review article of each of our link partners really isn't more work, as we have to create new content for our site anyway, right? If we write a review about each of our link partners, we will actually know who we are linking to, and will be much less likely to link to sites that really aren't relevant or useful to our visitors. If for some reason you really don't like the idea of anything having to do with trading links or lists of links, but still want incoming links, then there are constructive ways to do that too. What I've tried to do with my site is provide a service, other than outgoing links, that is useful enough that other webmasters will link to me to receive it. My site has been open about 30 days and has almost 400 incoming links according to Google, and for those who follow such things, a Page Rank of 4. I don't link back to the overwhelming majority of those linking to me, I provide a service instead. I'm sure that each LED reader can come up with their own creative ideas for implementing a constructive link strategy that serves the unique goals of their enterprise. Linking isn't dead, but sometimes our creativity needs an injection of new energy. Phil Tanny http://links-for-you.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Kathryn Martyn Subject: Google > 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, LED 1921 Once upon a time I spent long hours looking at sites that ranked high, trying to ascertain why, modifying pages, yadda, yadda, all to no avail. My site OneMoreBite simply does not rank well. In fact, my other site (my husband's), http://www.daytradersbulletin.com has also never ranked all that well. Both sites contain hundreds of pages of original content, updated regularly, etc. No joy. I add two to three new weight loss articles a month plus my newsletter to http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com/weightloss-articles.html but Google barely comes a calling. I get a lot of requests for linking and I when I check out the sites, they are nearly always the diet pill variety, with no content at all, but are merely affiliate sites or link farms. What is disheartening is many of those sites have a Google rank of 4, some a 5. What's up with that? These are sites with no content at all. It's ridiculous. I'm tired of trying to unravel the puzzle and now my attention is on improving my site for my visitors. That includes linking to other sites of interest to my site's visitors or mentioning them in my newsletter, Bits-n-Bites for People Who Chew because that's what I like from sites I visit. When I read magazines or the paper, I read ads looking for where to find more information. (Okay, I'm an info junkie). When I visit websites I often visit links pages because I'd like to think they are hand selected and offer good, relevant content I might otherwise miss (wouldn't want to miss one morsel of goodness on the net). As for Google, their results reflect best relevency they can dish up with the resources they have. I don't see any way that good, relevant results could ever hoped to be achieved (but I'm sure some clever programmer will prove me wrong) especially when the results are computer generated, but time will tell. For now, we must work with what we have. I do not think that spending hundreds of hours trying to figure out what Google or any other search or directory wants is worth the effort. So, I work on writing and posting articles, offering content to other sites and newsletters, writing for local papers (encouraging local PR is easiest), encourage feedback from your site's visitors as to what they'd like to find on your site, etc. Treat your visitors well and they'll return and perhaps one day the Google Gods will deem you and me worthy of better placement. Kathryn Martyn, M.NLP Ending Emotional Eating, One Bite at a Time http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns." - The Godfather |
