How to Choose and Manage an Affiliate Program?

[benitez17]

One of the websites that I own provides investing information to members and charges a monthly subscription fee. It has been doing reasonably well for the last couple of years without any advertising on my part, and generally has a few dozen subscribers at any given time.

I use Clickbank to manage the subscriptions, so I also have access to their affiliate program, but I have had very little success attracting affiliates. I am offering $40 per sale that is recurring as long as the subscriber is a member of the site, which seems pretty generous to me, given that the average length of a subscription is over 6 months.

I'd like to begin to seriously advertise this site because I honestly believe that it provides the best value in its niche based on comments from subscribers and my knowledge of the sector, so I think it could take a lot of customers from the competition if more people were aware that my site existed.

My questions to people who have run affiliate programs are:

1. What affiliate programs would you suggest to someone with a product like mine?
2. What do you think of my payout to affiliates?
3. What do you do to attract and retain high quality affiliates?
4. Do you think it is worthwhile to hire an affiliate manager, or should I rely on the affiliate network to handle this?
5. Who is responsible for creating ads for the site?
6. What are your other suggestions and comments?

If you need any more information about the site to answer any questions, please let me know. Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Andy]

Hey Benitez,

It just occurred to me to suggest you look to ABestWeb for answers for this. Poke around there and you'll find several affiliate managers who are highly regarded - they even have a "best of" list for the past several years with a category for affiliate managers.

While you may not be able to find one of the "best" available - they may be able to refer you to one of the upandcomers.

Okay, I'm back. Sorry for responding after just skimming your post. For some reason I thought an affiliate manager would be your main concern.

I still think ABestWeb is a good place to look for information about affilate programs. Not a bad place to announce your program either. There's a similar site - I think 5 star something that would also be worth looking at.

That said I'll answer whatever other questions I can. My perspective is more from that of an affiliate rather than a manager.

$40 dollars is a decent payout for an affiliate program - especially when it recurs. IF you have a sales page that converts well - you should have a gold mine for affiliates.

That said, I'm not sure CB is the best place for you. Clickbank already has a reputation for low-end products - not all of them but I see a lot of hype and junk there. With a financial product especially, you really need solid associations. While I'm not a fan of Commission Junction - they do have a good reputation. Share-a-sale is my favorite aggregator. There one better suited to your market available - you are most likely to find them in a place like ABestWeb.

If you want high quality affiliates, my first thought is to find the best affiliate manager you can. You might also want to be more selective than many. The most common complaint I hear is only a small fraction of affiliates ever produce any decent numbers. But I think those that do are well worth putting up with the marginal ones. I might even go so far as to limit affiliates to paying members. This may or not work.

One thought on the above, if you are a believer in Pareto's Principle - the 80/20 rule - then you might want to go after as many affiliates as possible under the assumption the the bigger the pie, the more you will make.

As far as who is responsible for creating ads, I'm not sure, but I think a good manager would handle the details for you with your oversight. (I think you may get a better picture buy perusing yet another forum - JV Notify Pro. While they focus more on product launches, I think you can learn a lot from what a good launch project manager does. From there I gather they handle just about everything.)

Many Clickbank marketers are very good at creating affiliate tools - it might be a good idea to look at what top marketers are offering their affiliates. You'll find everything from banner ads and other creatives to emails, keyword lists, articles even adwords ads.

If you care to PM me with any details, I might be able to offer some more specific ideas for you.


Andy

[benitez17]

Thanks Andy. I'll take a look at the site you suggested and then probably contact you.

[Thomas]

1) Clickbank should be fine - plenty of suitable affiliates on there
2) Can't say without knowing what sort of % that is of the sale. Most decent affiliates on CB won't touch anything below 65%
3) Contact them directly, hire an affiliate manager to keep them happy, offer them a better payout & resources
4) Yes, I do, and it saves me a lot of time
5) Make sure you supply all affiliates with a ton of resources. Mine get: banners, auto-responders, tweet sequences, email templates, review sites, articles, squeeze pages, keywords, custom graphics...

Sounds like you have a good site. The hard part (as I am discovering!) is keeping the big affiliates on board

[benitez17]

1) Clickbank should be fine - plenty of suitable affiliates on there
2) Can't say without knowing what sort of % that is of the sale. Most decent affiliates on CB won't touch anything below 65%
3) Contact them directly, hire an affiliate manager to keep them happy, offer them a better payout & resources
4) Yes, I do, and it saves me a lot of time
5) Make sure you supply all affiliates with a ton of resources. Mine get: banners, auto-responders, tweet sequences, email templates, review sites, articles, squeeze pages, keywords, custom graphics...

Sounds like you have a good site. The hard part (as I am discovering!) is keeping the big affiliates on board

I have been told more than once that my product is not suited for Clickbank since it's not targeted towards something that internet marketers can really hype up, but I appreciate your comments. I had basically given up on attracting any quality affiliates through Clickbank, but I will contact them and see what they recommend.

It's 40% of the sale, but I don't see why that matters. I assumed that people would be more interested in a higher dollar figure than a higher percentage on a smaller sale, plus the recurring revenue from that sale, but again, I know very little about this subject. I don't think I am willing to offer much more than that to the general public, since I'm selling access to a service that requires daily maintenance, not an e-book or something like that. If someone was able to bring in a lot of new customers, I'd be happy to increase their percentage.

I have made somewhere around 5 sales in total from affiliates in the last 3 years, so I am not attracting affiliates at all, let alone retaining quality ones.

Again, thanks for the advice.

[Thomas]

IMO Clickbank is the most convenient for the majority of affiliates. Your other choice would be a 3rd party affiliate program (what I use) but it makes life so much harder when recruiting affiliates and quite a few will only promote CB products. CB is the easiest way when starting out unless you want to get into a CPA network and make the real $$$ but doesn't sound like you are quite ready for that as you'll need deep pockets and a very solid product and sales funnel etc.

Don't shoot the messenger I hear you - I have a similar product that requires a lot of after sales support and is not just an ebook, so it's hard to offer the high commissions. I actually offer 50% as a default but $ value is higher ($197). The good thing about having your own affiliate program is you can set bespoke commissions for each affiliates.

It's certainly not easy, but I'd recommending pimping out your affiliate area and perhaps running a competition to get them interested. If you have a really good product, you should contact relevant sites in your niche and see if they would be interested in promoting your product. Explain the conversion rates and commissions and why they would make more using you than adsense or a similar alternative.

[benitez17]

meathead, I apologize if I came across as harsh. I really appreciate any suggestions, and as I said, this is an area that I know little about, so I am not really in a position to disregard any suggestions. Your comments just run counter to pretty much all the advice I have received in the past, so that is why I have more questions.

I signed up for Clickbank because it was convenient and they also process subscriptions for me.

I am willing to invest in a better sales page and/or put down the money required to get into a good CPA network. I don't know what your definition of deep pockets is, but I'd be willing to put down several thousand dollars as a starting point, and I have enough cash to continue to ramp that up if it is worthwhile. Is that reasonable, or not?

Do you think it would be a better idea to offer a higher up-front payment rather than recurring commissions? As I said in my first post, I offer $40 per month for each month that a person is a subscriber, and the average person is a subscriber for about 7 months, so a sale should really generate $280 in commissions for an affiliate, not just $40. I'd be willing to offer up to $90 per sale (my break-even point for the first month and 90% of the initial sale) if it would be more enticing.

I have been reaching out to other sites to act as affiliates with some success (convincing them to promote my product, but not generating sales), and I am actually in talks with a fairly major investing site to provide some content for them and have them act as an affiliate, so I will continue to pursue that.

Again, thanks for the suggestions.

[Thomas]

No worries - I'm no real expert myself am just speaking from my experience recently.

If you could get into a good CPA network you would expect to start making XXXX a day with the site - the problem is getting in in the first place. Most networks will require an introduction from another publisher or an upfront fee just to get in the door. I don't have too much experience with this myself but I was under the impression you're talking about 10k to get in and then you'll need to be able to have a mid 5 figure float or a very reliable merchant processor. I'd tweak the offer for yourself first before taking the plunge. Optimise the conversions and tweak it so you max revenue per customer.

I quite like the recurring payments, especially if you are offering a lot of value. If you can afford to offer a one-time $90 CPA this would be far more profitable for you than 40% monthly assuming you can manage the cashflow.

I would recommend hiring someone to do a lot of the contacting for you as I'm assuming your time is worth more to you than sending emails all day Hire someone in the US/UK for say, $8 an hour as you're more likely to get better quality of work. Put them on a trial and hopefully you'll start seeing a positive ROI on their time as they recruit more affiliates.

[Andy]

I would recommend hiring someone to do a lot of the contacting for you as I'm assuming your time is worth more to you than sending emails all day Hire someone in the US/UK for say, $8 an hour as you're more likely to get better quality of work. Put them on a trial and hopefully you'll start seeing a positive ROI on their time as they recruit more affiliates.

An affiliate recruiter - now that's a concept I have not heard of before. Thomas, have you noticed people doing this? I know something similar is done on a JV level but not for "common" affiliates.

Andy

[Thomas]

An affiliate recruiter - now that's a concept I have not heard of before. Thomas, have you noticed people doing this? I know something similar is done on a JV level but not for "common" affiliates.

Andy

Sure, why not! I'm not really big on affiliate marketing, but I have a girl who's full time job is to recruit affiliates and then look after them As long as I get a positive ROI on her time I can spend my time doing more productive things such as browsing forums (lol) and working on other projects. It's rarely worth your own time sitting down and emailing 100s of people, so why not get someone to do it for you

Thomas