How to Choose and Manage an Affiliate Program?

[hooperman]

Hooperman - let's say you decide to become an affiliate for a Forex membership site. You set up your own Forex based web site and drive traffic to it. All potential customers first hit a page that offers some free information in exchange for their email address. You end up building, completely ethically, a list of people interested in making money with Forex trading. You then email that list a mixture of (hopefully) good and useful information intertwined with marketing offers, one of which will be the opportunity to join the Forex membership site that you have decided to promote.

Eggbox Sh*te O'Reilly! That makes perfect sense! I've only ever forwarded potential customers on to offers from vendors, and I'd not even thought about building a list to market to. It sounds like a lot of work, though.

Thanks for the lightbulb moment James

[jamesuk]

Just as an example, here is a product that is promoted heavily on CB. http://www.richjanitor.com/ Go there and what do you find? The vendor captures emails. Not saying this is wrong, but you can see how a potential affilaite might have to be wary. I'm in no way saying that you need to be wary of this particular product, but you do have to use your brain in this game...

[hooperman]

Ah, gotcha. Earlier I thought you meant that it might just take 6 weeks or so to finally sell a tough customer (lol), but actually some unscrupulous vendors (obviously not this one) might deliberately take long enough for the affiliate cookie to expire.

[jamesuk]

It is more work, but something you can do over time. Take the forex example again - develop a report that would be useful, not something cr@ppy. This could be something you pay to have made for yourself, it could be a list of useful resources, software or audios. This is given away in exchange for the customer's email address. Then you need to develop a series of autoresponder messages. These need to be good quality and the best affiliates will have nigh on a year's worth (say 50/60 messages) - but of course, you can develop these as you go.

The beauty of having a list like this is that you can promote other relevant products as an affiliate, re-promote an upgraded version of an old product or even develop and market your own products and services.I would only do the latter if I considered myself an expert...

[hooperman]

It sounds like once you've created that year's worth of autoresponder messages, you're laughing. You can just automate the sending of those messages to new customers? Every time a new offer comes out, you can incorporate it into the autoresponder sequence...

It does sound like a lot of effort upfront but I can see how it all fits into place now, and that over time the amount of work reduces a little.

I'm really taking the ball away from benitez now (sorry!), but as an affiliate marketer, how many "campaigns" do you have running at any one time? Just being nosy now

[jamesuk]

lol yes sorry Benitez...

I have many campaigns, and these increase as time goes on. Think of targeting a niche rather than a product. So if you target Golf, it would be as follows -

Keyword research >> build site and write relevant articles targeted at keywords discovered in step 1 >> people attracted to your free offer and opt in to your list >> Autoresponder kicks in >> send mixture of useful information, resources and relevant offers. Once this process has begun, you have to work on getting your site up the search engine rankings. Four ways to do this are 1. On page SEO 2. Off page SEO 3. User engagement (Google loves sites that have users who stay a long time and re-visit often - this forum is a great example of a way to get users to-revisit your site) 4. Site growth (add more articles, blog etc)

You can see that by doing this, you are focussing on building quality sites that provide useful information that you can then use to promote any products you deem fit.And if you have done it right, you should feel that you absolutely do deserve to be paid for your efforts.

Be careful of the keywords you target in stage 1 though. Go for a mixture of keywords initially that have around 5000 searches a week in total. You can expand later. I use a free keyword tool called Traffic Travis - it's as good, if not better than a lot of paid tools. I initially only target keywords that have a TT difficulty rating of 4 or 5.

[benitez17]

Wow, I missed a lot while I was sleeping last night!

James, you have provided a lot for me to think about. The product I am selling is in a fairly small niche, and isn't something that I would think could be promoted to mass audiences. I don't think I have the greatest sales page (there is a single page that lists the information available in the members area, and people can contact me for more information). If you want to take a look at the site, let me know and I will PM you.

It sounds like I have a lot of work to do no matter what route I take, if I want to pick up some successful affiliates.

[Clinton]

These need to be good quality and the best affiliates will have nigh on a year's worth (say 50/60 messages)

I've no idea about running my own list, but I used to have a subscription to an SEO/webmaster related newsletter. When I discontinued I kept getting reminder emails to resubscribe, then a limited time renewal offer, then a discount to "win" me back, then a further sop or two. I take it all these were automated emails on a timer. But 50-60 of them?

Or are these information/article emails you're talking about? If they are, how would you suggest one build up a stock of emails in a subject that's not evergreen? In an SEO newsletter, for example, you can only cover Caffiene when Google launches it... a few months later it's stale news.

[jamesuk]

Clinton - yes I do mean information/articles. On the affiliate side of things, in a lot of niches you can build up a bank of evergreen material... golf, weight training, winning in love... all these topics will have timeless ways and methods to achieve success. I guess even with SEO topics, there are still core topics people will wish to know about - on page optimisation, off page SEO, how does article marketing work, what's a keyword etc etc. If I was an SEO expert and was building a list, I would also be looking to bring the latest relevant news to my readers too... telling interested people about Caffiene and what it means to them would be an excellent example. Perhaps then, you would have 2 lists - one for evergreen content and one for up to date news, ideas and concepts. I know for example that Chris Brogan sends different news to different lists and so does Perry Marshall. Perhaps you could capture newbs into an autoresponder that delivers the timeless stuff that everybody needs to know and then progress them onto the list for more experienced people. That way, you could also differentiate and target products that are relevant to each group to the correct list.

[Andy]

Hi Benitez. I happened over to this web-site almost by accident whilst doing (of all things) some keyword research. I generally make most of my money as an affiliate marketer and your question was interesting enough to make me want to join the forum and reply. So here's my two pennneth worth in no particular order of importance-

1. A lot of affiliate marketers at clickbank (CB) are "newbies" who have been sold on the dream of becoming overnight millionaires simply by promoting a few (mostly crappy) products on CB. They have often bought the dream through some over-hyped and over priced course which tells them to pick products based on what CB calls "Gravity". This is perhaps THE most misunderstood subject in the whole of CB affiliate marketing. In essence,Gravity is an indication of how much competition there is. It measures the number of affiliates who have each made one or more sales over the previous 8 weeks. I would need a whole book to explain properly, but suffice to say that most of the affiliates on CB will have been taught to only promote products with a high Gravity. This in fact turns out to be entirely wrong. But it's worth bearing in mind that if your offering has a low Gravity rating on CB, this in itself will be enough to put most (98%) of affiliates off.
2. There are super affiliates out there. These guys can (and will, if the deal is right for them) bring you massive traffic. And I mean massive. To attract the big affiliates, it's actually simpler than you think - concentrate on 1. having a mass market appeal product (and I mean mass market - free competitions, net detectives, earn money doing surveys, win a house for £1 etc), and 2. Having good salescopy that CONVERTS and that you can prove converts. If an affiliate is going to bother to send you streams of traffic, you will need to prove to him that you have GOOD SALES COPY THAT CONVERTS.
3. $40 a pop recurring is good money. However, if I can only sell 2 of those a month vs 100 doowaps @ $10 a month, guess which one I would put my effort into? Again - all down to conversion rates. How well does your sales page convert? In general, recurring pay checks are always more preferable than one off payments. IMO, you are wrong to be thinking of changing from recurring to (albeit higher) one off payments
4. I personally would not promote a product that doesn't allow me to capture email addresses before sending them on to the vendor. Simple thinking here is that if you have an autoresponder series that captures email addresses and then spends 6 weeks selling the customer on your membership site, I will lose my commission - you will make the sale long after my cookie has disappeared from their home drive.
5. The best affiliates actually don't need or want "affiliate packs" or banners or even much advice from you on how to sell your product. Show them a good product that you can prove CONVERTS WELL and that's all they will need. Bear in mind that they may be using PPC to get you that traffic - they might spend $2 per click through, but if your offer converts well and makes profit for them, they will do it.
6. Final thought - if you are confident in this product, you can always pay for traffic yourself either through PPC or Google's paid content network or even through paid banner advertising on appropriate sites which you can locate through various free means. Paying for traffic in this way is like a tap - you can turn traffic up, down or even off completely, depending on (yes you guessed it) HOW WELL YOUR OFFER IS CONVERTING!

Hope this helps. Please do contact me if you think I can be of any further use! I'd be happy to give your site the once over if you think it might help.

Hi James,

I agree great first post and welcome to e-p.

You've helped me understand some of the mistakes I've made in my own affiliate marketing efforts. I totally agree on the conversion issue.

Benitez - a note here - before you start changing things wholesale - take a look at your current conversion numbers - what are they overall? Keep in mind, even a lousy sales page may convert well with a good endorsement from someone like James who has taken the time to build a relationship with his list. What I'm saying is: whatever conversion numbers you are looking at are relative to the quality of traffic coming to your site.

One aspect of this is when you divert your traffic and control where it goes. This sounds complicated but it is not. Let's say James wants to promote your site to his list - instead of just sending them to your main page that converts fairly well - you two put your heads together and make them an exclusive offer and send them to a page specifically designed for them. This could increase conversion several fold.

Another way to do is when you buy traffic - such as adwords, banner ads, or even ads in newsletters. Same principle applies - send each group to a different page. Even if it's just a copy of your sales page, you can get a better idea of how each traffic source converts.

But FIRST start with the numbers you already have! Test every change you make and keep track of what works. Even if you want an entirely new sales page - test it against the old one. Believe me I've had some of my own "brilliant" work backfire on me. Many times, in my own experience and many, many others - simply changing the headline can greatly improve your conversion. Some report changing just ONE WORD increased conversion dramatically (Like 700% + -- note that without a base figure to compare this to, this number means little. If your base rate was 0.04% and you increase it to 0.07% you get a 750% increase but you still have a lousy conversion rate.)

Also be aware that what you test should depend greatly on how much traffic you get. It's no use trying to test 10 different things if you have little traffic because it will simply take far too long to gather any significant results.

Hooperman - with lists you have two ways to contact your subscribers - follow up and broadcast - the autoresponder series (follow up) should be evergreen - as it doesn't change much. News, special offers and so forth can be broadcast as needed. This doesn't mean you cannot have offers in your follow up series - you can and should - but anything here should be timeless so you need not tweak it. Thus you could go on vacation for a while and your subs are periodically reminded you exist. This helps keep your list "warm".

Andy