Shawn Collins' Blog

Affiliate marketing and other stuff from Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit.

Archives for March 2005

Ask Shawn Collins: How to Join Affiliate Programs

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Q: Would it be better for us to go one by one and join the affiliate program of individual sites, or I notice there are outfits like Commission Junction. Do they represent a load of sites, so we would join just Commission Junction and become partners with ALL of their sites? Can you mix and match? Join Commission Junction and also individual sites?

Shawn CollinsA: You can find hundreds of sites through the various affiliate networks (Commission Junction, Kolimbo, LinkShare, and Performics), as well as in the affiliate program directories (AffiliateTip.com, AssociatePrograms.com, and Refer-it).

You can pick and choose which sites you’d like to apply to at the affiliate networks, and the directories will provide links to apply to affiliate programs.

And if you come across sites that you like and you think they’d sell something you’d like to offer through your site, take a look at their footer. If they have an affiliate program, there is often a link in the footer that says ‘Become an Affiliate’ or ‘Affiliate Program.’

Another place to find quality affiliate programs is the CPA Tipline newsletter. You can subscribe to receive email featuring the latest offers.

One word of caution – resist the urge to join every affiliate program, and focus on those that are as relevant as possible to the target audience for your site.

Low Hanging Fruit in Affiliate Marketing

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We hear a lot of low hanging fruit in affiliate marketing. Some people refer to the industry itself as an opportunity to grab low hanging fruit.

Shawn CollinsOthers castigate certain affiliates (PPC arbitrage) as grabbing the low hanging fruit that should be going organically to merchants.

But there is one area of affiliate marketing that should be treated as low hanging fruit, yet affiliate managers tend to look at it more as forbidden fruit.

I’m talking about inactive affiliates. I’m frequently asked about strategies to recruit new affiliates, but nobody seems to concentrate on activating their existing affiliate force.

There is the frequent citation of the 98/2 rule with 98% of the affiliate program transactions being generated by 2% of the affiliates, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Some outreach to inactive affiliates can go a long way towards shifting the numbers to a far more favorable ratio. So many affiliate managers are adamant about never booting inactive affiliates because there might be a diamond in the rough, or so the party line goes.

In my recent AffStat 2005 research, approximately 70% of affiliate managers said they hadn’t removed any affiliates from their program in the last year.

So there might be lots of diamonds in that rough, but nobody knows, because they are not doing a thing to find them. Not for nothing, but if I thought I had some diamonds, I’d be concentrating on them, rather than just focusing on selling the program to new people.

Regardless, you’ve already got these affiliates in your program, so work on getting them active, rather than climbing to the top of the tree to pick more and more of the high hanging fruit.