Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for April 2005

Ask Shawn Collins: Affiliate Program Startup

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Q: I am President of a skincare company with products in the natural product industry. We have rights to unique products that lend themselves to Internet marketing. My question is how do I go about selling my product on the Internet through affiliate marketing programs?

Shawn CollinsA: The preparation and launch of an affiliate program is key in getting started on the right foot. There are budgetary, legal, marketing, and technical issues that will need to be addressed.

As far as the budgeting, there are three cost centers involved – the costs for the affiliate technology, the salary of the affiliate manager, and the commission to the affiliates.

The affiliate agreement dictates the rules for your program. This is a legal agreement between you and your affiliates, and it must cover all of the hot button issues, as well as any rules and regulations unique to your industry or company.

Then there is the marketing. You will have to come up with the creative for your affiliates to use. At a minimum, I would suggest ten text links of varying lengths, and five banners in IAB standard sizes. I generally offer the following, as they tend to be most popular with my affiliates: 120×90, 120×600, 250×250, 468×60, and 728×90 pixels.

Finally, you should perform due diligence to determine the best affiliate solution provider for you. After this is decided, you’ll have to take care of the technical implementation of the affiliate tracking, as well as quality assurance and testing.

It’s important to dedicate proper resources to the affiliate management for your affiliate program. If you do not have the right candidate internally, you should consider outsourcing your affiliate program management.

Ask Shawn Collins: Best Way to Advertise a New Affiliate Program

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Q: What’s the best way to advertise a new affiliate program?

Shawn CollinsA: The best way depends on how much you have in your budget to market your new affiliate program, as well as how your program stacks up against others in the same category.

If you have money to spend, run ads through BlogAds, BlogKits, Google AdWords, and Overture to recruit new affiliates.

Also, try advertising on the various message boards that cater to affiliates.

Another worthwhile spend is a mailing through CPA Tipline. This will expose your affiliate program to lots of quality affiliates.

And a great way to meet and greet affiliates in person is to attend and/or sponsor an affiliate marketing conference.

But don’t go out with an aggressive marketing effort to recruit affiliates before your affiliate program is fine tuned. Make sure it’s competitive with the other affiliate programs in your category.

How is your commission, return days, creative, etc. compared with your competitors? It’s essential to do some reconnaissance on the affiliate programs in your space.

180solutions Responds to Wayne Porter, but Did They Answer Him?

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Back in March, Wayne Porter challenged 180solutions to answer a series of questions on their business practices and such.

In Wayne’s blog, Cory Magnus of 180solutions protests that “The notion that many of our users came from improper installs is an urban legend started in the anti-spyware community.”

Do urban legends about spyware actually exist? I do think some anti-spyware apps are overboard in what they detect and remove, namely affiliate cookies, but it rings as a little silly that people are ganging up on a clean, innocent piece of software.

One of my favorite answers was to Porter’s question, “180 is getting a lot of flak right now, and perhaps this flak is well deserved giving the issue of stealth installs. Why do you feel anyone should trust 180 Solutions after all the things that happened before?”

The response from 180solutions seemed to have been to the question, “Why would somebody want to work for 180solutions”?

I’m not sure how their office having “a bright, vibrant community of talented people” makes them trustworthy, but it does sound nice.

180solutions cites things such as being “recognized as one of the fastest growing private companies in Washington and in the U.S.” as well as being “a best company to work for in Washington” to bolster their claims of being trustworthy.

So they’ve got a lot of smart people and a nice work environment – that is great for their employees, but um… why should I trust them?

Of course, they are just like any other media company, or so they say. According to 180solutions, “Just like NBC we are in the business of connecting advertisers to consumers… clearly NBC is in the business of showing advertisements that sponsor content. 180 does the same thing.”

I suppose you could make a comparison in a VERY broad sense. Some things are starkly different. For instance, if you search for NBC on Google, you see a bunch of sites related to NBC.

However, a search for 180solutions on Google yields a bevy of natural and paid results geared towards educating consumers in the operation and removal of 180solutions.

So many products geared towards the removal of 180solutions just to reinforce some urban legend? Come on now!

One of the higher ranking natural results is an interesting bit of research, “The Effect of 180solutions on Affiliate Commissions and Merchants,” by respected urban legend debunker, Ben Edelman.

If it’s writ, we must acquit? Thanks, but no.

Finding best practices in affiliate marketing

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From the April 2005 issue of Internet Retailer…

Although well established by now, affiliate marketing is new enough that marketers are still looking for best practices. Consultant Shawn Collins annually surveys marketers who use affiliates–sites that drive traffic to e-retailers` or other marketers` sites.

His AffStat 2005 report is just out and the range of answers reveals the wide variety of approaches that marketers take. Among the interesting data is that 75% of marketers manage their affiliate programs in-house, 30% have reduced the size of their affiliate networks in the past year and 28% allow affiliates to bid on the marketer`s own brand name in search engines.

See the stats at http://internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=14573