Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for November 2005

Ask Shawn Collins: Competing with Your Affiliates in Data Feed Distribution

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Q: I am pretty new to Affiliate marketing. I watched your web seminar on StartupNation.com a couple months ago and started our affiliate program soon after. I offer a free Data Feed on ShareASale.com and now my affiliates are in direct competition with me on sites like Froogle, PriceGrabber, etc. I cant decide if this is a good thing or bad thing. We like having more exposure, but when a customer places an order through an affiliate via Froogle when my free listing is on the same results page, it’s tough to swallow paying 12% on the sale when I could have had it for 0%. If possible, could you give me thoughts on this situation?

Shawn CollinsA: Yours is a common issue and one that is sort of parallel to competing with your own affiliates on the pay per click search engines.

The solution here is to establish ground rules in your affiliate agreement. ShareASale.com has all affiliates agree to certain standards when they join the network – basics about not putting affiliate banners on adult or hate sites, no spamming, no fraud, etc.

But you also have the opportunity to add conditions that are unique to your affiliate program.

I would encourage you to consult with a lawyer and draft some terms and conditions for your affiliate program regarding data feed usage and any other issues you might wish to cover.

If you have certain sites where you already run your company data feed and don’t wish for affiliates to compete with you, just institute that rule (and police it).

On another note, I see you have impressive, popular brands on your site. If you do not wish to allow your affiliates to leverage those brands in title tags, meta tags, PPCs, etc., be sure to specify this information in your agreement.

However, if you wish to essentially outsource the marketing of these products in PPCs and other areas, don’t set any guidelines, and then encourage your affiliates to use these brands to increase their sales.

Affiliate Marketing in Layman’s Terms?

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The following is what Peter Phillips of eTech Support had to say in response to the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate market has been the popular method of promoting online business & has been used widely, and slowly realizing its potential.

It is a simple process where an affiliate is rewarded for a visitor or a customer provided through his efforts. The advantage of this kind of marketing is you pay only when you get results if you don’t get a customer or a visitor you don’t need to pay.

Some businesses owe much of their growth and succes to affiliate marketing. Internet awareness is on the rise steadily, New blogs, websites are exploding daily. New ventures are explored, in such view affiliate marketing is also gaining fast pace.

Affiliate marketing has also generated a source of income for geeks or entrepreneurs wishing to get a foothold in Internet. Any geek with fairly good members on website could easily implement this strategy to earn an extra income.

This also works well for advertising companies who get customers in exchange for a small referral. Affiliate marketing has only started now, it reflects bright future ahead.

How would you answer the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing? There are no right or wrong answers.

The author of any response that is published at affiliatetip.com or affiliatesummit.com will receive their choice of one of the following:

  • Size: small ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: medium ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: large ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Affiliate Summit coffee mug
  • Affiliate Summit optical mouse for a notebook computer

Share your thoughts now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=281531467120

RSS Reader Poll – Tell Us What You Want

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I am part of a team working on the upcoming release of inclue! (www.inclue.com), an RSS reader in Beta that will enable users to get their subscribed RSS feeds in Outlook.

We are currently gathering some data from both publishers of RSS feeds and RSS subscribers, so we can optimize inclue! and try to make it an RSS reader you would use and suggest to others.

Please take a few minutes and complete one or both of the following surveys:

RSS publishers: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=949131551110
RSS subscribers: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=793851551158

In appreciation of your time, we will be compiling a report to share the collected data, and this will be sent to everybody that shares their opinions. The published data will all be anonymous – no sites or individuals will be cited.

If you’d like to play around with inclue!, you can download it at http://www.inclue.com/.

Ask Shawn Collins: Fundraising Affiliates in the UK

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Q: I had someone contact me asking if there are any reputable loyalty/fundraising websites open to folks in the UK who want to shop online on behalf of a certain cause?

Shawn CollinsA: I am not aware of any cause related sites in the UK. But when it comes to loyalty sites, there is GreasyPalm, which is a cash back rewards site.

The marketing directory for GreasyPalm is reknowned affiliate marketer Neil Durrant, who has been a fixture in the industry since the early days.

Hopefully some others can provide insight in the comments for this post.

What do you want out of networking at the Affiliate Summit?

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We’ve gotten questions from Affiliate Summit attendees asking what affiliates/merchants want to know when meeting one another at the various networking opportunities.

So we’ve put together a very brief survey to give you an opportunity to anonymously share what you’d like to know or find out when meeting potential partners in Las Vegas.

Please take a moment and fill out the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=150951554669

This applies to all attendees of Affiliate Summit 2006.

Relationships are Key at All Levels of Affiliate Marketing

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The following is what Salvatore A. Conca of Puritan’s Pride had to say in response to the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing?

I believe the future of affiliate marketing lies with the consumer. Merchants, affiliates and the like will all need to adapt to how people want to receive their content.

Consumers are fickle and they are smart. Consumers know how exactly to find the information they want.

The internet is not a mystery anymore so much as it is an integrated part of our daily lives. I believe there will be a new breed of innovators that utilize the latest technologies to deliver their content like those that utilize RSS and Blogs today.

As history has shown us, relationships are the cornerstone of marketing. Relationships are what matter most. Merchant relationships with their affiliates and affiliate relationships with the consumer, which in turn creates the merchant to consumer relationship.

As simple of an idea as that is and as many times as we may have heard it, I think many of us forget that the relationships are the building blocks of our success no matter where the technology leads us or how automated our programs become.

How would you answer the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing? There are no right or wrong answers.

The author of any response that is published at affiliatetip.com or affiliatesummit.com will receive their choice of one of the following:

  • Size: small ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: medium ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: large ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Affiliate Summit coffee mug
  • Affiliate Summit optical mouse for a notebook computer

Share your thoughts now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=281531467120

Monetizing Blogs Though Affiliate Programs

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The New York Times reports that businesses are spending “$50 million to $100 million this year on blog advertising and marketing.”

Many blog writers have signed up for Google’s AdSense program, which started in 2003 and pays Web publishers based on how many times advertisements on their sites receive clicks. Google places the ads on participating Web sites using contextual word matching, in an attempt to ensure that the advertisements relate to the content on the page.

Bloggers are also making money through “affiliate networks,” which, in contrast to Google’s automated system, allow blog writers to choose which advertisements to put on their pages. They also can be paid based on how often ads on their sites lead to sales rather than how often the ads receive clicks. Shareasale, Commission Junction and LinkShare are three such network companies.

“You have all these self-publishers, people like the bloggers, who suddenly become business partners with Fortune 500 companies,” said Heidi S. Messer, the president and chief operating officer of LinkShare, which connects Web writers with companies like Dell, Wal-Mart and Apple Computer.

Ask Shawn Collins: Performance Based Affiliate Management

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I am working part-time as an affiliate manager. The merchant wants to pay me performance-based with a percentage of all partner income. What percent do you think would be a fair deal for both sides?

Beware of any merchant that insists that you manage their affiliate program strictly on performance. Of course, the merchant prefers that approach – it presents them with zero risk.

It also takes away their incentive to properly invest in the affiliate marketing channel for their company. They may not have a completive offer, affiliate commission, etc.

And if the affiliate program flops, you lose and the affiliates lose, but the merchant is unaffected.

They’ll tell you they want you to have skin in the game to keep you motivated. When they say that, be sure to smile and agree. Then tell them that you’d like a hybrid deal that provides you with a monthly retainer for your services, as well as a percent of the transactions generated by the affiliates.

And if you are working on a contract basis, don’t blindly signed their agreement. Run it by a local attorney to be sure that the terms of mutual and fair.

Ask Shawn Collins: Business to Business Affiliate Programs

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Q: What are your thoughts on whether affiliate marketing will work for a business selling a very cheap subscription service to other businesses? Or is affiliate marketing much more successful for B2C marketing?

Shawn CollinsA: In general, affiliate marketing is most commonly used in B2C programs, but it can certainly work with B2B products and services, too.

The main issue is the market demand for your subscription service. I would urge you to manage expectations with an affiliate program. Some folks go into it with the idea that an affiliate program can carry their company.

This does happen in some cases, but it’s not the norm. So you ought to plan for affiliate marketing to account for an incremental 10 to 25% of your business.

Take a look around to see whether your competitors have an affiliate program, or more importantly whether they used to have an affiliate program. It’s always nice to learn from their mistakes.

However, even if your prime competitor had an affiliate program at one point and does not have one now, that does not mean it cannot work for your niche. It may well be that their program perished due to poor management.

As far as the technology for a B2B affiliate program, you ought to ask all prospective vendors to give you a sample of the affiliates in their affiliate network that would make sense for your affiliate program.

If they cannot provide some examples of affiliates for your program, it’s a good sign that you’ll be doing all of the affiliate recruiting and can do without the cost of a network.

Affiliate Marketing is as Good as the People Behind It

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The following is what Daniel Schonfeld of PrimeQ had to say in response to the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing?

As I wrote about in Adbumb this past month, the future of Affilate Marketing is in the hands of its sales staff.

Affiliate marketing is beoming ever so popular, but popular for what? A new way for an advertiser to reach the massees or for the Largest affiliate networks to branch out to smaller ones.

It seems as though new affiliate networks serve as individual super affiliates to a much larger source. Dont get me wrong, there is money to be made this way but how is it adding to our industry growth potential?

Just as the planets revolve around the sun so do smaller networks around the larger ones. The question is, at what point will the sun eclipse those planets and have no need for the smaller networks.

Zips and Email offers and several other usual suspects are 90% of up and coming networks and they certainly aren’t exclusive or even competitive. If we all ascertain the same offers and have for the most part the same affiliate base it’s only a matter of time before the affiliates smarten up and go with the larger networks.

So diversification, uniqueness and innovation among offers are the future of affiliate marketing.

The web is filled with over 1 million ” Potential Advertisers” – why are we catering to the same 50? Lets get in gear, hire and train great salespeople and make affiliate marketing what it should be, the greatest marketing medium in the world.

How would you answer the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing? There are no right or wrong answers.

The author of any response that is published at affiliatetip.com or affiliatesummit.com will receive their choice of one of the following:

  • Size: small ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: medium ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: large ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Affiliate Summit coffee mug
  • Affiliate Summit optical mouse for a notebook computer

Share your thoughts now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=281531467120