Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for November 2009

Finding Niche Affiliates

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Q: I am a new affiliate manager and am working on recruiting affiliates to my niche. How do I use search to find qualified affiliates of my competition, or even if they are not promoting my competition?

Shawn CollinsA: There are a handful of software programs, such as Link Capture that purport enabling you to find the affiliates of your competition.

Essentially, these programs run queries in search engines and enable you to save some time in finding which sites are ranking well for various searches, as well as which sites are linking to your competitor’s site(s).

Presumably, those companies linking to your competitor(s) are affiliates, but this technique relies on affiliate programs having affiliates link directly to the company’s domain, as Amazon.com and other affiliate programs do.

Most affiliate programs use a redirected url with affiliate networks, so this method isn’t useful. You can do this sort of search on your own via Google Webmaster Central.

Also, search on the big search engines to see which sites rank well for your top keyword searches. Then contact these sites to see if they’d be willing to work with you.

Affiliate Duffers at ShareASale ThinkTank

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ShareASale ThinkTank 2009, which took place October 23-25, 2009 at the Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Coast, CA, kicked off with a bunch of affiliate marketers playing golf with CEO Brian Littleton.

During the networking event on the first evening of ThinkTank, there was a funny video with highlights and lowlights of the golfers.

ShareASale is providing DVDs to any of the golfers that participated that day.

How to Get a Company to Start an Affiliate Program

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Q: One of the many hats that I wear is visual merchandiser in the retail sector. Part of my responsibility to distribute multiple goods to form a display at malls in Vegas and CA. Multiple items from multiple vendors; up to 12 items. How do I get a non-affiliate traditional online manufacturer (i.e acrylic signs) to fit a traditional affiliate program? Example: my retail client needs a merchandise setup of 3 racks, 2 shelves, and 2 acrylic signs. I would be happy to set up a way to sell the products from my own site but I don’t want to manufacture nor ship them. What would you suggest. Most retail companies are archaic when it comes to affiliate. Any and all ideas welcome:)

Shawn CollinsA: First, search around more, because there are plenty off B2B affiliate programs. There may already be a vendor out there supplying these goods, who has an affiliate program, who you haven’t come across.

In your case, try one of your keeywords with affliate program (i.e. acrylic sign affiliate program).

Also, if you want to see if a particular site has an affiliate program, since some do a great job of hiding their affiliate programs, run a search like this in Google: site:acrylicsignworld.com affiliate

If those two methods fail, it could well be that there are no affiliate programs for the particular niche, because the companies don’t want to do it, or have no idea about affiliate marketing.

In this scenario, you’re going to be spinning your wheels if you set out to sell them on an affiliate program just so you can promote them.

It’s a pretty big undertaking for them to get started with an affiliate program, so if they don’t have one, try working out a relationship where they’ll provide a unique coupon code or something to track your referrals.

Affiliate Marketing: Get Rich Slow or Never

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I got an email today from a stranger. It’s an email I get a few times a week from desperate people that are looking to make money fast.

Make money online - get rich quickIt’s almost as if they’re on the same template with these three components:

  • Something terrible has happened (sick family, lost job, bad investments, etc.).
  • They found me on Google.
  • How can they make money really fast in affiliate marketing?

I might as well set up a canned response in Gmail, because I invariably send them all the same answer, but with slightly different words.

I explain that affiliate marketing can be a great supplement to income, but it’s a slow grind to make that supplemental cash, and most people will quit before their first modest check.

Back in 1997 when I first got started as an affiliate, I had low expectations. After all, who was getting paid for putting up sites back then? Certainly not anybody I knew. They all had conventional jobs like me. We got on trains and commuted to the city.

But slowly, money started coming in. Not a lot, mind you, and it wasn’t proportionate to the time I was putting in. I might have averaged 50% of minimum wage my first couple months.

Then I was getting enough to pay for my hosting (a common goal for affiliates back in the 90s). I persevered, and other bills started getting covered. But I was way far away from making my affiliate action into a career.

At the same time, I was working a 9-5 on weekdays. I was also serving as the weekend sports editor for NJ.com (pulling down Newark Star Ledger sports stories by FTP and converting them from text to HTML – I got to write the headlines, too). This was 6am to 9am every Saturday and Sunday for $20/hour, and I was ecstatic to make such a grand rate.

I was also running a site for a ticket broker, and making online birth announcements by hand. I was scraping nickels and dimes where I could.

As time passed, I was able to drop some other projects and focus more on affiliate marketing. After a couple or three years, I was making more as an affiliate than I made at my first job.

That was hardly an overnight success – more like 1,000 overnights. All these years later (going on 13 as an affiliate), I supplement my income with affiliate action.

Long story short… if you want to make money as fast as I did, go out and work seven days a week, live lean, and be patient.

Oh yeah, and don’t buy those ebooks, videos, or whatever else that promise you the secret to fast money. Those are only fast money for the huckster selling them, and you’ll just be deeper in the hole.

Navigating the Internet Advertising Tax

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Commission Junction has posted the video from a panel I was on at CJU this past September called Navigating the Internet Advertising Tax.

Shawn Collins at CJU 2009

Other panelists were Jonathan Johnson, President of Overstock; Brook Schaaf of Schaaf Consulting; and David Lewis, CEO of Cashbaq.

Kerri Pollard, General Manager of Commission Junction, moderated the panel.

Watch the video at http://www.cj.com/news/internet_tax_cju.html and you can download the slides to follow along.

For more on the conference, read my recap of CJU 2009.

How to Deal with Coupon Affiliates

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Q: Any ecommerce store whose checkout includes a coupon prompt will have the issue of paying out affiliate commissions for sales that were already in their shopping carts.

Many merchants consider affiliates who focus on offering coupons poachers because it is the merchant’s coupon prompt that caused their buyers who came in through ppc or organic listings to click on an affiliate link.

Merchants are reluctant to remove the coupon prompt because they use it to generate repeat sales from their in-house mailing lists.

What is the best solution for removing the coupon prompt from the shopping cart while still being able to offer discounts to newsletter subscribers?

We hate to decline all affiliates who offer coupons because many quality affiliates do generate sales AND offer coupons? What should a merchant do who already has affiliates whose sales are all coupon related? Should we lower the commission – maybe cut it in half – or eliminate that affiliate?

There is some concern that taking either action might cause those affiliates to retaliate with negative reviews or publicity for the merchant. We look forward to your expert advice on this serious issue for merchants and affiliates alike.

To clarify for those who don’t know why this is a huge issue: if a merchant is buying traffic and then ends up taking both a discount off the retail price and paying affiliate commissions on the same sale those sales my cease to be profitable. They could even end up losing money on them.

Shawn CollinsA: I think one problem here is that you’re looking at your affiliates as some sort of adversaries, rather than partners.

It’s you’re own setup that is causing the conflict… not the affiliates.

The simple answer is that any affiliate that doesn’t provide a net gain for you in your transactions shouldn’t be in your affiliate program.

In this case, I don’t think you should assign blame to these coupon affiliates, as they’re performing as they are supposed to by delivering targeted leads.

I would sugggest either revising your payout structure immediately or reaching out to these particular affiliates and explaining the situation.

Then, you may be able to come up with a creative solution.

I don’t think any affiliates will be particularly excited about slashing their commissions, but it comes down to the EPCs they can generate, and if those numbers are working for them, they’ll continue working with you.

In the end, if it doesn’t work out for either you or the affiliates, just end the relationship and move on.

Ask the Experts: Thought Shapers and Influencers

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Ask the Experts: Thought Shapers and Influencers panel from Affiliate Summit West 2007, which took place January 21-23, 2007 in Las Vegas, NV.

  • Marty Fahncke, President, FawnKey & Associates (Moderator)
  • Chris Henger, Vice-President of Affiliate Marketing, Performics
  • David Lewis, VP, Business Development, ThisNext and Founder, 77Blue
  • Corey Newhouse, Founder and CMO, Amazing Clubs
  • Brook Schaaf, Principal, Schaaf Consulting

Industry firebrands in a no holds barred exchange on the hot button issues. Hear from the characters in the industry that start and shape the conversations.

Note: the companies and positions listed above were current as of the time of the conference. Some of this information may have changed since then.

Video: Ask the Experts: Thought Shapers and Influencers