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Are you better off to snub the little guy and go for the gold in the big time affiliates or is it better to woo the little guys in mass?
A consultant told us that we are better off just skipping the mom & pops and going for the top but...
It seems to me that a healthier affiliate program would have plenty of the little guys too. Buy.com just released some numbers showing that their catering to smaller affiliates has paid off.
What do you think?
You should probably balance it out with some of both. In sales, there is something known as the "80%/20% Rule". It means that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of the participants.
Keep in mind that acorns grow into trees. (This is analogous to the small affiliate or small business.) Some trees though are cut down to make way for opportunities. (Big businesses can go out of business too. If you grow dependent on a particular affiliate, you may find yourself in the same boat.)
As your program grows, you can reevaluate which of the smaller affiliates you want to keep.
Ted
The small websites one may snub probably buy your products even if they can't sell them as an affiliate. Abandoning them is a mistake for this reason also you get free branding even if they can't sell anything. Small affiliates become larger with time in many cases. One small affiliate angry with a given program's unfairness can create a great deal amount of negative publicity.
If an affiliate program converts and is for a thing people actually buy then small and large sites should be signing up for the program. You should court the larger ones personally, but the ones that sign up on their own will largely be small sites. You can handle the small affiliates with discounts or gift certificates also. If you can't justify paying out a $5 commission check maybe a $5 off of sales coupon might work just the same for your smaller affiliates.
How will you tell the little guys from the big guys? Sure you can create a "gate way" of levels that need to be achieved in order for affiliate to get paid. However, as someone put it here often times little guys turn into big guys, and I know it is hard to tell.
When I got serious about marketing online about a year ago I was making maybe about three or four hundered bucks monthly. So far this year I have already made more money with affilate programs than I did working as a chef for 11 months last year.
I guess all I am saying is that when you do start working with affiliates once they are in your program never second guess any of them.
Also, little guys like myself can make there own decsions and start working a program on a dime. A company might need to get the "go ahead" from others within that company.
Brian
>>Are you better off to snub the little guy and go for the gold in the big time affiliates or is it better to woo the little guys in mass? <<
Your wording here is interesting. I'd say neither snub little guys, nor go after masses. Look for quality, big and small.
Regardless of the size of the affiliate, give them the tools and support they ask for and need to promote your site to their audience and you'll have the best chances of succeeding.
Unless you're a major brand or get some good help, you'll likely have a difficult time getting the attention of the big guys at first. The smaller affiliates will be your initial sales force.
You'll be amazed at how big the right "little guys" can produce. A lot of a little is a lot.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean approach the websites at the top of the SERPs about becoming one of our affiliates?
Correct..Also look through the directories and contact those sites that are appropriate.
I am selling on Amazon (using individual links) and I'm trying to get a couple of my CJ advertisers to do more product links ... I even sold on a link to the front door of one just because it was supposed to be a product link. But just slapping a banner on a page does next to NOTHING for the affiliate or the advertiser.
We are thinking about keeping it inhouse after looking at several affiliate companies. We have the means to track sales very accurately and we would be able to give access to every page on our site, which I have read (thanks to this forum) is very important to affiliates. It seems like if we can do it ourselves, in the long run it would be a healthier, better program.
Thanks to everyone for the info. It will go a long way in helping us develop this program.
I used to program for a hosting company that had a couple clients doing in-house affiliate programs. Can be done very well. The weakness they had was poor reporting. Affiliates like to see click-throughs, not just sales. They like to see the date of the clicks. They like to see which link/product got the click. And they like to see the products they've sold.
They also like long-term affiliations -- lifetime are best. A major gripe against Amazon is that its cookies are only for 24 hours. Makes us think Amazon is competing against us, its sales force.
Good luck w/ the program.
I have taken into account the reporting and I think that most affiliates would be please with what we could provide. We already have a system for tracking online ads that hooks into our backend that gives us this info and more. It wouldn't be too tough to tweak it for an affiliate program.
The cookie is the biggest sticking point but not from a technology standpoint. While I understand it, the PTB here won't. Maybe if they see it is an industry standard, that will help. But inhouse or outside, the cookie would be a problem either way. It's hard to explain to non web people how internet users work (shop and play).
