Forum Moderators: skibum
For the Merchants:
1. How easy is it join an affiliate program like the top names such as CJ, Linkshare, Performics, etc.? Meaning what gets rated when joining; is it monthly hits, content quality, willing to spend, etc.
2. When joining an affiliate program are you locked in to that affiliate network or are you free to join other affiliate networks at your discretion? If yes, do you think this is beneficial?
3. Can you join an affiliate program if you have a site that is strictly an affiliate site? I have one site that strictly sells amazon.com products...so I do not have a thank-you page or shopping cart...everything is handled by amazon...i just list amazon products. Can a site like this be included into an affiliate program?
4. Lastly, which affiliate program do you think is the best of them all or do you feel running your own in-house affiliate program is the best solution?
For the Publishers:
1. Does it matter much to you who is running the affiliate program? Meaning would you sign up FREE and advertise for a in-house affiliate program regardless if it was a third-party big name or not.
2. As an advertiser which affiliate program would you suggest I stay clear of? Meaning which affiliate program have you had trouble with in the past or you wouldn't ever do business with?
3. What usually attracts you to publish affiliate creatives? Is it the targeted audience, the professionalism of the site, the percentage of the payout, etc.?
4. Lastly, if you were to advertise for me what are the key things you would look for before signing up for my affiliate program?
Please anyone feel free to share your thoughts!
Merchant Questions
1 - setting up your site to join an affiliate program is really difficult. Most of the affiliate sites have clauses in the agreement where your site will only feature their affiliate program in your entire shopping cart system. Many of these sites (CJ, for example), requires a minimum sales volume to join (CJ requires 500 sales/day to join, regardless of the price of what is sold).
2 - usually you are stuck with one depending on the terms of use. Most affiliate networks require some coding to be added to your cart pages, which can really mess around with other affiliate program code that you install. Overall I've found that from a merchant perspective, you really can only run one affiliate site for any shopping site (that's why the affiliate program on our sites are all developed in-house and managed by us, gives us alot more control - and do you honestly want CJ and those other sites knowing your sales information even if they didn't help to generate those sales?)
3 - from a merchant perspective no. If you are trying to get an affiliate system onto a merchant site, it implies that you have your own shopping cart setup and running.
4 - like I said above we use our own in-house affiliate system. But I have run many successful ClickBank affiliate sites and was quite happy with the results (certain ebooks and digital products sell like there's no tomorrow on that site).
Publisher Questions
1 - I personally don't care. As long as the system works, is reliable in its tracking, and doesn't have any flaws.
2 - I've never really had problems with advertising programs. Over time you'll find that certain products sell better through certain advertising medians (banners, text ads, adsense, newsletters, etc). But overall I usually stick with the big advertising companies so I know I won't get burned.
3 - The affiliate sites that I run focus very tightly into niche markets that I have alot of knowledge about. I only push out these sites for products that I'm very familiar with and can't find alot of information about online as it is. That way it's easy to become a leader in the search engine rankings.
4 - Details about the products you sell, the prices that consumers will have to pay, the payout rate that affiliates get. I'd then spend some time looking around your site to see if I would want to buy anything from it (if a site does not appeal to me, I simply won't work with it). Web Design/UI is very important. I'm not about to setup massive traffic flows to your site if the conversion rate in general is very poor. I.e. if I spend $100 to send, for example, 1000 visitors to your site through various advertising medians and only get 10 sales (law of averages) and get paid $10 for each sale, then I'm not going to be happy since I'll have an ROI of zero. Wheres I can do the same on Amazon, for example, and get 50 sales, each which pays $5 (netting $250, profit of $150 for me). So it really comes down to the products and your site design.
