Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Currently we have a simple web-based system we developed that will build a database of the top x number of sites for any term(s) we want. Then we go through the list manually, visiting every site to locate potential affiliates.
If it looks like a match we send a very short and to the point email, asking if they sell advertising or if they would be interested in joining our affiliate program.
In a nutshell, the response is just horrible. We pick up maybe 1 new affiliate for every 100 emails we send out.
Very few responses at all - not even the usual "send more info", "no thanks I'm not interested", "I'll think about it", etc. which leads me to believe a lot of the emails aren't even being read i.e filtered as spam, etc.
I know it's just a numbers game, but at this point I'm thinking of fully automating our sytem to send the emails to all the sites and just eliminate the manual process completely.
My only concern is that we really don't want to be sending emails to sites that aren't a good match, and we definitely don't want to be accused of spam (would that be spam?)
I just don't know how to proceed at this point. Even paying a "link monkey" relatively low wages to do the work it just seems like a huge waste of someone's time to be visiting all these sites manually if the response is so poor.
As far as I know we're doing everything "right". Do people just get so bombarded with link requests, etc. that most of these types of emails are ignored automatically?
As a webmaster myself I read every email I get unless it's obvious viagra, rolex, etc spam. And if someone offered to pay me $1 per free signup at their site and it was a logical match to my own site I would definitely take a look.
Any ideas or suggestions?
[edited by: martinibuster at 1:42 am (utc) on Jan. 17, 2005]
[edit reason] spelling [/edit]
