Affiliates – What to Look for in an Affiliate Program

September 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The past two posts have been about programs vetting affiliates. Well, let’s turn things around and talk about how you, the affiliate, can determine if you want to work with a program or not.~lOOk~

Whether you are approached by a program or you find them yourself, the methods you will use will probably be the same. Your main focus should be “will partnering with this program help or hinder me in reaching my website goals?”.

We’ll assume that no matter what type of site you have (blog, mini-site, forum, regular site, social media campaign, etc.) your goal is to be an expert in your niche or market. You want your readers to trust you and your website. Make sure the affiliate programs you choose to promote are in line with your thinking.

You are the best judge to know if a product will resonate with your audience or not. You live, sleep and breathe you niche, so we obviously don’t need to tell you how to judge if your audience will like it. Chances are, if you like it, so will your audience.

There are many other factors to consider besides is the product a good fit.

General Information

How long has the store be in business? What do they sell? Do they sell anything morally objectionable to you or your audience? Are their products in line with your views (e.g. an eco-blog will want to make sure all of the products contain recycled materials). Who owns the store? What makes this store unique?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Affiliate Info

How to Vet Affiliates Who have Applied for Your Program

August 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We have already covered vetting potential affiliates that you want to recruit, and here is our very short “how to” on vetting the people who have applied to your program.

The most important thing to take from this post is ask questions. If something seems a bit strange about their application, send them a quick email asking them to explain whatever you don’t understand.

Things you might want clarified:

  • their site/blog does not seem related to your market
  • you don’t understand their language
  • they are in Hong Kong and you don’t ship outside of Madison, WI, USA
  • They haven’t posted on their blog in ages
  • their URL provided is to a blank page
  • their methods of promotion may not work with your product
  • they appear to be a competitor of yours
In any of these cases, send them an email asking them to clarify. You don’t know their story, they could planning on setting up a new blog, or revamping an older one, they could be using social media only. You won’t know unless you ask for clarification.
If everything makes sense to you, scan their site to make sure it is a good match, that their readers are your target market (you won’t sell much of your grass-fed beef jerky on a vegan blog) and that they are not on wordpress.com or tumblr.
Wait … what? Yes, certain free blogging sites like wordpress.com (not to be confused with wordpress.org which is self hosted wordpress – yes, totally confusing) and tumblr do not allow affiliate links on their platforms. So if the blog address is whatever.wordpress.com or whatever.tumblr.com you may want to let them know affiliate links are not allowed.
You have to ability to turn down sites on whatever criteria you see fit for your program. If the site has nothing to do with your market and they haven’t provided a reasonable response to your questions, you can reject them and ask them to reapply when they have a site suited to your products.
So use your power for good, and go get some awesome new affiliates!
Filed Under: Uncategorized

How to Vet Potential Affiliates in Under a Minute

August 22, 2011 By 1 Comment
magnifying glass

Image via Wikipedia

One of the most time consuming parts of running an affiliate program is the recruiting. We have tried to make it easier on you, by providing our reports of people we think may be good affiliates for you.

So you have a list of potential affiliates, from us and from doing your own research, now what? How do you know who will be a good affiliate? And how long will this process take?

We are all about speed at Wigify. Let’s zoom through your list in way under a minute per entry.

Here is our  quick and easy guide to vetting potential affiliates.

(Note: this process should not used for people who have applied to your program already, that will be a post later this week.)

For this example, we are using the blog Tech Crunch, which is a super huge tech blog, but the same process will be for all blogs and sites.

Paste the site url in your browser. Do a quick scan of the first page. What do you notice?

This Goes Without Saying

But I am going to say it anyway. Is the blog/site a good fit for you? Has it been mis-categorized? Is it one of your competitor’s blogs? Do a quick once over to make sure it is what you think it will be.

Date of Last Post

If the site is a blog and they haven’t published a post in 3 – 6 months, or if it is a forum and there hasn’t been a recent active thread, take them off the list. There, that probably took you 4 seconds, keeping going through your list. If they have posted recently, keep checking reading.

Advertising on the Site?

Are there advertisements on the site? Banners? There is a big one I circled in red on Tech Crunch. Advertisements mean the site owner wants to monetize the site, which means they will be likely to check out your affiliate program. If there are not any visible advertisements, that doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in your program, but having them in a good sign.

Number of Comments and/or Social Proof

Back in the old days of 2010 (ha!) if a blog had comments, you knew it was popular. Now a lot of people aren’t commenting, but they are tweeting about a post or sharing it or “liking” it on Facebook. Or “plus oneing” (is that even a verb?) on Google. Are there comments? Are there ways to show how many people have shared, tweeted or liked a post? Check a few posts to see if it is an active blog.

Those four criteria should give you enough information to determine if you want to approach the site owner about joining your program. Now if you want to get fancy/geeky you can go deeper into stats and rankings, if that sort of thing floats your boat, but it is not necessary if you are just starting out.

Let’s Geek Out

Rankings and stats do make my heart pitter patter, so if you are with me, let’s geek out with some real numbers. You can intall SEO extensions on your browser (Here’s the Firefox one and here is the Chrome one) that will help you determine a site’s (including your own) ranking with various ranking programs. You can see my SEO for Chrome extension to the right.

You can track things like Google Page Rank, Alexa ranking and Compete ranking.

These rankings are definitely not need-to-know, but if you like stats, you may use them. If they rank well, you may want to offer them super affiliate status. Or check your existing affiliate’s sites and see if you want to change them to super affiliate.

The more you vet, the faster you will become. Be quick, make your decision and then contact them with the details about your program if it is a match. Later this week we’ll cover how to vet people who have applied to your program.

If you have any questions, please ask below, I’d love to help you out.

Filed Under: Affiliate Program Management

Affiliate Tip – Back it Up!

August 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
A screenshot of the default WordPress theme.

Image via Wikipedia

Hey Affiliates, I know this sounds like a boring post, but it’s short and sweet. BACK UP YOUR BLOG! Or your site! Or your forum! Whatever you have, back it on up.

We have had a number of affiliates contact us lately because their site or blog had been hacked, and they didn’t have a recent backup. Months or years of posts were lost, including all of their affiliate links.

Backing up is NOT the responsibility of your hosting company. You have to back it up. There are lots of easy ways to backup, and you don’t have to anything scary.

If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of backup plugins that can even email the backup to you automatically, or put it in your dropbox account (that is an affiliate link, we practice what we preach). You don’t have any excuses not to be backing up your WP blog.

Typepad offers a manual approach as well as shares some ways to automate the backup. Once again, no excuses!

On Blogger go to your dashboard > Settings > Basic > Export Blog which is right at the top.

So please protect your blogs and sites and back up – often! It’s easy and so worth the peace of mind.

Filed Under: Affiliate Info Tagged With: ,

Affiliate Programs 101 – What is an Affiliate Program?

August 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Simple example graph of Web traffic at Wikiped...

Image via Wikipedia

A better title for this post would be What is an Affiliate Program and How Can One Help Me? But it seemed a little long.

According to Wikipedia: “Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. ”

You, the online merchant, will recruit other website owners (blogs, forums, sites, email marketing, social media users, etc.) to help promote and drive traffic to your online store. A piece of code, called a cookie, is embedded in links, so when the customer clicks on the affiliate link, the merchant will know which affiliate referred that particular sale to their store.

Affiliates are usually paid on a commission-based scale, which is set up in advance by the merchant. The merchant may raise the commission depending on the affiliate’s performance, very similar to how a salesperson is paid in the corporate world.

Affiliate marketing is result driven. You don’t pay the affiliate unless the traffic makes a purchase on your site. Other forms of advertising you will pay by the banner impression regardless of whether they click on it, or if someone clicks on your Google Adwords or Facebook ad, you will pay regardless if they make a purchase or not. I may be biased, but Affiliate marketing seems like a win to me.

How Can An Affiliate Program Help Me?

Most people want to know the dollar and cents figure, how much exactly can I expect to make with my affiliate program? Well of course it depends on a variety of factors, but providing you are in a market that has a lot of websites devoted to your products or services, and you are in a country that has a lot of affiliate marketers, the average successful affiliate program makes between 10-20% of their sales from affiliate traffic.

The increased sales is of course the reason why you will start an affiliate program, but there are other benefits as well. An obvious benefit is the increase of traffic, not only from the affiliate sites and links, but from other people who have heard of your program from a friend or colleague who saw it on a website.

You will get to develop relationships with the top blogs, sites and social media experts in your market. These relationships can help you in so many ways in the future, from learning about grassroots trends, to consumer changes. Your relationships will help keep you on the cutting edge. Your affiliates want you to be successful, so they can continue to get paid, so consider them an additional team member.

You can test new marketing or branding materials. If your new banner you created has caused a drop, or a spike, in traffic coming in, you know where to make changes and they can be made quickly. Your affiliates will also notice if they notice a reduction in traffic (or an increase) and will want to work with you to remedy the situation, or make other changes.

How Can Wigify Can Help My Store?

Wigify is an affiliate network, meaning we will work with you to make sure you are recruiting the right kind of affiliates into your program. Affiliates who will become essential team members, just like Wigify will become.

Wigify’s online application will take care of the Affiliate signup forms, paying affiliates through your paypal account and hosting your ads that your affiliates will use to drive traffic to your site, and so much more.

We will provide you with training, reports, lists of suggested websites to contact, go over your program with you and have brainstorming sessions to make sure your affiliate program is in the best shape to tackle the upcoming holiday season.

So contact us today and let’s get started making your program a success.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Program Management Tagged With: ,

Wigify is relaunching, as an Affiliate Network

July 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept

Image by lumaxart via Flickr

We have been speaking with a lot of our Program Mangers in the last few months about what their issues were with running their affiliate program. Many stated they had trouble recruiting affiliates and even knowing how to do it. Our training material was good, but they had trouble relating it to their own market.

As app owners, our job is to help our clients, make their business easier, help them get more sales, not to create more frustrations. We debated many ways we could help our clients with this source of frustration. We came up with some excellent reporting ideas, and ways to automate some processes, but this wouldn’t really help the fundamental problem.

So we decided to switch our focus. Instead of being an app provider (we build the software, you use it how you see fit), we have decided to become more invested in the programs. We are switching from an affiliate marketing app, to an affiliate network.

An Affiliate Network offers more support to it’s programs. We will be partnering with you to see how your program is doing and what improvements can be made.

Our research shows that on average, programs get their first affiliate sale within 59 days of signing up. Our goal is to decrease that number. On average, our programs generate 13% of their sales from the affiliate program, which is good, but we want it to increase to 15 – 20%.

What about recruiting? We are here to assist you in your recruiting efforts. Offering suggestions of people to contact. We will be out recruiting affiliates to come into the Wigify network, but they may or may not be the right affiliates for your program. We will work with you personally to ensure you are going after the right potential affiliates in the correct ways.

Ways we are going to help you:

  • More training – blog posts, screencasts, audio, written content, checklists
  • An updated support area (launching soon)
  • Recruiting affiliates into the network (coming soon)
  • Promoting your programs on this blog and in social media
  • Our own affiliate program, which you can watch behind the scenes, a case study if you will and you can also participate and make money (coming soon)
  • Access to feedback, suggestions and brainstorming sessions

In order to attract high caliber affiliates, we will be offering more detailed reporting on our Programs page, providing more affiliate training and going out and interacting with potential affiliates.

These changes will be rolling out over the next few weeks and will be in place by the beginning of September. We are very excited about how the changes are going to impact your affiliate programs and we look forward to success for everyone.

Filed Under: Wigify

Summer Time is the Ideal Time to Launch Your Affiliate Program

July 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Window shopping at Eaton's department store. (...

Image via Wikipedia

Summer time may seem like the time to lay low with your business and not expand into anything new and relax before the busy second half of the year, but it is actually the idea time to launch your affiliate program.

There are five compelling reasons while you will want to start your program before September.

Good Testing Ground

Summer is a good time to test all aspects of your affiliate program, from recruiting to creatives, from offers to commission structures. If you eCommerce site is less busy in the summer, you will have the opportunity to test out different methods and see which converts best for you and affiliates. Once traffic picks up in the Fall, you won’t have as much time to test your offers.

Get Prepared for the Busy Fall

With all summer to test and recruit, you can start the Fall with trained affiliates all ready to go. Having your affiliates trained means as soon as their traffic increases in the Fall, they will be sending more qualified, pre-sold traffic your way.

As you get more affiliates in the Fall, you’ll be training them with the material you already created in the summer.

Work One on One with Affiliates

The slow pace of the Summer allows you to work one on one with top, or super affiliates ensuring you are answering their questions and providing them with the materials they need to send you qualified traffic.

Your affiliates can also give you feedback on your creatives and you can work together to see which ads, banners and text links convert the best. You can also really study your affiliates sites to see who is brining in the best traffic (and sales) and what they are doing so effectively.

The communication you have in the Summer will shape your training materials, and will reduce questions and concerns in the busy Fall season.

People Still Shop in the Summer

In most markets, people are still shopping in the Summer, it may not be as much, but you might as well start getting affiliate sales during the slow time and you’ll make repeat customers by the Fall.

Back to School Shopping

Depending on your market, “Back to School” shopping may generate many affiliate sales, and you don’t want to miss this opportunity. Your affiliate may be promoting certain items for back to school shopping, and you want to get in that post and get your banners on their site.

You’ll want your affiliates to be trained and well versed in your products before the back to school shopping fever hits.

Those are just five reasons that it is a fantastic time to start your affiliate program, so don’t hold off, get started today. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments or contact us today and we’ll help get you set up.

Filed Under: Affiliate Program Management

California Now Taxing Affiliate Sales

July 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Category:U.S. State Population Maps Category:C...

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California has just been added to the list of states that are effected by the “Amazon Law”, which means the state wants to collect sales tax on any affiliate sale referred by a California citizen (the affiliate) to a California address, if the online business sells more than $10,000 USD in the state within 12 months. You can read more here.

Amazon has already removed all of their California affiliates from their program.

Does this mean you should delete all of your California affiliates? That is something you, your accountant and lawyer should discuss. This is obviously becoming more of an issue as more states are adopting these nexus laws to deal with e-commerce.

Filed Under: Taxes & Legal

Contacting Bloggers About Your Affiliate Program

July 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
contacts

Image by sheldonschwartz via Flickr

A few clients have expressed discomfort when we recommend contacting bloggers in your niche about your affiliate program. They would rather affiliates just come to them. It definitely pays to go out and be proactive and get your own affiliates.

Check out this article from Problogger, which is a blog filled with resources to help people become, yep, a pro blogger. The article shares why the Contact Us page on a blog is important, and here is a snippet of why we wanted to share it:

The most profitable affiliate campaign I have ever run was as a result of being approached through the Contact form on one of my blogs.

That one affiliate program replaced my full-time income the day I added the links to my site.

And it was all because I ran a visible blog and was easy to contact. Without my Contact form, I’d never have been invited to join this “private” affiliate program and would be literally tens of thousands of dollars worse off.

Contacting bloggers is a huge way to get motivated affiliates. Check out our book on it in the Learning section.

Filed Under: Wigify

Are Affiliate Links Good for SEO?

July 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
a chart to describe the search engine market

Image via Wikipedia

We got a question last week from an Affiliate Manager wondering if all of the affiliate links pointing to their site was good for SEO purposes. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and if you are not familiar with the term or practices, you can feel free to skip this post.

The purpose of your SEO work and having any links back to your site are to bring in more traffic. Will affiliate links push your website search engine results higher? Without knowing the exact algorithm search engines use, it is hard to know.

Affiliate links have unique tracking codes and most affiliates “cloak” their links using a url shortener. Wigify already cloaks and shortens the links using our wig.bz urls. This makes the affiliates links look neater and less confusing when a person visits their site, or reads their email. Url shorteners are generally 302 links, or nofollow links, so we believe they will not give you “Google Juice”.

The benefit of your affiliate’s links is that they will bring in qualified, “warmed” traffic . They could essentially be pre-sold on your products.

Our recommendation is that you use both SEO and an Affiliate Program as separate strategies to get qualified traffic to your website. You want both models working, to bring in the largest variety of traffic.

Filed Under: Wigify
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