It's all about the affiliate.

If you're going to be running an affiliate program, golden rule #1 is that it's all about the affiliate.

Your mantra should be to credit an affiliate for a sale or lead whenever you possibly can.

Be competitive with your cookie length, work with networks that have multi-layer tracking, and ensure the conversion process is optimized from start to finish with the affiliate in mind.

Why?

well obviously, the better the product is optimized to credit the affiliate the more conversions the affiliate will see, and ultimately the more loyalty/traffic you're going to get.

on top of that, affiliates will pick your process apart. They're going to check cookies, compare data, and blame you for stealing sales, even if you aren't. so the less they can accuse you of, the better.

why I love, and hate, pay per click affiliates

PPC Affiliates = crazy traffic. Qualified traffic. Converting traffic. It's bliss. Most of the time.

But it's so damn limiting. why?

PPC means spending money up front. The longer that affiliate has to wait to get paid, the less likely that affiliate is going to promote your offer. A with all those instant ROI gratification options out there, why should they wait 45 days for you to pay 'em out?

As an advertiser, if you want high volume from PPC affiliates, you're going to have to give up margin. Sure, you're paying 15% CPA to those organic banner guys you're working with, but then again they're not spending anything. let's say you can bundle your up-front purchase price to $50 or so - give 75% of that away. Hell, if you can get away with giving away 75% at any pricepoint, go for it.

Pay Per Click affiliates need as much gratification as possible all at once. Got a monthly recurring billed product? lump three months together for your PPC affiliate offer. This'll up your average earnings per sale.

Pay per sale networks always rank their products by a few things - overall sales volume, conversion rate, and average earnings per sale. the better your product ranks over time, the more visible it'll be to the affiliates. oh, and if we haven't gone over this yet, PPC affiliates = volume. volume volume.

this brings us to our next topic - conversion rates.

You could be giving away $500 EPS (earnings per sale) but if your product is converting like shit what's the point?

If you want to work with high volume PPC affiliates, ESPECIALLY if you're in a tight vertical, here's your checklist:

• make sure your product converts. depending on average cost per click, at a $40 EPS you'll want to convert from landing page/download at a bare minimum of 1.5%, and even then you're only going to get traffic on long tail keywords.
• have i mentioned conversions? run your own PPC campaigns first, and take a success story to your networks/affiliates. Most affiliates won't take risks with an unknown product unless you can drop serious numbers in front of them.
• refund rates. most real-time PPS networks process refunds. and in those network structures, refunds = withdrawn commissions from affiliates. this can be good for an advertiser as you're hedging the risk involved, but if your product sports a 15% refund rate no affiliate is going to promote it for very long. Plus, with a 15% refund rate google will probably kick you and your affiliates in the pants in the long term.
• Have a keyword list ready for the affiliates - this goes back to making sure you run your own PPC campaigns first. Sure, set bidding restrictions on your brand. But don't get too ridiculous - remember, affiliates will ALWAYS run PPC better than you can. 

At the end of the day being successful promoting your offers to PPC affiliates will likely get a lot of pushback at the board room table. your boss will think you're nuts giving away that much margin. But if you set yourself up properly, with a proven offer and proven numbers, you can make a drastic, incremental revenue increase on your overall sales.

Also, if you get too much pushback about high commission percentiles, set up private offers to proven affiliates who can hit baseline numbers. Throw an affiliate contest where prizes are commission increases. There's usually a solution!

i know NOTHING about lead gen

We've all heard the horror stories of affiliate managers rolling in to start up a program and getting canned for spending epic cash on crappy leads. Sorta like starting up a PPC campaign with no daily limit and "weight loss" in broad match.

I'd prefer not to get fired within a month, to be frank. So i've resolved to not be one of those guys. 

But man, am i ever starting from scratch. Virtually everything i've ever done has been transaction based - the concept of spending money solely for information is terrifying. 

I've been posting to wickedfire and getting pistol whipped along the way, but at least a few kind affiliates (or nasty ones that have me trusting them) have at least pointed me in the right direction. 

Here's what i'm doing:

 - working with the network (inuvo) to start me out small with some quality affiliates

 - scrub, scrub, scrub. I'm not going to be nasty about it, but if i value my head i've got to make sure we get at least a semblance of quality

 - watch who's bringing me what, and suspend affiliates bringing me bunk

 - scrub, scrub, scrub

 - build relationships with affiliates driving good leads

 - scrub, scrub, scrub

 - disabled any tiering or pre populated forms

here's what i'm really terrified about - 13 year olds getting spammed with free macbook offers giving me their informashuns on their path to laptop glory. 

so we'll see. keep ya posted.

It Begins

So I've got a background in pay-per-sale RegNow/Clickbank style affiliate marketing, having worked previously for RevenueWire in Victoria, BC.

I've moved to Vancouver and have taken on the affiliate side of things for a website development platform that makes easy to use business websites. It's a monthly billed service, which is already outside the scope of what I'm used to.

I've worked with companies like Avanquest, PC Tools, etc to optimize their campaigns, mostly with pay-per-click affiliates. Fine, sure, I know PPC and one-off purchases. But recurring billing? Leads? I've got a solid rolodex but I'm not about to reach out to anyone until I've at least got a saddle on the rest of the affiliate marketing world. a saddle, and a helmet for me.

I'm starting the affiliate program here on 3 sides - lead generation with Inuvo to start, as we have an inside sales team to close leads, as well as a CPA model through our shopping cart (MyAP), and a pay-per-sale model with RevenueWire.

Nothing has launched yet, we're still mostly sorting out technical details, and I'll keep posting as things develop.


Wish me luck!