We run the Profitistic affiliate network, and come into contact with many merchants/advertisers who are looking to start an affiliate marketing campaign, or who are looking to expand an existing one.

They want to further their marketing reach, generate additional sales/leads, and make their brand as popular as possible, so one of the first questions we are often asked as a network is ‘how many affiliates will be promoting our website’? The answer of course, is that it very much depends on the merchant and the details of the campaign.

So, we decided to have a little office chinwag and discuss the Top 15 factors that we think dissuade affiliatese from running any particular merchants affiliate campaign.

Here are the 15 Reasons Why Your Affiliate Campaign Isn’t Attracting Affiliates:

1. Low Commission: An obvious one this, and fundamentaly the most important. If you offer a lower level of commission than that of your competitors, who do you think the affiliates are more likely to promote?

2. Poor Or Lack Of Creative Material: Affiliates are fully aware of the power of good creative. Poor creative generates low click through rates, and wastes potential earning opportunities. Also, a full suite of creative should be made available, including html (email creative) a wide range of banner sizes, text links, and any other supporting material.

3. Restrictive Terms: Affiliates use a wide range of traffic sources to drive sales/leads to merchants campaigns. Restricting promotional choice (e.g, no pay per click affiliates, no email affiliates) can severely reduce the amount of traffic being sent to a merchants website

4. Leakage: Prominent telephone numbers with strong call to actions (e.g call us now!) will serve to divert a proportion of affiliate referrals towards calling the merchant in question, rather than completing the online checkout process. This will result in lost commissions for affiliates. Experienced affiliates know this and will avoid such merchants.

5. Merchants Website Design/Usability: With affiliate marketing, conversion of traffic referrals is everything. The merchant’s website should be professional looking, and usable to maximise conversions. Poorly designed websites will see high bounce rates, and affiliate traffic will be wasted.

6. High Merchant  Pricing (sales campaigns): This ties in with conversion rates. If a merchants pricing is higher than its competitors pricing, conversion rates will be low. Experienced affiliates know to compare prices and promote the merchant with the lowest pricing.

7. Low Stock Availibility: Similar to above. Conversion rates will be low if stock levels prevent referred traffic from converting into sales.

8. Brand Reputation: Affiliates know that well known brands are often trusted by potential customers compared to lesser well known brands and so, all other things being equal, convert better. Lesser known brands have to offer ‘more’ in order to attract affiliates to them.

9. Poor Localisation: Campaigns should be localised to the target market. For example, a UK landing page should show currencies in GBP, and address details should ask for Postal Codes (not ZIP codes). Don’t mention CNN or ABC News to UK visitors because they will see that it isn’t UK-specific which can drain trust.

10. Payment History: Some merchants are more reliable on the payments front than others. Savvy affiliates will know who pays (and who doesn’t) and prioritise merchants accordingly.

11.Payment Terms: Affiliates want to be paid as quickly as possible, using the most convenient, and lowest cost payment methods. If you are offering net-90 terms, and insisting on paying using Postal Orders, it willl effect affiliate take-up.

12. Trust Of Longevity: Does your campaign have monthly sales/lead caps? Have you suspended the campaign and restared it umpteen times? If so, you may have lost the trust of potential affiliates who require campaign consistency and longevity.

13. Pre-Approval Requirements: Many merchants (especially on the larger networks) pre-approve affiliates. The problem is that some merchants take weeks (or even months) to approve affiliates and so affiliates prefer to promote instant-approval merchants who enable immediate promotion. Merchants need to ‘strike while the iron is hot’.

14. Poor Campaign Descriptions: When describing their affiliate campaign, merchants should go into details about why affiliates should be running their campaign. Campaign descriptions should include all of the merchants unique selling points, and anything else that sets them aside from the competition.

15. Lack Of Niche Marketing Materials: Many affiliates require specific marketing resources to enable promotion. These may include data feeds, voucher codes, content units, and anything else a merchant can think of to increase accessibility.

We think this is a decent list of the main factors, but please feel free to add anything we have missed!

Google’s ‘decision’ (assuming somebody actually made a decision) to rush-launch its new real-time listings was a mistake, but it has provided rich bounty for marketers looking for easy, free traffic. Google suddenly said to us all… forget all the hard work involved with link-building, and page optimisation. Just spam Twitter all day with popular keyphrases and you will dominate our most valuable keyterm pages.

We have been keeping a very close eye on these listings, and although it is impossible for us to obtain accurate statistics, it is very clear that the number of real-time ‘windows’ appearing in the organic listings has been slashed heavily. This is bad news for the hordes of marketers who could suddenly appear on page one of Google for amazingly popular and commercial search terms, but if you look around, the opportunities are still out there for some super-heavyweight search terms.

For example, do you sell Blackberry phones? If so, why not spend this evening monopolising the search term by twittering how great your Blackberry store is? A mere 550,000 searched for the term ‘blackberry’ last month in the UK alone.

Page 1 for the search term ‘Blackberry’:

You see, this is where the slick Google machine turned into a blob of ice cream. Unusual, I know, but every online marketer I spoke to knew the implications within 3.2 milliseconds of seeing it in action so why didn’t Google’s army of boffins? Were they too busy counting their share options? Is ‘The Big G’ panicking about the rise of Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms? You can bet your derriere that they are, but this really isn’t the way to counter it for some kind of half-arsed ‘first-mover’ advantage.

Google, you got it mind-numbingly wrong, but my clients would like to thank you for all the lovely free traffic!

Ho. Ho. Ho.

Christmas is coming and the goose is becoming decidedly plump (and more than a tad worried).

This is the time of year that Uncle John Lewis and Auntie Dorothy Perkins compete to see who’s stores can most closely resemble National Lampoon’s with decorations fit for a king (or Simon Cowell). They do this with good reason. Christmas is a time for consumer financial abandon (yes, just like our banks), where the pressures of spending mount and the credit cards reach melting point. The ‘Christmas Feel’ adds to this pressure (don’t think it’s about adding ‘good cheer’ because it certainly isn’t), and the more the pressure mounts, the more Mrs Jones will spend on little Arnold’s NintendoStationBox.

So, how does this work in the online world? Well, very much the same, but there are other advantages to online retailers of adding a Christmas feel. Consumers will see that, with all its snow and holly, your website is current. They will see that you care that it’s Christmas and have bothered to show it. They will see that you have bothered to correctly place the Christmas  ‘hot items’ where they can be found within 1 click. These are all good signs and add to trust.

Last Christmas, as a little test, I was running an Adwords campaign and I had the traffic directed to 2 similar landing pages; one in the standard graphic format, and one with a few Christmas graphics added. Suffice to say that my client received 12% more sales when using the Yuletide flavour.

So, if you do nothing else over the next week, and you would like to see your conversion rates increasing (retail or not), pour yourself a Bailey’s Irish Cream, stoke the fire, and set about making your website feel like it hasn’t forgotten about Christmas.

Otherwise, you may receive a vist from the Ghost Of Christmas ‘Never Was’!  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist it)

Some have the PPC experience of a geriatric turtle whilst many are only just starting out with testing PPC campaigns, landing pages, ad-copy, and fine-tuning all of these factors as a means of maximising profit. With this in mind, one thing that never fails to amaze me is the frequency of which I speak to affiliates who have not thought through the raw figures of the campaign they are spending their hard-earned wonga on.

Let me give you an example.

I recently spoke to an affiliate who was using PPC to promote a videogame store on a sales campaign. The store paid out 5% commission and he had been told that the average order value was £26. So, it doesn’t take ‘Arnold Cleverbugger’ to calculate that every successful conversion will be worth, on average £1.30 in commission to him.

Now, videogames retailers have more competition than the Olympic Games, so there is a fair chance that conversion rates (unique visitors/number of sales) wil be no higher than, let’s be really generous, 3%. (TOP TIP: this is the conversion rate to PPC traffic, not other types of traffic that may have higher conversion rates and distort the figures.)

So, following our example, every 100 clicks purchased will yield £3.90 in affiliate commission.It follows then that the affiliate must be buying clicks for less than 3.9p per click to be showing an operating profit.

Can this be done? Possibly, but the affiiate I was speaking to had his maximum bids (all of them, as he hadn’t heard of keyword tracking/identification) set to 10p per click, paying on average 9p per click. So, for every 9p he spent, he would earn, on average, 3.9p.

Now that is a very quick way to fall out of love wth PPC, not to mention your bank manager who wants his pound of flesh and your new lady-friend who has her eye on those new Jimmy Choo footwarmers.

So, the moral is to look at the simple mathematics first and select campaigns from there. Then, with split-testing, accurate trcking, and ongoing optimisation, the rest will follow.

It really is all just very simple mathematics.

This is great in that it enables merchants access to affiliate marketing without the usual barriers to entry, i.e huge fees. However, one downside to this is that due to the lack of fees, there can be less pressure on merchants to actively manage their campaigns which can lead to ongoing neglect and declining performance for all involved.

Some merchants seem to believe that if they have a campaign sitting on a network it will simply keep on performing because the network will look after it! Now, this is true to a point in that the campaign will always be available to affiliates, but if a campaign is left alone it will gradually stop performing.

Why?

Put simply, because affiliates need to know it is working and the best  and most obvious way for this to happen is through simple communication. Any merchant who runs an affiliate campaign should be ready to work at keeping it competitive, current, and to service affiliates with ongoing promotions, incentives and campaign-related data. Most merchants have competitors running similar campaigns and often the choice of who to run with will come down to small details.

Merchants need to put themselves in the position of the affiliate who has a choice of promoting the campaign of a merchant they has seen sitting on a network listing, or a similar campaign run by an active merchant offering current sales data, incentives, bonuses, etc.

If they were to do this, they may begin to understand the value of regular communication with affiliates.

Suffice to say, at Profitistic, we now encourage all affiliates to communicate as often as possible and inactive merchants removed from the network.

This video from the guys at Affiliate Marketing Diary gives some useful pointers towards tools that will assist you when searching for a product niche to promote via PPC.

Certainly worth a look…

We did a full website assesment, checked that the commission was competitive, that the creative was of a high standard, and introduced the usual incentives for affiliates.

Things started to pick up, and the affiliate sign-up was high which meant a gradual increase in sales.

My colleague suggested to the merchant that they may also wish to issue a voucher code to affiliates as a means of furthering marketing reach and to incentivize customers to purchase from the store.

The merchants reaction was something like ‘if a customer is going to buy from us, they will do so without a voucher code‘ and ‘this just means customers will see the promo code section on the checkout, search for a code which will cost us commission!’. Both of these are common reactions.

However, they were good enough to trust us and try a 2-month code with an expiry date as a test.

It didn’t take long for the voucher code sites to take the code, and immediately the sales through the network started increasing. At first, the merchant assumed that this was because these new sales were simply customers who would have purchased anyway using a code and therefore sales that would have occured anyway were suddenly coming through the network.

However, after the first month, we asked them to check their logs, and they came back and reported a 34% sale increase (over and above the expected sales for that month) for all sales, and it seemed that many of these ‘voucher code sales’ were indeed additional sales. With a little further investigation, we could see that new users were actually coming from the listings on voucher code sites as if it were a new marketing channel in itself.

So, it shows that the popularity of voucher codes is spreading and that many online buyers are checking the code sites FIRST to see what dicounts are available and then shopping BASED ON THE EXISTENCE OF DISCOUNTS.

It all follows the principle of allowing customers the opportunity and belief that they are getting a bargain!

Introducing RunByAffiliates, The New International Affiliate Network With A Difference…

We are pleased to announce the launch of RunByAffiliates (www.runbyaffiliates.com), the new international affiliate network with a difference.

About The Network:

RunBy Affiliates is an affiliate network where advertisers (or ‘merchants’) are able to reward publishers (or ‘affiliates’) for sales or leads generated through that affiliates website or internet marketing campaign.

However, RunByAffiliates is very different from other affiliate networks.

The mission statement of RunBy Affiliates is to provide affiliates (and advertisers) with a completely transparent platform offering full disclosure on affiliate spending, revenue, management, and performance, so affiliates can be certain that the day to day activities of the network remain in the interest of the affiliates as a whole.

In addition, RunByAffiliates is the first affiliate network to hand a high degree of network policy control to its affiliates in the form of budget spending, proposing network changes, policy voting and community interaction. Although the network will be managed by Webtistic (who receive a 10% of gross revenue ‘management fee’),100% of the networks Net Profit* will be allocated to the affiliates budget on a monthly basis.

Here is the breakdown of how the affiliate spending budget is split:

• 30% Of Net Profit: Affiliate Community (Activity Points, Awards, Etc)
• 30% Of Net Profit: Affiliate Staff Positions
• 30% Of Net Profit: Marketing (controlled by affiliates)
• 10% Of Net Profit: Other Spending (as decided by affiliates)

*Net Profit is defined as the total revenue minus the total costs of running the network in any monthly period. The reimbursement to Webtistic (Run By Affiliates) is set at 10% of gross revenue (networks usually take 20%-30%) and is considered a ‘management fee’.

Affiliates are able to vote on policy and budget spending using an online voting system.

The social aspect of the network is furthered as jobs and tasks are made available on an ongoing basis to affiliates whomay apply and subsequently try to convince the community that they are the best person for the job. Whether the community agrees or not is of course a different matter!

Finally, RunByAffiliates promotes and rewards active community participation in the form of activity points that are earned by posting articles, forum posts,uploading design templates, and videos.This will help to educate and provide information to all affiliates which will, in turn, improve the general performance of affiliates and revenue for all.

*Please note that all affiliate information will remain private and no individual affiliate information will be accessible to affiliate-elected staff.

As an incentive to join, we are, for a short time, offering all new affiliates a $20.00 sign-up bonus, so to join, please click here

RunByAffiliates

www.runbyaffiliates.com