Affiliate Marketing Tycoon

**juliensimon** · 07-24-2008, 07:01 PM

I have been looking around and there are so many of them.
Which affiliate program do you recommend? Basically, we are an SEO company and we have webhoster, general marketers as resellers.

I'm sure this question has been ask already so if it's the case, please just direct me to the right post.

Thanks

**vangogh** · 07-24-2008, 09:25 PM

Two affiliate programs I often see recommended are iDevAffiliate and Post AffiliatePro.

**jesterx** · 07-25-2008, 05:31 AM

thats a simple question.

just find out what is already making other affiliates lots of money and study why it is and market it the same.

**juliensimon** · 07-25-2008, 12:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

Two affiliate programs I often see recommended are iDevAffiliate and Post AffiliatePro.

Thanks Steven. I'll go check them out right now.

**juliensimon** · 07-25-2008, 01:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

Two affiliate programs I often see recommended are iDevAffiliate and Post AffiliatePro.

I like iDevAffiliate a bit better. It is more straight forward and seem easier to manage. I like how they divided everything by color (blue=account overview, red=marketing materials, orange=acount management etc..)

Thanks for the recommendation

.

Has anyone used it before and can provide me with user experience feedback?

**juliensimon** · 07-25-2008, 02:55 PM

Steven - I looked a bit deeper into iDevAffiliate and it seems that it only provides commission per traffic brought to the website.

I am starting to think that I might not need an affiliate program. Basically, I have a bunch of resellers. We give them commission for every client they bring and not traffic. I wanted to manage those and be able to track sales generated by links on their website. My idea is: put a link on resellers website with the caption: "tell us you found us there and we will give you a 5% discount". This way, we will be able to track where the sales come from.

I guess a good old excel sheet might do the trick for that.

**5starAffiliates** · 05:53 PM

Hi Julien

You said:

Quote:

"I looked a bit deeper into iDevAffiliate and it seems that it only provides commission per traffic brought to the website.

I am starting to think that I might not need an affiliate program. Basically, I have a bunch of resellers. We give them commission for every client they bring and not traffic. I wanted to manage those and be able to track sales generated by links on their website. My idea is: put a link on resellers website with the caption: "tell us you found us there and we will give you a 5% discount". This way, we will be able to track where the sales come from.

I guess a good old excel sheet might do the trick for that."

Sorry but that isn't going to work for a variety of reasons. I do affiliate management consulting and have been through tons of scenarios with lots of companies so I'll try to explain.

1) Idev tracks sales not traffic. So that is what you want - or something like it. You may also want to consider a network like Shareasale instead. Some affiliates won't join in-house programs and will only join a network.

2) Asking customers to say how they found you is 1) not accurate or effective. Many will just check Google or whatever the 1st option on your list is. 2) Not practical if you have lots of resellers. No one is going to scroll to the bottom of the list to find John Zoe. Then again do you list them by real name or site name??? What order do you list them in? I guarantee Allan Adams will get the majority of sales even if he never makes one legitimately just because he's on top. Pros know that's what happens so won't go for this type of tracking.

3) PRO affiliates will not join a program unless it’s set up right. They have all been burned. Pros also need the stats an affiliate tracking solution provides. They need to see how many impressions they gave you, how many turned into visits and how many of those turned into sales. They need the stats to be able to judge and optimize their campaigns to help make you more sales. Without that info they are working blind.

But bottom line is good affiliates would never join a program that didn't have tracking or with a company that didn't appear to have a vested interest or the commitment to doing it right.
I know how affiliates think and most would think, if they can't even afford to set a proper affiliate program, how do I know they can afford to pay me?

Sorry that's just the reality. There are hundreds if not thousands of hosting affiliate programs to choose from so you need to at least do the bare minimum industry standard set up - or to really do it right and attract lots of affiliates you need to find out what the top hosting affiliate programs are doing - and do it better! :-)

Hope this helps and best of luck!

**juliensimon** · 07-25-2008, 06:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 5starAffiliates

Hi Julien

Sorry but that isn't going to work for a variety of reasons. I do affiliate management consulting and have been through tons of scenarios with lots of companies so I'll try to explain.

1) Idev tracks sales not traffic. So that is what you want - or something like it. You may also want to consider a network like Shareasale instead. Some affiliates won't join in-house programs and will only join a network.

2) Asking customers to say how they found you is 1) not accurate or effective. Many will just check Google or whatever the 1st option on your list is. 2) Not practical if you have lots of resellers. No one is going to scroll to the bottom of the list to find John Zoe. Then again do you list them by real name or site name??? What order do you list them in? I guarantee Allan Adams will get the majority of sales even if he never makes one legitimately just because he's on top. Pros know that's what happens so won't go for this type of tracking.

3) PRO affiliates will not join a program unless it’s set up right. They have all been burned. Pros also need the stats an affiliate tracking solution provides. They need to see how many impressions they gave you, how many turned into visits and how many of those turned into sales. They need the stats to be able to judge and optimize their campaigns to help make you more sales. Without that info they are working blind.

But bottom line is good affiliates would never join a program that didn't have tracking or with a company that didn't appear to have a vested interest or the commitment to doing it right.
I know how affiliates think and most would think, if they can't even afford to set a proper affiliate program, how do I know they can afford to pay me?

Sorry that's just the reality. There are hundreds if not thousands of hosting affiliate programs to choose from so you need to at least do the bare minimum industry standard set up - or to really do it right and attract lots of affiliates you need to find out what the top hosting affiliate programs are doing - and do it better! :-)

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Thanks for the info but I don't totally agree with you.

We are not planning on asking customers how they found us. We are planning on offering a 5% discount to customers that say: I found you there or So and so recommended your services. They won't have to pick a name in a list. If they want the discount, they'll tell us where they found us. We do not sell products online. We have contracts that need to be signed etc...as we provide services.

Also, we are not looking for Pro affiliates but people we developed a relationship with, who trust us and bring us quality clients.

We are a small company and have a few resellers but not more than 10 so far. We do not take a lot of new customers either. I think buying a program to manage commission for about 10 resellers is not a necessity. I am still considering on buying one because it would make things easier, especially if we get more resellers and/or more clients.

Anyway, what you said is properly correct for a big company but at the scale i am looking at right now, it doesn't really apply.

**vangogh** · 07-25-2008, 08:03 PM

Instead of the caption you mentioned you could say something like "tell us company x sent you and receive a 5% discount" If your ad on the other site is a banner you could make the banner a coupon with words similar to the above.

You could also leave the company name out of it and say something like:

"say 'orange' when you contact us to receive 5% off your bill"

and then give each reseller a different word to use. If you get creative with it, you can probably come up with better wording than I'm suggesting that is also designed to increase click throughs and sales.

**Joe.forex** · 07-28-2008, 08:11 AM

Yea... even i think proper research work should be conducted and the areas where these programs are successful the most should be considered. Marketing techniques like offers, discounts, gifts, bonus should also to be introduced initially.

Cheers

**juliensimon** · 07-28-2008, 02:19 PM

Thanks Steven.
I think I will try it out without an affiliate program first, see if it works and if not then I'll subscribe to one of the program you mentioned.

**TheGeekyOne** · 07-29-2008, 01:10 AM

Joe is correct if you have researched everything, split tested your auto responders, and text links aswell as Creatives, then you move onto creating an affiliate program. You can then provide your affiliates with the text links and creatives your using to make money. They will love you because it shows you know how to optimize for max revenue. The more they can make the more you make.

**sudilshr** · 08-03-2008, 01:06 PM

i use http://www.adlandpro.com/ affiliate program

**Joe.forex** · 08-04-2008, 08:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheGeekyOne

Joe is correct if you have researched everything, split tested your auto responders, and text links aswell as Creatives, then you move onto creating an affiliate program. You can then provide your affiliates with the text links and creatives your using to make money. They will love you because it shows you know how to optimize for max revenue. The more they can make the more you make.

Thanks....

Yea, If they gain you are the winner and if they lose you also lose. therefore making our product different from others and properly presenting them is very important. The more it looks attractive the more traffic we get.

Good Luck

**VidiJoe** · 08-06-2008, 02:19 PM

Have you considered using a 3rd party solution? ShareASale.com is just one example

**maya01** · 08-06-2008, 03:16 PM

5star affiliate great information

thanx

**witnesstheday** · 08-07-2008, 09:46 AM

It could be influenced by what you sell... but if it's fairly mainstream, surely the correct procedure is to go to a major network - I rang Affiliate Window about getting my family business an affiliate programme. I think CJ and Afw are full of major brands, so if you can afford to slip in between them, you could get a lot of good advertising. It costs so much though.

What are you selling?

I used to use shareasale too - and affiliatefuture and i tried some more whose name i forget, but in the end afw and cj are the only ones i saw whose front end could have been made by the saatchi brothers (Thatcher's marketing people).

If you want an affiliate program to milk it in the UK and USA from mainstream publishers, to have years of staying power, to do as well as Marks and Spencer and PC World and all the big names, don't mess around with the silly amateur-looking networks, that's what i say. in the end if they have no visual flaws and look perfect on their own site (the network site) then, and only then, is it worth handing over big bucks to them, in my opinion.

But of course, there are all kinds of specialist networks too (i just found a stock market related one on a page i found on another thread and joined it for my stock-market site)

Anyway. At this stage I'm just talking because I like the sound of my own ascii, so i'll sign out and minimize the reduction of intelligence in my content for today.

good luck, though! Affiliate programmes are blatantly a good idea. I hope you outlay about $10k for it, though - nothing done cheaply achieves results that are worth it.

**Dorc** · 11:59 PM

Hi there,

I can tell you need a reliable affiliate program to start with.
You can go to this link to find out about Mike Dillard's system
It teaches you how to generate leads without hassle that would soon turn into prospects, credit cards in hand ready to join your business.

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**EdTheil** · 08-09-2008, 01:58 AM

Hey Julien, Hope you received some good info here. Myself I don't see were an affiliate program would help you. It may instead hinder. You waiting without seems to be a better solution to me. Good Pluck

**PPC Coach** · 08-09-2008, 09:55 AM

Also check out jrox.com, they have a good solution.

I seriously doubt the "tell us where you came from thing" will work because if you put yourself in the affiliates shoes, that just won't fly. They need full transparency and that method isn't.