The Seven Secrets of Successful Affiliates
| Category: Affiliate Marketing - Basics | Date: 2003-04-28 |
In the affiliate program business, the universe of affiliates divides cleanly into two camps: winners and losers. The winners receive checks for hundreds or thousands of dollars each quarter; the losers find their mailboxes empty. And the truth is, the losers outnumber the winners by a large margin.
By meeting with affiliate program managers, makers of affiliate-tracking software, and the owners of websites great and small, I have discovered what determines whether a given affiliate will be a winner or a loser. By applying these Seven Secrets of Successful Affiliates, I feel any content site can maximize their return from participating in affiliate commerce.
Secret One: Feature merchants you trust. It doesnt matter whether a program offers sales commissions as high as 25 percent if no purchases are ever generated. Remember, online shoppers are very reluctant to give their credit card number to unfamiliar businesses. Affiliate schemes that claim to help content sites keep their eyeballs, take the transaction, and "be the merchant," suffer from a critical flaw: hardly anyone actually buys from them. Only include products from merchants who have earned your trust and made you a satisfied customer. After all, if a merchant is not good enough for you, how could they possibly be good enough for your audience?
Secret Two: Focus on relevance. Ultimately, the only way sites create value from affiliate commerce is by truly helping their audience find relevant products. Your audience should be thinking about you as an expert on the topic that makes your site unique. They should not (and will not) think of you as a general-purpose shopping destination. If your site is for Camaro enthusiasts, the products you link to should be tightly related to Camaros, not about all things mechanical, automotive, or sporting.
Successful affiliates do not cut corners with canned store solutions. They invest their time with the storefront programs and merchants that let them select or reject specific products based on how good a fit they are for the sites content and audience.
Note: You can boost click-though rates by a factor of ten by taking this a step further and writing a recommendation or review for a product you feature.
Secret Three: Its all about the product. There are two kinds of affiliate links: those that recommend a product and those that boost a merchants brand. Merchants tend to like the brand buttons quite a bit, even though they generate very low click-through rates. Why? Because they provide free advertising for their brand. Successful affiliates never surrender their valuable real estate for such unpaid ads.
Secret Four: Presentation matters. Until recently, creating a compelling product placement required a great deal of effort and technical knowledge. In recent months, various programs have begun to offer automated link generation. Output from such systems varies greatly, from text-only links to well-crafted combinations of product image, description, and link. Successful affiliates make sure that the products they promote are displayed within their sites in the most compelling way possible.
Secret Five: Keep your expectations in line with your traffic. No matter how good a job you do of picking merchants and products, your success as an affiliate will be correlated directly with the volume of traffic at your site. Dont lose sight of the things you need to do to attract, inform, and entertain your audience. Without the content, there is no commerce.
Secret Six: Dont worry about "losing" your traffic. For a content site, the key to making money -- whether from advertising or affiliate commerce -- is to be compensated fairly for giving access to your audience. All those ads on Yahoo!, for example, only work because people do click on them and leave the portal. Successful affiliates embrace the "traffic economy" and actively use the inclusion of topical products to make their sites "stickier." A NASCAR content site that promotes the NASCAR Barbie Doll from eToys may not be the place a visitor will return for future toy shopping in general, but it should be the place to return for NASCAR-related toys, books, videos, software, and, yes, refrigerator magnets.
Secret Seven: Learn by trial and error. Although a site owner can easily identify the products relevant to their content, it is still hard to know which specific items will sell best. In the world of affiliate commerce, there is no substitute for experimentation. Try different merchants, products, and methods of promotion. Successful affiliates learn from their mistakes, becoming more effective over time at driving transactions and earning commissions.
Conclusion
I feel these Seven Secrets can help you realize the affiliate commerce potential of your site. In particular, I hope they enable you to focus on the things that will maximize your commissions and the stickiness of your site -- and also to avoid the pitfalls encountered by the majority of affiliates today.
Being a successful affiliate requires creativity and hard work. I believe affiliates deserve better tools for finding relevant products, for creating effective product links, and for making frequent changes to their product and merchant mix. In return for your investment in affiliate commerce, you should demand that programs provide you with the features that will put at your command these Seven Secrets of Successful Affiliates.
About the Author
John McCrea is currently VP of business development at Affinia, Inc. affinia.com) company that provides online product promotion, mainly through its affinity storefront service. Before Affinia, McCrea spearheaded several Internet initiatives at Silicon Graphics. He also worked at SGIs WebFORCE business and helped launch the industrys first WYSIWYG HTML editor. McCreas contributions to the industry have been profiled in John Brockmans Digerati, Rob Reids Architects of the Web, and Harvard Business Schools WebFORCE: To Author and To Serve. McCreas own affiliate commerce experimentation occurs in his storefront called... Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from Watching Spock.
:To contact see details below.
jkm@affinia.com
http://www.affinia.com
By meeting with affiliate program managers, makers of affiliate-tracking software, and the owners of websites great and small, I have discovered what determines whether a given affiliate will be a winner or a loser. By applying these Seven Secrets of Successful Affiliates, I feel any content site can maximize their return from participating in affiliate commerce.
Secret One: Feature merchants you trust. It doesnt matter whether a program offers sales commissions as high as 25 percent if no purchases are ever generated. Remember, online shoppers are very reluctant to give their credit card number to unfamiliar businesses. Affiliate schemes that claim to help content sites keep their eyeballs, take the transaction, and "be the merchant," suffer from a critical flaw: hardly anyone actually buys from them. Only include products from merchants who have earned your trust and made you a satisfied customer. After all, if a merchant is not good enough for you, how could they possibly be good enough for your audience?
Secret Two: Focus on relevance. Ultimately, the only way sites create value from affiliate commerce is by truly helping their audience find relevant products. Your audience should be thinking about you as an expert on the topic that makes your site unique. They should not (and will not) think of you as a general-purpose shopping destination. If your site is for Camaro enthusiasts, the products you link to should be tightly related to Camaros, not about all things mechanical, automotive, or sporting.
Successful affiliates do not cut corners with canned store solutions. They invest their time with the storefront programs and merchants that let them select or reject specific products based on how good a fit they are for the sites content and audience.
Note: You can boost click-though rates by a factor of ten by taking this a step further and writing a recommendation or review for a product you feature.
Secret Three: Its all about the product. There are two kinds of affiliate links: those that recommend a product and those that boost a merchants brand. Merchants tend to like the brand buttons quite a bit, even though they generate very low click-through rates. Why? Because they provide free advertising for their brand. Successful affiliates never surrender their valuable real estate for such unpaid ads.
Secret Four: Presentation matters. Until recently, creating a compelling product placement required a great deal of effort and technical knowledge. In recent months, various programs have begun to offer automated link generation. Output from such systems varies greatly, from text-only links to well-crafted combinations of product image, description, and link. Successful affiliates make sure that the products they promote are displayed within their sites in the most compelling way possible.
Secret Five: Keep your expectations in line with your traffic. No matter how good a job you do of picking merchants and products, your success as an affiliate will be correlated directly with the volume of traffic at your site. Dont lose sight of the things you need to do to attract, inform, and entertain your audience. Without the content, there is no commerce.
Secret Six: Dont worry about "losing" your traffic. For a content site, the key to making money -- whether from advertising or affiliate commerce -- is to be compensated fairly for giving access to your audience. All those ads on Yahoo!, for example, only work because people do click on them and leave the portal. Successful affiliates embrace the "traffic economy" and actively use the inclusion of topical products to make their sites "stickier." A NASCAR content site that promotes the NASCAR Barbie Doll from eToys may not be the place a visitor will return for future toy shopping in general, but it should be the place to return for NASCAR-related toys, books, videos, software, and, yes, refrigerator magnets.
Secret Seven: Learn by trial and error. Although a site owner can easily identify the products relevant to their content, it is still hard to know which specific items will sell best. In the world of affiliate commerce, there is no substitute for experimentation. Try different merchants, products, and methods of promotion. Successful affiliates learn from their mistakes, becoming more effective over time at driving transactions and earning commissions.
Conclusion
I feel these Seven Secrets can help you realize the affiliate commerce potential of your site. In particular, I hope they enable you to focus on the things that will maximize your commissions and the stickiness of your site -- and also to avoid the pitfalls encountered by the majority of affiliates today.
Being a successful affiliate requires creativity and hard work. I believe affiliates deserve better tools for finding relevant products, for creating effective product links, and for making frequent changes to their product and merchant mix. In return for your investment in affiliate commerce, you should demand that programs provide you with the features that will put at your command these Seven Secrets of Successful Affiliates.
About the Author
John McCrea is currently VP of business development at Affinia, Inc. affinia.com) company that provides online product promotion, mainly through its affinity storefront service. Before Affinia, McCrea spearheaded several Internet initiatives at Silicon Graphics. He also worked at SGIs WebFORCE business and helped launch the industrys first WYSIWYG HTML editor. McCreas contributions to the industry have been profiled in John Brockmans Digerati, Rob Reids Architects of the Web, and Harvard Business Schools WebFORCE: To Author and To Serve. McCreas own affiliate commerce experimentation occurs in his storefront called... Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from Watching Spock.
:To contact see details below.
jkm@affinia.com
http://www.affinia.com
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