An Affiliate Program Is Not a Magic Bullet for Marketing a Website

Recently I have been hearing of companies being wooed by affiliate networks and then setting up an affiliate program with them without actually doing their own research.

Just putting up an affiliate program is not going to generate sales to make the program worth while. Although this is a paid on performance industry setting up an affiliate program is not simply a paid on results affair. Affiliate networks have setup, monthly and override commission fees, so you are going to have to make a number of sales each month simply to break even.

Even if you are a pretty major brand or have a real something unique to offer is is still a bit much to expect the affiliate program run autonomously. You may even get hundreds of affiliates to sign up in the first few weeks, but this means nothing without sales. Indeed those same affiliates have probably signed up to hundreds of different merchants and the current high turnover of new merchants means that given a few days they will probably forget that they have ever signed up.

So what is the missing piece? You have the sales site and products waiting to go out of the door, you have an affiliate program with a major network, you aren’t getting sales.

The missing piece is actually encouraging the affiliates to actively promote your site. There is a big difference to an affiliate that just adds your banner to one that actively promotes a merchant. Affiliates have limited time with which to promote every merchant that they subscribe to, they end up cherry picking the most lucrative for them. 

This is the role of an affiliate manager. The affiliate manager is the reason that affiliate programs succeed. There are a number of good affiliate managers (including myself) who can help your affiliate program. The best starting point is to contact me and ask how I can help.

Simple message is don’t expect an affiliate program to just grow active affiliates, the affiliates need careful cultivating to promote your site.

February 15th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, ecommerce | 2 comments