Affiliates can do a lot for a business. As well as boosting sales, affiliates can act as a customer service layer between the merchant and the customer, raise the profile of merchant by active promotion and attract other affiliates. Often compensated on a pay-per-sale basis, an army of affiliates can be the most cost-effective and zealous salesforce imagineable and yet some merchants treat their affiliates like dirt.
In my experience as an affiliate, I’ve had the disappointing experience of dealing with some unresponsive affiliate managers who couldn’t care less about treating me and my efforts with due respect. Getting overdue commissions, simple email responses and replies to forum posts (when they’re not being deleted) are apparently too much to ask for.
I have great difficulty in trying to understand the mentality of this approach.
When an affiliate has converted sales, but isn’t being paid for their efforts, what can they do?
Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Managing Affiliates
An interesting post from Stu about a contract I might have with you. Can’t say I agree with much of what’s suggested, though!
What would you think if I said to you,
“I’ll provide you free content, if you pop by once in a while and look at my advertisers ads.”
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Of all my forays into the world of Internet marketing, earning money as an affiliate for other people’s products has been one of the most profitable and if you’ve been reading this blog for a while then you’ve probably seen me mention Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook (SAH) as a very comprehensive guide to affiliate marketing. This particular ebook spans over 274 pages and takes the reader right from the beginning, explaining affiliate marketing from the ground up.
For newbie affiliates with little Internet experience, it’s a great ebook to study.Now, as good as the SAH is, I don’t think there’s as much in it for affiliates with some experience under their belts. For those affiliates who have already cut their teeth and are looking to apply some advanced techniques there’s a new ebook just rolled into town and it’s promising to reveal a bunch of very effective techniques.
I bought a copy and I wasn’t very happy with it.
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Wouldn’t it be great if you could see exactly what links your website visitors were clicking on. With that kind of information, you’d have a better understanding of exactly what your audience is interested in and what areas of your webpages attract the greatest number of clicks. All very valuable information if you want to increase the number of clicks you get on certain links or if you want to know what content interests visitors so you can provide them with more.
You may have already seen the AdSense placement heatmap produced by Google and I’ve found it to be very useful in determining the most profitable ad placements. Imagine if you could have a similar heatmap for your own webpages…
Well, now you can take the guesswork out of placement testing…
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When it comes to people’s businesses and livelihoods, it never ceases to shock me just how much faith is placed on third parties with little in the way of accountability. This behaviour seems to be much more apparent online than in the offline world. Much of this, I put down to people’s own perceptions about other people.
In the Internet marketing world, trust is a precious commodity. Trust will allow you more visitors to your website, more consumers of your product or service, more subscribers to your list. Yet many people will blindly place their trust without good reason. You might have done this yourself when you took a chance on an infoproduct or webhost on the basis of a recommendation from a complete stranger.
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