When affiliates decide to stop promoting your content via blogs/galleries etc., is it customary or acceptable to ask why? Obviously it is at their discretion what they wish to post and there are no hard feelings!
But it is be a great help to get feedback from surfers and bloggers to focus our efforts and create content that can compare in a crowded market.
It seems hard to compete with providers that are offering large signup bonuses. Is it wise to start offering even with a tight budget?
I know affiliates want to promote sites that are generating revenue in advance of those that are struggling to build a brand and grow their membership base. Any thoughts?
You will find that most affiliates who sign up do nothing for you. In fact, 90% of your affiliate revenue will come from 10% of your affiliates.
I don’t think it’s inappropriate to ask why an affiliate has stopped promoting you. It’s probably because they weren’t getting sales, but you may be able to help them.
I wouldn’t worry too much about PPS. It attracts a different kind of webmaster, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. There are loads of affiliates who are happy to promote revshare programs because it can mean long-term money.
Asking affiliates will also help you improve the site. They’ll raise issues you may not have thought of.
Don’t expect a lot of affiliates to answer.
If you ask on the boards, expect 99,000 different and conflicting answers. Don’t do this unless you really want to spend a lot of time sifting through lots of information that may or may not be worthwhile. I’ve done this in the past and haven’t found it terribly helpful, although sometimes it is. Often I’ve gone away and made changes in my site only to have someone say, “I’m glad you did that, I always hated the grey.” But when I asked for feedback, no one said anything about the grey.
i would ask. i often stop blogging for programs that don’t send content in the size or showing the quality or action i need, and finding something like that out could be very helpful.
Drake: you guys have terrific content, some of the best in your niche. I would spend much more time making sure that your productive bloggers and affiliates have what they need than those that disappear. Of our entire Manifest Affiliate group, almost 30% of them are not even reachable by email. Our top producing affiliates never go on or post/read forums.
Make certain that those that are producing for you are handled very well, keep building your brand independent of affiliate promotions and widely broadcast for new affiliates. All of the program owners will tell you (if they are honest) that a tiny percentage of your affiliates will actually produce. Look at those that do, and the way they do it and you can find more of the same.
[QUOTE=dzinerbear;71031]
6. If you ask on the boards, expect 99,000 different and conflicting answers. Don’t do this unless you really want to spend a lot of time sifting through lots of information that may or may not be worthwhile. I’ve done this in the past and haven’t found it terribly helpful, although sometimes it is. Often I’ve gone away and made changes in my site only to have someone say, “I’m glad you did that, I always hated the grey.” But when I asked for feedback, no one said anything about the grey.[/QUOTE]
If you help dzinerbear don’t expect him to remember you were the only one who cared enough to post about that ugly gray in his design. Even if you talked to him on the phone about the design issue, and helped create the new color scheme in Photoshop that he uses to this very day, don’t expect him to remember. rofl
Maybe this will help in wondering if it is OK to ask. First, you could get good info. Second, there’s another factor. Reading what you wrote on this thread and your site itself, you seem genuinely sincere. That’s really impressive. There are a lot of practical factors why certain sponsors are used or not, and many of these factors are only known until after you sign up. One thing is definite for me. I don’t like working with sponsors who don’t respond, are negligent, slow, or never get back to any affiliate or act if they don’t care - how can I trust them? In fact, I’ve signed up with a sponsor I’d like to promote, but so far I know of NOBODY who has been able to contact him. The site looks perfect for my niche. Am I going to promote that site even though I signed up? As things stand today, no way! On the other hand, the sponsors or the affiliate managers who show they care in their attentiveness to affiliates really impress me. They may not even realize how much they do, and I remember it. I trust them more and am more apt to promote them - for obvious and practical reasons. These are just my own thoughts. I don’t know what other affiliates think.
You should always ask, otherwise you won’t ever know why or how to improve. I would suspect though that often when affiliates drop a membership site its after testing it to see if it sells.
You don’t have to worry about signup bonuses, very few sites offer it and many affiliates won’t pay much attention to it. What most of us will pay attention to are the signup ratios, what happens to our traffic. The worse the ratios, the more likly we will drop a site.
Personally I check ratios every 6 months on all 700 sites I promote. I adjust the amount of adspace I give a site depending on how they perform. Other affiliates might concentrate on a few sponsors that they know will sell.
Now more directly and I hope you won’t mind this but I had a closer look at your site and how it performs. I can clearly see a problem and possibly why as well.
Your pricing structure is wrong in my view. Totally against what everyone else is doing (the tested norm you might say). You currently only have 2 price points:
3 months - $19.99
1 month - $10.95
Those prices are suicidal. Both in terms of your own survival and getting affiliate sales. You can’t get much leftover once everything is paid on $10.95…? You have really good content and you have decent signup ratios, in my case 1 in 500. BUT if you take me as an example I’ve done 5 sales and earned $24.90, that equals $4.98 per sale.
On my sites, the limit before i give more exposure to a site is $0.05 / hit. You can see you’re quite far behind there. But it’s not due to bonus or anything, my best converting sites are on ccbill 50% revshare just like yourself. And some of them haven’t got more or better content than you have.
Your problem is that your prices are wrong, I really don’t think you will be able to survive in the long run. The only ones who can offer a product at such a low price is someone who will have massive volumes of sales.
You got to research and check your prices, compare to other sites.
Bjorn is dead on there. I didn’t even look at your pricing. From an affiliate stand point, the money just isn’t there. From a consumer standpoint, I would wonder why it was so cheap. Sites that don’t update with a static library are in that price range to monetize old worn out content. Yours deserves better.
We have done a lot of pricing tests and research and found that even reducing the rebill costs by 50% of the initial subscription cost does nothing to increase retention. All it does is cut revenue.
Thank you for all the positive and constructive feedback!
I think being fairly new to the game, our site is clean, easy to use and our content is consistently growing in volume and quality. (I do all the directing/photography/videography and editing/encoding/graphics and my partner does all the technical web/programming etc.)
We truly are a two man operation!
We started out with a low price because we knew our library was limited when we launched. Being almost a year we have increased our content and just changed our pricing scheme to better reflect our content.
I will be contacting our affiliates to get better feedback and inform of the price changes.
We have also started a paid ad campaign to increase traffic as well.
[QUOTE=DrakeCameron;71098]Thank you for all the positive and constructive feedback!
I think being fairly new to the game, our site is clean, easy to use and our content is consistently growing in volume and quality. (I do all the directing/photography/videography and editing/encoding/graphics and my partner does all the technical web/programming etc.)
We truly are a two man operation!
We started out with a low price because we knew our library was limited when we launched. Being almost a year we have increased our content and just changed our pricing scheme to better reflect our content.
I will be contacting our affiliates to get better feedback and inform of the price changes.
We have also started a paid ad campaign to increase traffic as well.
We are hanging in there!:happy:[/QUOTE]
That was quick. I like the new prices, they look good to me. Much more competitive plus better for you as well hopefully.
I’m not sure going from $10.95 to $24.95 was a good idea… I would have gone for $19.95 now and then after six months or so go up to $24.95.
But about your original question, as an affiliate I’m always impressed when a sponsor reaches out to ask how we can both make more money. It’s sad that this doesn’t happen more often.
I’m also very impressed when a sponsor contacts me offering to give me a site pass so I can check out their site. Some sponsors are stingy about this, and I understand they don’t want to give away their product to freeloaders, but if they check out an affiliates site(s) and it looks like they’re putting some time and effort into them, they should be offered a site pass. When this happens to me I usually work harder to promote that sponsor, first because its easier to do so once I can see the content as a paying customer does, and second because I feel I owe it to the sponsor since they were nice enough to trust me with a pass.
