Sometimes it’s difficult to know when an attempt to attract more affiliates is coming across genuine and informative, and when it seems like bullshit sales talk.
Our main site does really well in converting the medium amount of traffic it receives into loyal, recurring sales, but I’m now trying to attract a larger number of affiliates to jump on board. I need help getting the site to that next level, by increasing its reach and awareness.
So, here’s what I put together. What I think affiliates would want to know when choosing to promote a site.
Your thoughts please? Am I missing any key points that you would want to know about?
Make Sales. Our average conversion ratio for the last year is 1:228. Our top three affiliates achieve average conversion ratios of 1:25, 1:41 and 1:60. You can expect your traffic to convert into sales!
Branding. We’ve spent thousands upon thousands on paid advertising (QueerClick, Recon etc) ensuring the RTG brand is recognisable for your traffic.
Current and Hot. We update 3 times a week with exclusive videos featuring hot, new, straight guys nervously filming themselves. The content is enticing. The site is always fresh.
Rebills. RTG is interactive, with comments, ratings and weekly competitions. Members feel valued, and retention is high. You can be confident of multiple rebills.
Promo Material. New promotional packs emailed direct to you at least once every week, including stills and video teasers. You’ll never be stuck for content to promote RTG with.
Multiple Fetishes. The videos that make up the site fit into many different categories, giving RTG wide appeal across many fetishes, such as: foreskin, hairy bodies, twinks, close-up anal play, gay-for-pay, straight guys, showers, stripping to music, cum eating, reluctant masturbation etc.
Custom Banners. We can create banners to your specifications, just email and make a request.
Question: Your top three affiliates are sending sales from what kind of sites? What niche? And are you talking about your RTG site here?
I only ask because we’ve all seen sponsors mention great conversions, but one affiliate’s site isn’t the same as another’s. I have a foreskin, big dick, jerk off, and jock blog. Any or none of those might convert, it’d be nice to know where to start. So what niches are your top sellers sending from?
Right, I see what you mean Michael. The top three sites’ niches are in order 1) straight amateur guys, 2) a large gay gossip blog with a nsfw area and 3) sporty straight hunks.
And yes, this is primarily relating to RTG, our flagship site.
Your ratios are very good, converting at 1:150 for me (but not quite as good as your top affiliates it seems). I don’t think it rebills as well as it could though, only 1 in 4 rebills.
I would like to see weekly, bi weekly or monthly newsletters with recent updates including description of each scene, links to zip files with content etc (separate zips for pictures and video clips). Could be that you already send it out and I’m not getting it though? Affiliates are often busy/lazy, the easier you make it for us to find your content the more likely we will use it. The best way is to provide it in a email, then we don’t have to visit your site or go somewhere to figure out if you got a new episode to blog about.
It’s also quite good to have a couple of emails each year with contact details for the site, affiliate reps and email addresses change all the time. Maybe send one introducing yourself to your affiliates and asking if there is anything we need and who we should contact.
The only thing I would add to that is media dimensions and quality. There are a lot of sponsors out there that I’ve rushed to sign up with only to find that their promo content is next to useless with 400px images and a single line of text a chimp could have written, without even watching the trailer.
Now I check what others are promoting from a site to get an idea of their promo materials before I even bother to sign up.
Also, I think honesty is the best policy when it comes to promoting yourself to affiliates. We’re not stupid, we know the hype, we can see it. I would say you have more credibility with me if you’re less like a cheer-leader and can be honest about what I can expect.
I don’t think I’m the only one who ignores announcements from sponsors that are entirely glowing and sound like a late-night TV ad for the “Ab Cruncher 3000!!!”
Bjorn, I will look into why you’re not getting the newsletter emails. Perhaps we have the email address for you typed wrong in the mailing list or some silly mistake like that on our part. Whatever the reason, sorry about that and I’ll fix it. Re: the rebill percentage, our average across all affiliates is about 2.5 out of 4 (65% of all initial signups will rebill).
Conran, I definitely agree honesty is best, I absolutely want to be transparent about how our sites do. Will use your suggestion of including dimensions.
Thanks guys, good feedback which I will definitely take on board.
I thought I’d chime in here and mention an experience I recently had. I know you were looking for ideas about how to increase affiliate promotion.
I have a blogging contract where I write posts for another blog and my boss sent me some of your content and asked me to try a post.
But when I looked at the pictures for your Rate These Guys site I found most of the pictures were really blurry. (These were from James’ simulated fuck.) I realize they’re screen grabs, but I found the quality was so bad that I couldn’t really use them to create an attractive looking post. Couple that with the fact that there’s a huge watermark on every photo.
What I usually do is leave a watermark on the top photo and then either crop out the others or make them disappear with Photoshops smudge or clone tools. Too many watermarks make for an ugly collage. I want to give the sponsor credit, but I want to create an appealing collage.
Eventually I just went back to my boss, showed him the pics, and he agreed that they were unusable, so we moved on.
I just looked at Jon’s pics that just came out today and these seem a bit better, but there’s still the issue of the huge watermark. I don’t know how you resolve this because you obviously want your site’s name out there. Some sponsors provide a copy of their logo file in psd format, but you can’t really on all affiliates using it.
I work with Staxus, and so I started promoting them as an affiliate too. When I saw the content of the zip files I was extremely impressed.
Although they’re working hard to get all new content in the affiliate area, they provide everything needed. I would definitely suggest you take a look at their zips and see what you can offer in the same way.
They include banners relevant to the scene, logos for both the main site and the category, photos in both 600px and 1000px width without watermarks, trailers where possible, and the scene text too.
Incidentally, I started promoting RTG, and one of the biggest stumbling blocks is working out the site. On the outside, it’s very limited. What are the guys doing now? Who is still around? Am I going to sign up to see **** and find out he moved on six months ago?
I love the concept of the site, but I have no clue of what to write for a post. You don’t really include a lot of text to tell me how to promote it. I checked out the Australian lad wanking in the pub toilets and you don’t tell us anything about him in the text. Is he gay, straight or bi? How old is he? What does he do for a living? What did he do in his last video?
If you provide affiliates with thorough text we’ll find it much easier to pick out the relevant aspect for our sites and create an original post, which gains us more traffic and you in turn, hopefully leading to sales. If we don’t have any information other than what we can decipher from the photos already, why bother adding text at all? I could have worked out everything you spent time writing in the text for the pub toilet wank from the title and the stills, you didn’t use that text to tell me anything I didn’t already know.
Incidentally, your site has converted for me, and I really do want to continue to promote it. But it’s just very difficult to promote without that information.
I thought that as well. I have sold a couple of membership and this has always been a site I wanted to promote more, but I’m just underwhelmed by the tour. And if I’m feeling that way, I’m not sure I want to send traffic that might also be underwhelmed. I think RTG needs to heighten the tease a lot more, give surfer’s a bit more to look at without giving away the farm.
I liked an earlier incarnation of the site, I think it showed more and got me feeling more excited.
[QUOTE=dzinerbear;119506]I thought that as well. I have sold a couple of membership and this has always been a site I wanted to promote more, but I’m just underwhelmed by the tour. And if I’m feeling that way, I’m not sure I want to send traffic that might also be underwhelmed. I think RTG needs to heighten the tease a lot more, give surfer’s a bit more to look at without giving away the farm.
I liked an earlier incarnation of the site, I think it showed more and got me feeling more excited.[/QUOTE]
I definitely agree. I think the format of the site is really great, but there is a lot more they could do. I know what it’s about - kind of - but the tour doesn’t really show it, or expand on the idea at all.
I mean, I guess the guys are set a task by the audience, and then someone wins. But how do members set tasks? How are they voted on? Who makes the decisions and what media is shown? There’s a lot that needs to be said on the tour that isn’t, and I think the sales I’ve had with them are just guys who want to watch these boys jerking off and don’t really understand what the whole deal is.
I would definitely vote for a redesign of the site, and I would suggest hiring a pro to come in and create a tour that actually explains the entire site from start to finish.
I am by no means an idiot (careful now, I expect others to agree with me there! ;)) but if I don’t really get it all as an affiliate, how are surfers supposed to?
i also found the ratetheseguys blog content to be unusable. blurry pics, and a very intrusive watermark. disappointing as it’s always nice to have new sponsors’ content on the blog collages.
