Affiliate Sites No No's

random2004 · #1 (**permalink**) 07-16-2004, 04:05 AM

There is a book or report out talking about how affiliates are getting ripped off by merchants through things like:

1. Offering an affiliate link on the site where you send your customers to, they join the affiliate program, get 50% off the price and you get nothing.
Solution: make them purchase before allowing them to become affiliates. They need to see if they like the product anyway.

2. Failure to collect emails from potential customers from your site first. This report suggests that you do that FIRST, then send them to the merchant's page. So the merchants don't market to your *users* that you paid money to obtain.

There are a number of other suggestions such as back-end sales, etc. that affiliates are missing or merchants changing their clickbank commission rate or simply accepting non-trackable echecks or holding the affiliates money until they reach say $100, those who don't got past this amount end up forgetting about the program and often losing their money altogether. At the end of all these suggestions, the author then wants to sell you a site for over $600.

I've implemented some of these tactics on one of my sites at snipped by Catalyst with a degree of success. I guess it all depends on what kind of user comes to your site. Most users don't even know what an affiliate program is and are unlikely to join just to get a discount. But on my site I simply have a "partners" link for those who want to join as affiliates. I still have a whole page for CBers who want to sign up and deliver the url by email. Because of the type or product I sell, many people could easily get a discount.
The kind of product I sell produces some really high income, here's proof of one affiliate in the industry. This represents his earnings for the month of June:

Pretty impressive? By not making your site affiliate unfriendly, you can actually make more sales and retain more active affiliates.