What price is enough to find massive number of affiliates ?

[binder]

We are running a number of vacation rental web sites and are providing holiday apartments for thousands of guests across Europe ( London,Barcelona and Prague ) . We did try Google AdWords and that was a total disaster ! We have now build our own little affiliate program and even as we have signed up about 30 affiliates,we find that they hardly put up our banners ,and as they don't the leads they produce is not very successful. So how much money should we offer ,or how else can we motivate them to
place our banners in good positions ?

Our program can be found on http://www.visit-bcn.com

<edited to fix link :: Catalyst>

Any advice highly welcome !

[Linda Buquet]

binder,

Only about 5% of the affiliates most companies get end up being active, productive affiliates. So you will need to get more affiliates. Your payouts are fairly low compared to similar programs I have seen.

To learn more about growing a thriving affiliate program I will refer to you to my partner Linda Woods' site.
She has written some great articles.

http://www.partnercentric.com/pctogo.shtml

Read:

Top 10 Tips to Run a Successful Affiliate Program
and
What’s Mary Kay Got to do With Affiliate Marketing?

[marketershandbook.com]

For a start, banner advertising is not very effective any more.

You might be better off having text links with decent ancor text linking to your website.

Are you paying them per lead or per sale?

I wrote a very short article on how to super charge your affiliates

http://www.marketershandbook.com/articles/how_to_super_charge_your_affiliates.htm

You might want to take a look at that, might give you a few ideas.

How about instead of just getting people to send people to your website, how about getting your affiliate to send people toyour newsletter or an auto responder telling them about your apartments and why they are so great.

Basically have a programmer create somthing that allows you to give your affiliate a subscriber sign up box and pace it on their website, then anyone from that affiliates web site is tagged with thir affiliate ID, then if that eprson makes a sale, the affiliate is credited.

This could give you a new slant on your affiliate program and hopefully get you an increase in sales.

[jim@kowabunga]

You want quality, not quantity. You may want to contact our Team Affiliate team for a free consultation on affiliate recruitment.
www.teamaffiliate.com

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Jim,

Yes, TeamAffiliate is a good option. I refer alot of merchants to them. If anyone is interested in finding out more, PM me so I can give you my direct contact in that department who is extremely knowledgable and helpful.

[binder]

excellent advice ! Will do,and thanks a lot !

Philip Binder

[mizambar]

Thanks for the links...this is some good information!