Affiliate Networks « The eSilverBullet Blog: A "do follow" blog about traditional and online advertising, CRM, affiliate marketing and best business practices.

Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Networks’

Why it is So Hard to Aggregate Tracking Statistics for Affiliate Marketers

Friday, August 6th, 2010

By Adam Ward

Close-up of a young man with a bundle of bidis in his mouth Vertical

“And it’s so easy, it’s so easy, it’s just so easy, to do the goat dance. Yeah, but it’s so hard, it’s so hard, to love somebody, really love somebody.” -Greg Brown, So Hard

If affiliate marketing is the goat dance (whatever that is), then tracking statistics is loving somebody. In Feeling the Pain, I mentioned that one of the top frustrations for affiliate marketers is having to log into every network to access the tracking statistics from their affiliate programs. Everyone we talk to that runs on more than one affiliate network tells us what a hassle that is.

So that begs the question of why it is so hard to aggregate those statistics. Certainly, companies have built databases for personal use that aggregate statistics across multiple networks, and some have even done it for commercial use. But they will tell you it is hard, and not a panacea. When you understand what they have to do, you begin to understand why.

First, there are only so many ways you can pull data from a database. If you have direct access to the database and know what report to run (or write), it is easy. But no network is going to give a publisher or advertiser direct access to their database. Instead, your access is either going to come from an Application Programming Interface (API) that was written and authorized by the network, viewing the reports through a Web browser (which you may or may not be able to export to your hard drive), or from the network pushing the report to you via FTP or email.

APIs

Let’s look at APIs first. APIs are great if you can get them. By writing an API, a network essentially tells developers what parts of their database they can access, and provides the vocabulary for them to pull the data they are looking for. So if every network had an API, a developer could easily use those APIs to pull all the tracking statistics into your own database, which you could then run consolidated reports from.

Here are the problems, though. First, not all networks have APIs. Even if they aren’t opposed to having you get your information that way (it is your data, after all), they have to take the time and effort to write the APIs. That includes documentation on what APIs are available, and what the data structures, object classes, protocols, etc. are used in them. Second, if they do have APIs (yes, there will most likely be multiple APIs), they may not be written using the same protocol. The same network can have some APIs that use Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and others that use Representational State Transfer (REST). That drives developers nuts. Third, even if they have some APIs, they may not have them for everything you are looking for in your consolidated report. That means you either have to forego that desired information, or you pull it in with a scrape.

Scrapes

A scrape refers to creating a program that will go to a website, log in as a user with a username and password, go to a particular page on the site, run any necessary reports, and harvest the results of those reports into a database outside the site. This happens automatically, perhaps on a daily basis. This sounds fine, considering you ostensibly should be able to pull all the information you have access to as a real user logging in.

Except for these problems. First, companies don’t particularly like non-humans logging into their sites. They may employ software tools to thwart hackers, which could restrict access. Just because an application can scrape the site today doesn’t mean it will have access tomorrow. And even if it does, it relies on everything staying the same on the site. If the website changes to where the report shows up in a different place, or with a different name, the data pulled from the scrape could be missing, or worse, replaced with incorrect data. That means your developer has to constantly be tweaking your report. And third, unlike APIs, networks don’t have any control over what information you’re pulling from their databases. Besides not liking that, it may be in violation of their terms of service.

The Good News

As we’ve talked to networks about data aggregation, we have yet to have one tell us they are opposed to it.

The Bad News

Just because they aren’t opposed to it, networks don’t seem to have a big enough incentive yet to help out with the effort, short of some of them providing APIs. Even though their customers are all clamoring for it, they aren’t leaving the network over it. After all, where would they go?

Tags: Ad Tracking, Affiliate Networks, Data Aggregation
Posted in For Advertisers, For Publishers | No Comments »

Affiliate Networks Directory

Friday, June 25th, 2010

By Adam Ward

I’ve written previously about using affiliate networks to advertise online. Although running ads through multiple networks can compound problems for advertisers, online publishers have more of an incentive to join multiple networks.

So the question of which networks to join comes up frequently. And that question is often followed by, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a list somewhere of all the affiliate networks out there?” Well, yes it would be great. And I’m working on building that list. Since putting a list like that on this blog would be too static, I’ve built the list on Squidoo. The Affiliate Networks Directory there allows anyone to add a network that isn’t already on the list. My hope is that Squidoo visitors (which are a lot more than this site gets) will help keep the list current.

We first put together an internal list of networks last year. When I was recently adding it to Squidoo, I checked each website to see whether the network was still in existence. I found 34 that weren’t in business anymore. There are probably at least that many new ones that have started up since then, which are not on the Squidoo list.

With such high turnover, it is wise for any advertiser or publisher to do their due diligence before joining a network. Ask around to find out how long they have been in business, whether people on the network have complained about fraud or lack of payments, etc. At the very least, do a Web search for that company name, to see if anything comes up. The last thing you want to deal with is a network owing you money, but shutting down before you have a chance to get any of it.

Tags: Affiliate Networks, Directories
Posted in For Advertisers, For Publishers | 2 Comments »

Using eSilverBullet to Automate Your Workflow

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

By Adam Ward

The workflow automation feature in eSilverBullet is particularly useful to affiliate networks. Most networks have websites where advertisers sign up in one area and publishers sign up in another. Once the signups occur, affiliate managers or advertiser managers need to vet them and decide whether they want them on their network.

Along with populating fields in whatever tracking software you use, you can have the sign-up information populate fields in eSilverBullet as well, either as an advertiser prospect or a publisher prospect. When this happens, an alert can go out to the appropriate affiliate managers (either as an email, or a pop-up reminder in eSilverBullet) alerting them to a new sign-up. They can then vet the prospect and either accept them into their network by converting them to a publisher or advertiser, or they can drop them.

Managers can also receive alerts. So if you want a manager to know that 24 hours has passed since someone signed up and nobody at the network has contacted the prospect yet, eSilverBullet can send an email or pop-up reminder that no action had taken place yet. The manager can then follow-up with the employee to make sure the job gets done.

As an eSilverBullet user, you will be able to create any alerts and workflows you need to help manage your organization’s prospecting and customer management.

Tags: Affiliate Networks, Workflow
Posted in eSilverBullet | No Comments »

Feeling the Pain: Top Ten Frustrations for Advertisers in Affiliate Marketing

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

By Adam Ward

Even for veteran online merchants (the advertisers), marketing products in the affiliate space (also referred to as performance-based marketing) is no walk in the park. Here are the top ten headaches nearly all online advertisers deal with.

Running ad campaigns (or programs) on multiple ad networks (also called affiliate networks)

Online merchants expose their products to more consumers by running ad campaigns on other websites. Ostensibly, the more publisher websites the ads run on, the more traffic they push to the merchant’s site, which increases sales. Since ad networks provide an easy way for merchants to find publishers, it makes sense that a merchant would want to join as many ad networks as possible.

However, running on multiple networks creates new problems. First, there is the extra cost of getting set up and funding an account balance on each network. Second, the merchant needs to have a way of determining which network to attribute the sale to, if traffic came from multiple networks. Third, the chance of fraud increases dramatically, especially if the merchant isn’t actively managing the campaign.

Having to use different tracking software for each network on which they run ads

Every network has its own software for tracking ad campaigns. The networks expect merchants and publishers to use the tracking numbers from its own software to determine who should receive commissions on sales. So even if a merchant has its own tracking software, it still has to log into a tracking system for every network it belongs to and pull campaign statistics from it.

Having to develop proprietary tracking software (or buy third-party software) to manage in-house campaigns

Although a merchant can use the tracking software of whatever network it joins, that only works if the merchant doesn’t run ad campaigns in-house or on multiple networks. For example, if the merchant has the same campaign running on two networks, it is possible for a single publisher to grab that ad from both networks. If the publisher refers a consumer who ends up buying on the merchant’s site, each network will attribute that single publisher with a sale. So if the merchant doesn’t have its own tracking software to police that situation, it will end up paying a double commission for a single referral.

Also, because merchants contract directly with publishers (off network) to run a campaign, those merchants will need to have their own software to track the campaign results.

Dealing with publisher and network disputes over tracking numbers

Because everyone uses the tracking statistics to know what commissions to pay, this inevitably leads to squabbling over “which” statistics to use. Publishers would prefer to use their own tracking numbers. Networks would prefer to use their own tracking numbers. And advertisers would prefer to use their own tracking numbers. Since all these numbers are rarely the same, you get a lot of back-and-forth between advertisers and publishers over how much the advertiser really owes.

Recruiting new publishers and maintaining relationships with current publishers

Having an ad campaign does an advertiser no good if the ad isn’t running anywhere. So advertisers need to constantly prospect for publishers. And just like any other sales environment, taking care of your existing business relationships is far cheaper and more productive than prospecting new relationships. So advertisers need to stay in touch with publishers that are running the ad campaigns. However, knowing that this needs to be done is not as easy as actually doing it. With all the other demands on an advertiser’s time, prospecting and relationship management often take a back seat, especially if the advertiser doesn’t have tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, in place to help focus those efforts.

Dealing with parasiteware and unethical networks and publishers

Parasiteware is too complicated to delve into here (but you can go to this forum to learn all about it). Basically, there are some networks and publishers out there that use various technologies to divert search traffic that would have come directly to an advertiser’s site (so the networks and publishers get commissions they didn’t earn), that would prevent other publishers from receiving their legitimate commissions (which can create tension with the advertiser and those publishers), that would overwrite the tracking code, or would inflate tracking numbers so advertisers end up paying more than they should.

Not knowing how effective a campaign will be before it starts, and then not knowing the optimum time to discontinue a campaign that is no longer effective

Although advertisers can get a good sense of what campaigns work, they don’t have crystal balls. Since the look and content of an ad’s creative play a big role in attracting customers, a poor campaign can really hurt an advertiser. Advertisers can use analytics and persuasion consultants to help them optimize their campaigns, but that adds an extra cost to a campaign.

Having publishers refuse to join a particular ad network, or refuse to run an in-house campaign directly

Ideally, an advertiser should be able to work with any publisher it wants. Unfortunately, some publishers refuse to work with advertisers that don’t run campaigns on a specific network. If an advertiser wants to work with that publisher, but decides the benefits don’t outweigh the extra headaches of joining another network, it will have to not work with that publisher.

Having to continuously, actively manage an ad campaign

Running an ad campaign is not as simple as writing copy for the ad, designing the creative, giving it to a publisher to run, then forgetting about it. A campaign needs to be actively managed. Campaign managers need to monitor statistics to make sure the commissions they pay out are for valid leads. They need to monitor the effectiveness of the ad. They need to make changes to the campaign or creative if they aren’t getting the results they’d like.

Having to manage an ad campaign in-house as well as on affiliate networks

As a continuation of the previous point, an advertiser needs to multiply the effort of managing each campaign by the number of networks on which they run the campaigns.

Tags: Ad Campaigns, Affiliate Networks, CRM, Headaches, Parasiteware, Stealing Traffic
Posted in For Advertisers | 2 Comments »

Newspaper Ad-Tracking Systems vs. Online Ad-Tracking Systems

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

By Adam Ward

Man reading newspaper in armchair, portrait

Thanks to the Internet, differentiation between media companies is blurring. Newspaper photographers now shoot video for their websites. Broadcast companies offer classified ads on their sites. Bloggers report local news, and news reporters blog.

However, when it comes to advertising on these different media, the available technologies still cater specifically to a single medium. Newspaper software differs from television software which differs from radio software which differs from online software. Because I’m most familiar with newspaper software and online software, I’m going to focus on the difference between those two.

Newspaper business systems (e.g. AdPro, MediaSpan, SCS) refer to themselves as ad-tracking software. Although they are correct insofar as they keep track of the booking, pricing, sizing and billing of ads, they don’t track the effectiveness of the ads. That’s a major difference from online ad-tracking systems. Another major distinction is print publishers are the ones paying for and managing the newspaper software, whereas online publishers piggyback on someone else’s software, usually at no cost to them.

Although business software is the most complex software used by newspapers, here’s a simple example of how it works. Once a newspaper gets a system up and running (which takes a lot of customization, training and money, by the way), the system knows the rates and ad sizes for all publications offered by that newspaper. Someone at the newspaper then enters an insertion order into the system. For example, let’s assume the ad is a 4X5 ad (four columns by five inches tall) that costs $20 a column inch. The ad-entry person finds the advertiser in their system, enters a new 4X5 ad for them, the system prices it at $400 ($20 X 20 inches), and saves it. Unlike online ad-tracking systems used by publishers through affiliate networks, newspapers control what they charge for ads running through their system.

Because the business system contains an accounts-receivable system, it will either place the ad on hold if the advertiser doesn’t have enough credit, or approve it. The ad-entry person can also enter a payment for that advertiser and apply it to the ad. The system allows newspapers to send out a monthly bill to the advertiser showing all the ads that ran and the total due. Once the advertiser remits payment, an accounting person will enter that payment into the system and apply it to the appropriate ads or invoices.

Some business systems also have modules for managing the actual creatives (the ads themselves), as well as keeping track of the orders for online ads. But they usually don’t manage the uploading of those ads, or tracking the customer responses to those ads. That’s where online ad-tracking systems come in.

Online publishers who want to place ads on their sites often use affiliate networks to manage the ad tracking for them. Networks can either be open networks or exchanges (e.g. Commission Junction or ShareASale), where the publishers are responsible for choosing which advertising campaigns they want to run, or they can be closed networks (e.g. AvantLink or Affiliate Traction) where the networks manage the campaigns for the advertisers.

Whichever type of network the publishers join, they will use that network’s ad-tracking software. Each network uses either an ad-tracking system they built in-house, or a commercial tracking system (e.g. DirectTrack or LinkTrust). The networks allow publishers to log into their tracking system. If a publisher joins multiple networks, the publisher will have access to all the systems used by those networks.

Once logged in, publishers grab the HTML code for whatever ad campaigns they decide to run. When they paste that code into their websites, the code refers back to the tracking software to pull in the creative for the ad, direct users to the advertiser’s landing page when clicked, and track the impression, click and ultimate lead or sale.

The publishers are also able to see the stats from the campaigns they run so they can see the number of impressions, clicks, sales and—most important—the commission they expect to receive as a result of running that campaign. Unlike newspaper software where only the newspaper has access to the system, both publishers and advertisers have access to online tracking systems so they both know how successful the campaigns are. Online tracking systems also differ from newspaper systems in that the advertisers are the ones that dictate what the cost of the campaign will be, and the actual payout isn’t known until after the campaign has been running. With newspaper ads, an advertiser knows exactly what the ad will cost before the ad runs. With online tracking systems, although the advertiser and publisher have an idea of what the cost for each lead or sale might be, the total cost is dependent on how the ad actually performs. That’s why affiliate marketing is also referred to as performance marketing.

Online tracking systems do a pretty good job of tracking ad performance (unfortunately there are still ways to defraud the systems, but that’s another topic), and they can tell you what the payout should be. But that’s where they stop. Unlike newspaper business systems that have robust accounts-receivable features, online systems don’t handle billing, receivables, etc. They expect you to export that data (or enter it manually) into Quickbooks.

Maybe someday newspaper business systems will track effectiveness like online systems, and online systems will handle receivables as well as newspaper systems. But the more systemic differences between the systems, particularly which entities have access to the system and which entities dictate the costs of ads, suggest we won’t see the blurring of tracking systems like we’ve seen with the blurring of the media themselves.

Tags: Ad Campaigns, Ad Tracking, Affiliate Networks, Newspaper Software, Newspapers
Posted in Online Media, Traditional Media | 1 Comment »

An Advertiser’s Guide to Placing Ads in Traditional and Online Media

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

By Adam Ward

If you’ve never advertised your product, service or business before, you might find the world of advertising to be daunting. You have a variety of media to choose from, each with their own advertising products, prices and lingo that aren’t necessarily intuitive.

You’ll find some basic information here that will help you wade through these waters.

Television and Radio

Broadcast media have a finite space (i.e. just 24 hours a day). That space is divvied up among programming content, public service announcements and ads. The ads you’d be buying are called “spots” and you pay for a fixed amount of time (e.g. 30 seconds). Although you could buy a single spot, it is much cheaper for you (on a per-spot basis) to buy a bulk of spots. Especially with TV, where the cost of producing an ad is so expensive, it wouldn’t make sense for you to run the commercial just once.

The cost of a 30-second spot will vary greatly among stations (based on the number of listeners), and among the time of day. Drive time for radio and prime time for TV will cost you a premium over ads in the middle of the night, for instance. So when you buy a package of spots, you’ll probably get your ads spread out over the course of a day, with a spot or two during more desirable times (or programs), with the majority of your spots being at less-desirable times. Be aware that even though you think you’ve purchased spots for a specific time, if another advertiser comes in and is willing to pay more for those spots, they can bump your ad out of that time slot. Because of the finite space for ads in broadcast media, the law of supply and demand are in full swing.

Outdoor Advertising

Like broadcast media, outdoor advertising has limited real estate. They can’t easily add a new billboard if they are running at 100-percent capacity. However, with billboards you can lock in the duration of your ad, so you don’t have to worry about another advertiser with deeper pockets bumping you off halfway through the month.

Billboard rates are determined by the number of eyeballs they deliver. So a billboard on a busy freeway will cost a premium over a billboard on a less-busy street. You usually buy billboard space a month at a time, and you can also get discounts for committing to run longer.

Print Advertising

Magazine ads are pretty straight-forward. They typically have just a handful of sizes that you can choose from. So a full-page ad might cost $X, a half-page ad would cost a little more than half of $X, and a quarter-page ad would cost a little more than a quarter of $X. Magazine ads usually include color in their prices because color ads visually enhance the overall look of their magazine.

Newspaper advertising is probably the trickiest to understand because there are so many options. The ads you typically see scattered throughout news pages are called display ads, also known as run-of-press (ROP) ads. Newspapers typically charge per column inch for those ads. A column inch is one column wide by one inch tall. So an ad that spans six columns and is ten inches tall is called a 60-inch ad. If the newspaper charges $X per column inch, you’d be looking at paying $60X for that ad to run once. If you want the ad to be in color, you will probably have to pay extra, either as a flat color cost, or an extra color cost per column inch. You can get discounts if you agree to run a certain number of inches over a specific period, or if you agree to run an ad a certain number of times.

In addition to running display ads in newspapers, you can run classified line ads (paying per word, per line, etc.) or classified display ads, which price more like display ads but run in the classified section. You can also pay for advertorials that are written to look like news content (the front page of a real estate insert, for example) but are written by advertising people, not the editorial folks.

You can also put pre-printed inserts into the paper. Newspapers will charge you a fee per thousand inserts. So if you decide to have the newspaper put in 10,000 of your inserts, and the cost is $X per thousand, you will pay $10X. You will also have to pay to have the inserts created and delivered to the newspaper.

Online Ads in Traditional Media

As you know, newspapers and broadcast stations also have websites. They run the same types of ads as other online publishers (e.g. banner ads and text ads), but they don’t always price the ads the same. Since traditional media companies are used to telling their advertisers what to pay for ads, they’ve adopted the same approach for ads on their websites. They usually charge one of two ways: per a fixed period of time (e.g. a month) or per impressions served.

The nice thing about these pricing structures is you’ll know about how long your ad will be online. If you pay for a month, you’ll be up for a month. If you pay per impression, the media company should be able to tell you what their average impressions per day are. Chances are you’ll also be able to deal with the same sales person for online ads as for the other ads you purchase with them.

The downside to this is you aren’t paying based on the effectiveness of the ad. Like running a radio spot or a print ad, you expect the ad to ultimately generate sales for you, and with online ads you have a better ability to track that your website visitors clicked through a particular ad, but if your ad doesn’t get enough people to your site to buy your product, you may pay for a lot of eyeballs that don’t do anything for you.

Online Ads in the Performance Marketing Space

Before traditional media companies even had their own websites, Internet publishers were hosting advertising banners placed through affiliate networks. The publishers (anyone with a website that wants to advertise someone’s product on their site would be considered a publisher), to a certain extent, were happy to take whatever money the advertisers were willing to push their way. And the advertisers, thanks to the electronic nature of the Web’s marketplace, wanted to pay for actions, not just eyeballs.

Today there are hundreds of these affiliate networks that help pair online advertisers with online publishers. To advertise on these networks, you need to simply join the network. Most networks are free to join and you’ll have a network manager assigned to you. Others are more like exchanges where you pay to join, then post your campaigns on the exchange hoping to get picked up by the many online publishers in that network. You will have direct access to the publishers in an exchange, but probably not have any access to publishers in a managed network.

Affiliate networks are using the term “performance marketing” to highlight the fact that you’ll pay for actions, not just eyeballs. What you pay depends on what you are selling and the type of campaign you run.

If you are a bricks-and-mortar retailer, you will probably run a cost-per-sale (CPS) campaign. This simply means you pay a publisher only if a visitor on the publisher’s site clicks through your ad, lands on your site, and buys your product. When you start the campaign, you’ll tell the publisher what the percentage of each sale you will pay. So if you figure you can afford to pay 10-percent commission on all sales coming from a publisher’s site and still be profitable, your campaign will have a 10-percent payout. Publishers decide whether to run your ads based on 1) the payout and 2) how well the advertised product fits with the publisher’s site content.

If you aren’t selling a physical product, you may want to do a cost-per-lead (CPL) campaign. For example, if you are just trying to build up your email list, you might want to put an ad on a publisher’s site that entices a user to fill out a form with their email address. Once the form gets submitted, that lead gets tracked in a tracking system, you get the email address you’re looking for, and you then pay the publisher whatever amount you previously decided for that lead.

If you run performance campaigns through networks, you actually won’t pay the publishers directly. You will actually pay the network, which will then pay the publishers. The network will also have the tracking software that tracks your sales and leads. The network will provide you with a login to their tracking software so you can monitor your campaign’s activity and results.

As you can see, there is a lot to learn for advertisers in the traditional and online arenas. I hope this information has given you a good starting point for learning more.

Tags: Affiliate Networks, Banner Ads, Billboards, Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Sale, Magazines, Newspapers, Radio, TV
Posted in For Advertisers, Online Media, Traditional Media | 2 Comments »

Using New Technology, but Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

By Adam Ward

Out with the old media. In with the new. Traditional media companies are struggling to stay afloat because everybody and everything is online now. All you need to do is generate some online content (like a blog) and join an affiliate network. You grab advertising banners from the network, and the readers who find your site (because of your riveting, fresh content) click the ads, buy the goods, and you make loads of money. Sound familiar?

That’s the hype at least. The reality is quite different. Daniel Lyons, a Newsweek columnist who spent two years pretending to be Steve Jobs on his wildly popular blog, couldn’t do it, so what makes you think you can?

I don’t mean to take the wind out of your sails. It’s true that there is a lot of money swishing around the Internet, with more advertising dollars making their way to the Web all the time. (According to the census bureau at the Dept. of Commerce, eCommerce is expected to reach $300 billion in 2012.) I just want you to have realistic expectations if you decide you want to be a Web publisher.

It’s true that the barriers to entry are low enough that anyone can do it. It costs next to nothing to set up a blog, forum or website these days. And it’s true that there are hundreds of affiliate networks you can join where you can grab banners from online advertisers. But the ease of entry makes it that much harder for you to succeed. (How many musicians do you know who have their music on Facebook and MySpace, etc. but have never made a dime?)

So I apologize if I tricked you into reading this post thinking you’d get rich quick. After all, that’s what all the other blogs seem to suggest, so that’s probably what you were expecting, right? Rather, I want to give you some things to consider before you jump in. That way you’ll jump in with your eyes open. And you just might want to take some lessons from traditional media companies (yes, I know they are struggling too) if and when you do.

First, remember that content is king. I should qualify that to read “good” content. Look at newspapers. Even though newspapers have been losing readers, there is still a good reason why they can sell advertising space. Their readers are picking up the paper because of its news content. I believe that newspapers are the best organizations for generating news, and will be for many years to come.

One advantage of being an online publisher is your ability to generate news or other content at a hyper-local level. Although newspapers can report news on a local level, they will still cover general news at that level. Web publishers can provide information for small niches, but if the readers who are interested in those niches don’t find the site’s information to be valuable, they won’t be back. And with no readers, you won’t be generating any ad revenues. Just because you can place ads on your site from an affiliate network, if nobody is on your site to click through those banners, you won’t be getting any commissions from those ads. So your silver bullet would be to 1) have a site that covers a specific topic so well that it is a must-read site for people interested in that topic, 2) have ads on your site that tie closely to your content so that your readers have a greater proclivity for clicking them. Sure, newspapers will have mattress ads and plumber ads and personals because they have a general readership. You probably won’t (and probably shouldn’t) have a general readership, so don’t accept general ads.

Second, don’t rely solely on affiliate networks for your advertising revenue. Networks are great resources. They are a great way of getting relevant ads on your site by outsourcing that duty to someone else. And they should pay more than Google AdSense. But there is a personal element to selling. Advertisers like to know who they are dealing with. This is why local newspapers have such a great connection with their business communities. They have sales people interacting with local business owners constantly, and the business owners place ads in the paper.

If you have no interaction with your advertisers (and most affiliate networks won’t allow you access to those advertisers), you don’t have a lot of control over the ads on your site. You may get great commissions from an advertiser on your site only to find the advertiser is no longer associated with your affiliate network because the network rep who had the relationship with that advertiser left for another network.

To counteract this, you need to sell your site to advertisers directly. Yes, this is outside sales. Yes, you probably aren’t a sales person. And yes, it takes work. But business owners (or in your case, website publishers) are often the best sales people because 1) they understand their products better than anyone else, and 2) they are passionate about their business. They believe in it. And advertisers appreciate being associated with a business or website that the owner believes in and will be constantly improving.

That brings us to the third point: put in the work. Some people think that the rules of the real world don’t apply to the Internet. They’re wrong. Whether your business is bricks and mortar or virtual, it is still a business. And running a business takes work.

Tags: Affiliate Networks, Blogs, Newspapers, Newsweek
Posted in Online Media | No Comments »

A "do follow" blog about traditional and online advertising, CRM, affiliate marketing and best business practices.

Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Networks’

Why it is So Hard to Aggregate Tracking Statistics for Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate Networks Directory

Using eSilverBullet to Automate Your Workflow

Feeling the Pain: Top Ten Frustrations for Advertisers in Affiliate Marketing

Newspaper Ad-Tracking Systems vs. Online Ad-Tracking Systems

An Advertiser’s Guide to Placing Ads in Traditional and Online Media

Using New Technology, but Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way

Pages

Archives

Categories

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Most Popular Posts