Affiliate Programs / Marketing Question

I figured it would be an idea to find out what you folks thought about the various affiliate programs and how they market themselves overall.

For example, do you think that an affiliate program, in order to succeed needs to have a solid business plan so far as how it markets itself and, if so, what aspects of a program should be marketed and how?

I know for the most part almost every affiliate program has FHGs now, is that something that needs to be promoted or, should they concentrate on something else in your opinion?

Also, what mistakes have programs made in the past whn it came to their marketing techniques?

Im hoping this will turn into a good thread packed full of info :)

Regards,

Lee

For us, fhg's where a great addition to the program, and people use them, however, it's mostly people that run tgp sites or link lists that use them. Very few others use them. We also give out free content for people to use, but we ask them to let us see what they create. Some of them REALLY put forth some effort in their designs. About 75%-80% of them actually do come back and show us. So far, our free content has only been used to promote our sites, but I'm sure that its out there promoting someother sites.

Offering more then one program option is good also. (PPS, PPC, Reccuring, ect.) We saw a a great responce from webmasters as soon as we started offering it. Something that is a good marketing tip for someone building their program is to simply ask webmasters what they want while they build the program. After all they are the one's that will be using it 90% of the time. So why not build something they would use and had a hand in building?

Gives them a feeling that they aren't just some poor guy sitting at home making galleries and a real part of this business. After all, without them a lot of us would not have the traffic and sales that we have. :specs:

1 important thing i've learnt over the years ...

Those with the most feedback about 'improvements' they want in the program, requests for FHG's, auto site builders, tools etc are the ones who have the least traffic/signups to send.

Good marketers don't need anything more than a site and a linking code ... and matching traffic.

You can spend months creating the things webmasters ask for, and those webmasters never bother to send you a click ...

Start with nothing but a good site, contact webmasters with relevant traffic, get them to test - then build from there.

Very true. Some of my best webmasters only use what they build. From sites to the banners they use. They are the one's that we send monthly checks to for $800-$1200.

we're working on a selection tool for FHG's with descriptions where you can select which niche, what seperator used to divide the url and description and how long of a description you want. This will result in a delimited text file that you can import directly into your TGP. I'm hoping that it's ready in the next couple of days. This will give us something for our webmasters to use that makes their jobs much easier.

We are also aggressively marketing the fact that our company is now publicly traded and that for every sale you make you earn shares of stock in our company. This gives you the opportunity to get paid recurring on your traffic and then also earn something that will increase in value and can be liquidated into cold hard cash or held onto for future income.

As far as mistakes people have made I think that would be giving too many rewards and goodies while paying out PPS and having crappy sites that don't rebill.

The sponsor FHG's are a real plus to me. So much of what I do as a webmaster is by hand and thus very slow. Anything that increases my productivity is WONDERFUL.