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Im stunned by the number of affiliate programs who have real attitude in day to day dealings with webmasters. Were the people that get you guys sales. *Im not* working for people that are rude or wont take 5 minutes to answer a simple question like "are sales down this week?".
BTW most on here are above excellent. Just a general comment.
Well you might unknowningly be asking a dicey question.
Recalling my retail sales associate days, if I ever asked my district manager "were sales down last week?" the response would always be "Then you just have to go make some"
After all it's your job.
Steve
depends on how frequently you ask that question although it would be courteous of them to drop a quick line.
a couple times over the years, i asked sponsors if there was a problem only to discover that their join page was broken or a similar issue. but i notice that most of the people who start those "are sales down for you this week?" threads seem to start them rather frequently.
sometimes sales are actually down but often it's just the law of averages - every three weeks webmaster a may make 50 sales and the fourth week he may make 25 and feel sales are low. yet if he checked his monthly sales across the last year, he may discover that he's made between 170 and 180 sales every 4 weeks for over 12 months.
I think that no matter what you ask, the answer should be polite. It doesn't have to provide you with concrete info, perhaps they want to keep that information to themselves, but it has to be polite.
That said, I do try not to bug my reps unless I absolutely need to. They are busy people and have work to do, just like me. Unless I see something very extreme in my patterns (for example no clicks, when I know there have been lots of them, something that makes me suspect there may be a technical issue at hand), I won't just IM them to ask in general if their sales were down or up this week. I actually don't think it's any of my business on a week per week basis... and my own sales I am pretty sure are no gauge of a sponsor's overall level of success.
I don think i pestered these people. whats the point in having a rep you cant contact? its not just that either, its when you email a new sponsor to ask about whats in the members area. recently i got a reply that made me feel like its none business.
besides if your trying to build up sales with a sponsor, maybe changing the way you do things, you need to know if poor sales are the general trend that month or something youve changed.
Never ceases to amaze me that some folks in the business have NO CLUE about basic business.
Affiiliates are the lifeblood of most big programs. Any sponsor that is consistently nonresponsive to an affiliate, or responds rudely simply doesn't "get it."
Now... we've been guilty of dropping balls at times, but when we do, we always try hard to make it up to anyone that's been inconvenienced. But I'm amazed at how some companies simply can't be bothered to respond consistently, or, if they do, they NEVER follow through, are rude or arrogant, or otherwise act like they're doing a favor to the affiliate.
I think it boils down to laziness. A lot of people in this business seem to just not be interested in putting in the necessary effort to provide good service, and that problem isn't limited to sponsors.
I will say I believe the definition of affiliate is changing, as more and more of the traffic is consolidated between less and less people. I can really see a day when their are a very few big sites supported by what remains of about all Free / AVS link directories, and search engines. All that will really be around for most affiliates is going to be this pic post and video post, and a few other smaller traffic ponds. I know people have been saying this stuff for years now, but the door really is closing on the average person doing this stuff. Paying for all your traffic one way or another in the end will cost us allot, and stifle this industry. I really do not like the idea of a few sites having this much control, but I can see how some sites are going to quietly support what amounts to E-Communism.