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I was curious to know what you folks figured the pros and cons of having an invite only affiliate program was these days, it seems like a few more programs have gone the 'invite only' route in the past year and im wondering if this is a good or a bad thing overall?
Your thoughts? What do you think some of the pros and the cons are of having an invite only affiliate program?
Regards,
Lee
As an affiliate, invitation-only is just one more negative consideration (albeit, a small one) when I evaluate new pay sites/sponsors.
Dean,
Out of curiosity, why do you say its a negative thing?
Just trying to get some input on this subject :)
Regards,
Lee
I usually schedule a full day or two for adding new paysites. Each paysite will need promotional links to be added to several of my sites. So it is more convenient to have instant approval as an affiliate, then to have to wait until another day to add these links. It's a minor inconvenience, but I always have a long list of new sponsors to add, so it's an advantage for a sponsor to give instant approval to affiliates.
hmmm
Pros:
- Having a better idea who's promoting the sites
- Better idea who/what the traffic sources are
- Keeps out the fake webmasters who come looking for free content and free passwords
-
Cons:
- Time consuming to talk and check each affiliate closely
- Less overall affiliates promoting
- Missing on otherwise good affiliates who decide not to join because they don't want to take the time and go trough the approval process
I think an invite only paysite would just set itself up for failure. We all want INSTANT gratification. I guess if I saw a site that I had to wait for approval on, I'd just move on.
Bill
I want instant ... I have work to do, and i'm probably in the middle of a new site that needs whatever niche you're selling, and now I can't grab a banner and a link at 3 am because you want to be sure I'm worth adding?!? puleeassse.
Also, i run peer to peer sites .... you obviously don't want me sending you new webmasters, so why would i list your program on the resource sites?
isn't it that if a program was invite only that you would put much more heartwork into a site promoting that invite only program?
just reading the posts make it look like if you guys promote a program you do it in a hassle :D
how do you guys promote seancody.com? like any other regular site or do you rather try a little harder since not everybody is entitled to promote that very program?
It's not even about those sites that are "worth more work". Recently I signed on to tubeclicks and had to enter like 20 manadatory sponsors id's before I even begin promoting it .... and damn if at least 5-6 didn't require approval first. So 3 weeks later I have all the approvals and zip time to go back and implement the project. That time was here, and gone.
As an affiliate, the pros for me would be:
Less competition in promoting the site, meaning the images and stuff would be easier to get listed in directories, etc.
The Negs for me would be
the criteria they use to determine who is, who isn't good enough.
it might fit a project, that would then be put on hold or terminated based on approval, or not
the tools. they may provide less, as they have less people demanding tools.
harder to bitch at, because they are invite only, so it creates a sense of beholding to them, which it shouldn't.
detracts from other promotions, due to worry about being dropped or some other crapola.
my 2cents
we moved to an approval process before allowing an affiliate to signup after getting a string of scammers signing up. I don't think it has affected our webmaster signups, these days its quite normal to wait upto 24 hours for affiliate approval. I just signed up for about a dozen straight affiliate programs 3 weeks ago and over 2/3rds of them require approval first.
The best sales pitch I ever had was "invitation only". Besides being a great sales
pitch, it really worked well and reduced hassles. Way back in the day when we did
web hosting, we started out "invitation only". We didn't want to deal with spammers,
scammers, morons, and people who didn't pay their bills, so we invited a few friends.
Because we weren't taking time dealing with helping morons use FTP or fighting
to get our mail servers off of the blacklists because of spammers, we were able to
provide excellent service at an excellent price.
We then invited our very happy customers to invite a friend or two whom they trusted.
We took those referrals and checked at least one other independent reference.
We could then go to the webmaster and explain that what we were doing - limiting
the service to only select professionals who pay their bills and don't cause
problems so we could spend our time providing excellent service, rather than
chasing down the asshole who doesn't pay or dealing with other problem clients.
We'd let them know that we had spoken with two or three references, saying
"Bob at hotpepperass.com tells us that he's worked with for years and you are
a true professional in every sense of the word. Big Bird agrees, saying you're a
pleasure to work with, so we'd like to invite you to join us". As I recall that "sales
pitch" worked 100% of the time. Everybody we invited through that process
signed up, and in fact we WERE able to provide them with excellent service.
We spent our time taking good care of them, rather than dealing with bullshit.
Later, we opened it up publicly, signed up a bunch of little guys, newbies, and
our customer service went down hill because we had to spend so much time
dealing with newbies.