Affiliates, Why Do You Do This? Seriously, Why?

There seems to be a lot of questions for affiliates being posted. I'll add a few:

1. Why do you join a program that you have no intention of promoting? I'm amazed how many affiliate codes get activated through CCBill and that's the last you ever hear of that affiliate. Even after reaching out and offering assistance.

2. Why do you request/demand (in the form of bitching and moaning all over the boards) if a program doesn't offer exactly what you need? Then when the program does offer these tools, you don't use them and go silent. Seriously why?

Welcome to the reason ive been saying affiliates are the worst thing a paysite owner can have for years... Most of them think they know it all, how to make sales, send traffic, design a great tour, shoot or purchase great content, design killer promo tools, the list goes on.... Unfortunately, what 99.99999% of these 'affiliates' dont realize is... They dont know shit about running a paysite or affiliate program.

I had a guy a few weeks back DEMANDING that i gave him members access so he could 'download a few hundred content sets' to use on free sites LOL

When i told him politely 'no' he decided to start abusing me via email, saying that i didnt know shit about running a program, how letting affiliates have access to my members area so they could strip it of content would mean MORE sales for me and that he was going to promote another site instead.

I politely told him to go fuck himself and pointed him in the direction of another program.... So hopefully Lloyd is letting him download all of their content for free now instead ;)

Seriously, most affiliates are great at what they do, but in reality they dont understand that offering up 'more' content for free isnt going to help sales.

We were specifically asked a few yrs back about hosted reviews, we launched them and they attracted a lot of traffic and generated a lot of sales, slowly though over the past 2-3 yrs since we launched, traffic to them has slowed down, the same with FHGs, we were asked for them, provided them, and the affiliate who asked for them decided they were 'getting out of the tgp game' a few days after LOL

I really think a lot of those who do signup to a program do so with the intention of seeing what they can get for free from the program to make them sales, if they dont have enough 'free' stuff they can simply download, then re-upload to their domain, they dont even bother... They truly have become lazy to the point where those that make up the vast majority want us to pay them for doing next to nothing.

Any fool can throw up a link to a FHG and make a sale, using someone elses content, bandwidth and marketing, to actually sell a website membership is a skill that a lot of so-called affiliates these days simply dont have :(

Hell, i had one affiliate a few months ago asking me to build his main site for him... Of course he told me i could put links to Condom Cash using his affiliate codes on the pages until he got around to changing them 'next week' LOL

Regards,

Lee

They are not all bad BUT
The good ones are hard to come by
Plus, one aff who complains represents % who say nothing and just move on
PLUS everyone is competing for the same affiliates as sponsors we are a commodity

Conclusion get over it :snake:

Be careful, soon you'll see posts from you know who saying that linking to FHG's is hard work, or maybe she wont go there on GWW :innocent:

Sometimes when I am searching for new programs, I might sign up for 4 or 5 in the same day, then I try to get their link codes up and running as soon as I can...... BUT it usually takes longer to get it done because other programs that I am allready promoting (and hopefully making sales) change their codes, so I have to change all those codes first ... since they are allready posted all over the place and I don't want to give away my traffic to them with no chance of making a sale. ... THEN I try to add the new programs.

I am a one man band, no staff, no help from anyone, so things take time.

I currently promote over 500 different CCbill programs and a bunch of Epoch, and another bunch of stand alone affiliate programs. (So this new CCbill WMS skin is really going to be a BIG BIG problem for me to fix when they all change over to it).

You may ask why do I sign up for a program if I am not prepared to put the link code up right away and I would have to say because:

-I sign up for programs when I find them so I don't have to search for it again.
-I have signed up for programs that closed or made changes within a few days of signing up to them.
-I like to see what other people are saying about a program before I put up a whole bunch of links for them.
-Sometimes I am just lazy for a few days and take a break from typing, copying and pasting, and looking at naked folks.

To end this long long post I would like to say.... if I sign up for a program, I will put links up for them, it just might take a little longer than someone with a team of workers and/or fancy automated scripts that do alot of work for them.

What he said.

I often sign up just to get a better look at how a sponsor works and what they are offering, or simply out of curiousity.

Or to get on their mailing list.

And I'm definitely more loyal to sponsors who do things like offer me passwords and permission to download and use content.

Over the 13+ years I've been in the business one thing has always remained consistent; the top 10% of your affiliates make 90% of your sales. The bottom 10% of your affiliates make up 90% of your support issues/affiliate manager's time.

Go figure.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kmanrox

Over the 13+ years I've been in the business one thing has always remained consistent; the top 10% of your affiliates make 90% of your sales. The bottom 10% of your affiliates make up 90% of your support issues/affiliate manager's time.

Go figure.

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Kman may have a point, but:

1. everyone starts out somewhere, I am sure 13 years ago when you started in the biz, you had a lot of questions and someone somewhere placed you in their bottom 10 percent. Eventually you moved up to the top.

2.Hopefully a good affiliate manager can make a bottom into a top (if that's their thing :rolleyes: ) and can recognize the fact that it's in their best interest to at least give it a shot, and give that bottom person a chance to make an improvement.

I did it because I knew it'd irratate the shit outta you!! :cheerleader:


Seriously though, I sign on for pretty much the same reasons that hotdudesnude mentioned. I have a boatload of folders for blogs that I have kept notes in about who I'm signed on with, who I need to sign on with, etc to promote that particular site. Eventually they'll all be online and doing their thing! Just not enough hours in the day.

Yeah I don't really expect to see an affiliate sign up and be promoting 5 minutes later. I completely understand about activating an account and getting to it later, sometimes much later. I'm certainly guilty of that.

But there are those that have been signed up for months and in some cases even years, that you never hear from.Yet they have active sites and they were't signing up to check it out as its all right there in the open, no sign up necessary to check it out.

I guess that one wasn't really my biggest peeve. But rather the second one about providing promo tools specifically at the request of certain affiliates. Then you provide them and you never hear from them... Really makes you wonder sometimes, why even bother?

It's certainly true that most affiliate traffic & sales comes from a very small number of affiliates. I have over a thousand affiliates registered and I can count on one, maybe two hands the ones that actually generate a fair amount of sales. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate each and every affiliate that sends me any traffic at all, I just have a hard time understanding why some just don't bother.

Quote:

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I just have a hard time understanding why some just don't bother.

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I actually do not think it is a case of some not bothering.

Instead i think it is a case of the majority beleiving the 100 or so hits they DO send a month is a large amount of traffic.

On the grand scale of things, an affiliate sending 100 hits a month doesnt really amount to much when you consider the affiliates sending millions of hits a day to a program, but for the smaller affiliates, their 100 hits is mroe than likely as much traffic as they have to spend which is why many are cautious about signing up to a program and sending their traffic to it.

The major difference is, as already mentioned, the ones sending you 100 or so hits a month, want and in some instances NEED a lot more of a program owners time than those sending out millions upon millions of hits a month and yet they do not seem to understand that when they ask for something and get told 'no' its not that it is beinng unfair, its just that we, as program owners, are trying to remain profitable.... Which is the bottom line.

Regards,

Lee

I'm guilty of joining and forgetting :juggle:

but it's only because i am working by myself and there's only one me to go around

There are so many programs out there to promote that for anyone working by themselves may not be humanly possible to send traffic to them all, unless you have a big site and have banners in rotation.

Plus people don't stick with one niche they work with many, or with whatever they think will stick

I would rather have someone join our program well before they are ready to promote it, than leave it to the last second and possibly forget to join. That way, this affiliate would get our newsletters and our update news, and after logging into our affiliate area and checking around, they would be able to build new sites which promote our paysites better.

newsletters are big for me i open my inbox and start putting in all the content i get from them onto my sites

like hunkmoney ;)