Affiliate Marketing: Why you must own your affiliates - or risk
losing your entire sales force
Control your affiliate marketing program - control your profits.
Choosing the wrong Affiliate System Provider (ASP) can be lethal to
your profit margin. This article discusses what to avoid in an affiliate
management provider. If you're starting an affiliate program or are
dissatisfied with your current affiliate software, you can't afford
to miss this.
Don't pay a Success Penalty that will sap your profits
A lot of ASPs charge you a monthly percentage of your affiliates'
total earnings. For example, Commission Junction (CJ) charges you
30% of affiliate earnings every month - forever - with a $250 per
month *minimum*. It used to be 20%, but they were greedy and raised
it. Oh, and that's on top of their $1,295 "setup fee"!
Don't get trapped into paying this "Success Penalty" -
it's a huge mistake! The more successful your program becomes, the
more of your revenue goes to the ASP - even though they are providing
the same service!
Let's look at how this Success Penalty affects you in real life.
If you pay your affiliates a 20% commission - $4.00 on a $20.00 product
- you pay CJ.com $1.20 per sale.
But if your affiliates send you 30 sales per month - $120.00 in commission
payouts - you will NOT pay CJ 30% of that - $36.00. You will pay them
$250.00, simply because that is what their monthly minimums are. That's
$130.00 MORE than you paid your affiliates! If that's not crazy, I
don't know what is.
Don't find out too late that you don't own your affiliates - and
are in danger of losing them
Even worse, is the fact that any affiliates you sign up are not actually
YOURS at all … they belong to the ASP. They have signed up for
the ASP's affiliate program first, and yours second.
What if Commission Junction decides to raise their rates from 30%
to 40% of affiliate commissions? Remember, they've already raised
them from 20% to 30%. You may decide that's too expensive and you
want to change providers.
The hard truth is that it doesn't matter how hard YOU worked to recruit
affiliates … you don't have even so much as their names and
email addresses, so you can't contact them and tell them you're leaving.
You will LOSE your entire hard-won sales force.
Do you want competitors to see your private sales figures? Commission
Junction also openly publishes clients' private sales figures. That
means that all your competitors have to do to see your private sales
statistics is sign up as a free Commission Junction affiliate.
Do you want to see your sales figures splashed all over the Internet?
No ... Keep your affiliate program in-house and keep your business
info to yourself.
Existing affiliates - the biggest "benefit" of ASPs - exposed
as useless to most of us
Affiliate management providers claim their existing network pool of
affiliates as their biggest benefit. But the truth is ...
Your affiliate program will be like a needle in a haystack of hundreds
of competing affiliate programs, some paying higher commissions than
you. And all the affiliates ALREADY belong to one or more other programs
… drastically reducing your potential to get prime "web
real estate" in their sites, newsletters, etc.
In fact, a source at Commission Junction, who wishes to remain anonymous,
has been quoted as saying, "The majority of our affiliates belong
to at least 10 programs." Sure, you may get a few new affiliates
out of it. But this is what Internet guru - and author of the unprecedented
" Report on Affiliate Management Software," Dr. Ralph Wilson
has this to say about the quality of this type of affiliate:
"Having a pool of eager affiliates to draw from seems pretty
attractive. The truth is, however, that only 3% or so of these affiliates
have sites with much traffic, and only a few are making any significant
income from affiliate programs."
It's relatively easy to build up an affiliate base. It takes a little
time, but you end up with quality affiliates - not an untested herd.
Ultimate Affiliate Plus comes with a FREE Affiliate Training Center
that has valuable information on finding and keeping affiliates. This
will certainly help with "stickiness" - keeping affiliates
loyal to your program - as well as training them to really SELL for
you.
You have the right to own your affiliate network
Luckily, there are alternatives to ASPs. In his "Report on Affiliate
Management Software," Dr. Ralph Wilson points out: "A number
of merchants are choosing an alternative approach that gives them
substantially more control over their program while capping their
costs with a monthly service fee rather than a per-transaction fee."
Among the affiliate management solutions we've analyzed, only ONE
not only offers the benefit of owning your affiliates, but also eases
the pain of switching from an ASP.
Ultimate Affiliate Plus is the recipient of Dr. Ralph Wilson's prestigious
Editor's Choice Award.
And you'll receive a $100 Migration Bonus if you switch to Ultimate
Affiliate Plus from ANY other affiliate system.
Ultimate Affiliate Plus is our pick for all-around affiliate software
- it is high-quality, feature-packed, and affordable.
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