Affiliate Trust

Of victory and defeat, confrontation is the victor!

It’s a very simple strategy. The observation of suspicious merchant activity is posted. The merchant is invited to the discussion and confronted with the facts. The resulting action or inaction determines whether the merchant’s affiliate program is listed in the trusted merchants list or the un-trusted merchants warning list. There is no brow beating, threats, or insults, but “just the facts ma’am“. The consequences are either good press, or bad press. And Internet press lasts forever.

A Victory…
It was discovered that Gold Star Nutrition (www.powerthin.com) exhibited extraneous reversal rates in their affiliate program statistics on Shareasale. A merchant alert * was sent. The next morning, John from Gold Star Nutrition registered with Affiliate Trust and constructive discussion ensued. John answered affiliate’s questions and explained the reason for the spike in reversals. Affiliates went away happy and John’s affiliate program earned a place on the trusted merchants list that is being developed for inclusion in the forum very soon. This is one of several recent victories resulting from Affiliate Trust merchant alerts *.

A Defeat…
While researching affiliate programs for fragrance merchants, a member noticed leaks on unlimitedperfumes.com, the website of Unlimited Perfumes Inc, a Shareasale merchant. The leaks included banners to other fragrance merchants and Google ads. A merchant alert * was sent on May 25th with no response and a second attempt was made to invite the merchant to the discussion on July 5th. A representative registered the next day and joined the discussion. He/she posted the reasoning that “Often time what we are seeing is the ads HELP us to convert at a higher rate because our pricing is the lowest on the market.“. After a little more discussion he/she assured us that “I have had my programmer remove all analytics and affiliate code, pending further discussion as a company. There should be no more “leaks.”“. This sounded good, but it was soon discovered that a price comparison banner leads to perfumecompare.com, another website owned by Unlimited Perfumes Inc. The plot thickens! On perfumecompare.com there were links to other perfume sites. Some of these other sites are also owned by Unlimited Perfumes Inc. Here’s the kicker… Other sites linked to from perfumecompare.com are fragrance sites that Unlimited Perfumes Inc. is an affiliate of! Oh what a tangled web we weave when… well you know! Not only is affiliate traffic potentially leaked to AdSense ads, but the traffic that Unlimited Perfume’s own affiliates deliver is redirected to earn Unlimited Perfumes commissions AS an affiliate. When these facts were presented to the rep, he/she disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since.

Unlimited Perfumes owns…
unlimitedperfume.com
unlimitedperfumes.com
perfume-room.com
perfumeroom.com
perfumecompare.com

They are affiliates of at least these…
FragranceNet
Perfume Worldwide
FragranceX
Scented Monkey

While I labeled the Unlimited Perfumes effort a defeat, is it really? The knowledge of merchants to avoid is as valuable as the knowledge of trusted merchants to join. That the confrontation happens is what matters!

AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

*Merchant Alerts is an exclusive feature of Affiliate Trust. Members may send official alerts to merchants through email under the umbrella of Affiliate Trust. The identity of the sender is not exposed and the emails are sent through the AT email system. These alerts notify the merchant of active discussion about their affiliate program and the type of concern raised by affiliates. They are invited to join the discussion and address the concerns of affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing: How Nichie Can You Get?

Niche is a word that most affiliates struggle with. They ask how, what, will??? If you’re lucky enough to hit on a niche that’s popular but not saturated, you can make money… but only for a while. Profitable niches are fleeting. Other marketers inevitably find out and your competition only grows, never shrinks.

Consider a niche within a niche. We run an eCommerce site that targets a particular audience. The variety of products that appeal to that audience is virtually endless. But call that target audience our top level niche. Now within the top level we offer a variety of product categories. Each is the next level niche. There may be several categories within categories. All of these are niches that become more narrowly defined as you drill down to individual products. Individual products can be even nichier if you want to consider colors and sizes. For instance, large size product niches can be lucrative.

What led me to this discourse? One of our product categories contains a selection of about twenty items with various features, prices, and brands. There are several brands that we carry just one product each of. We sold one of these single items this morning. I was curious as to why this one instead of another brand with a number of different choices. So I checked the traffic stats and found that there was a Google search for this particular brand that resulted in the sale. I’ve found that this is a pretty common occurrence. We sell more products through targeted searches than through more general searches where the shopper browses the site. Though the stats show that this shopper spent ten minutes on the site and viewed seven pages, she still settled on the product she originally searched for.

Though we continually promote our brand and hope that shoppers are attracted to our home page, this simply is not where the traffic arrives. It virtually always arrives at the very nichiest of pages, the individual product pages. So though you build a great website from the top down like we did, your traffic will usually arrive at the bottom.

This concept becomes critical to PPC (pay per click) advertising. I can imagine a graph in my mind. One line represents nichieness (an imaginary quantity) and the other represents CTR (click through rate). CTR will unquestionably follow nichieness proportionately. Add another quantity, [PPC] cost. Cost will graph inversely proportionate to nichieness and CTR. So theoretically, the nichier your campaign, the lower your advertising cost.

There’s a lot of talk about the magic bullet. Most experienced affiliate marketers insist that there is no magic bullet. I contend that there IS a magic bullet, but you have to mold it yourself. It can’t be purchased at the magic bullet store.

So how do you mold the magic bullet? Don’t labor so much over your top level niche choice. Build a top down website that gives you the flexibility to experiment within an established base. Build it to facilitate easy product additions and updating. Add appropriate products with unique detail pages and images. Optimize for searches at the nichiest levels (products) rather than the categories, or your website brand. Never remove non-performing products, but continually add products. When you hit on a success, leverage that success before it disappears by giving that product more attention than non-performing products. Fine-tune SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC campaigns. Let demand drive your promotion rather than promoting to create demand.

And… get nichie!

For insights and discussion about this and many other topics, visit the Affiliate Trust Forum.

AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

A Parade of Wanna-be Affiliate Marketing Associations
Affiliate Trust, Affiliate Voice, and the Performance Marketing Alliance

This is going to be a quite cynical treatise addressing the feasibility of an affiliate marketing industry organization. It will probably make some people angry, including Affiliate Trust members. They may ask, “what motivated you to post such a rant?”. Observation, experience, and realization have led to the conclusions expressed here.

In my year at the ABW (A Best Web) forum I contributed a great deal of time and comment toward becoming a member of the community. I was asked by Haiko, the forum administrator, to serve as a moderator, which I gladly agreed to. That was quite a revealing, and sometimes entertaining vantage point for observing the inner works of affiliate marketing.

In November, the One Cause/LinkShare debacle surfaced. Many ABW members ranted and raved about the inequities of the merchant/network/affiliate relationship and the unfairness of some marketing methods. Ideas were thrown around, frustration was expressed, anger led to insult, people were banned, and the sources of the controversy became silent… a typical ABW experience. It seemed like an ideal time to gather all this disdain into a viable force to attack some of the inequities that affiliates find themselves on the short end of. So I approached Haiko about firing up the Affiliate Voice organization that he had birthed. By then there was an AV logo and a false store front but no substance. He refused my suggestion and my offer to help.

Since all Haiko wanted to do was rant, and still feeling like something could be done to support and strengthen the affiliate dimension of affiliate marketing, I started fielding some ideas on the forum. There were a lot of members who agreed and would be willing to support the cause. So Affiliate Trust was born.

The premise was to base our entire organization on communication and education. It would be geared toward influencing merchants having affiliate marketing programs. We began working on compiling a database of contact information for distributing multimedia presentations about profitable and unprofitable marketing methods. The parasite methods of ones like One Cause would be exposed as commission sucking techniques to avoid. We had several different projects in progress simultaneously that included video examples of detrimental marketing methods.

We needed contributing members to accomplish the AT goals. The contributions were not monetary, but time and expertise. So the membership drive began. Posts at ABW asking for help in achieving the AT goals were met with positive comments and a few volunteers were garnished. Haiko was supportive as expressed in private communications with me.

Here’s the kicker… the very outspoken ones who seemed so supportive during the One Cause explosion in November were more or less absent from the roster of volunteers when the time came to put action to their words. What’s more, some who went so far as to join AT went no further than posting once that “I’m here to help”, and then disappearing.

To add insult to injury, when trying to recruit those same people who openly expressed their disdain for the One Cause scheme, I was apparently perceived as a threat to the sovereignty of ABW, and viciously tarred and feathered and dragged through ABestWeb like a rapist and run out of town on a rail. This speaks of a double standard practiced by the ABW administration and some members. I still haven’t gathered the courage and donned enough armor to take a look at the text of that tar and feathering. I’m advised that I should delete it and never look.

So here’s the conclusion I’ve come to. Affiliate marketing is made up of individual, independent, small business people who have loosely bound contracts with merchants to provide Internet advertising services. They, for the most part, have no relation with peer affiliates and operate independently to maximize their profits and advance their own businesses. They make business decisions based on profit and return on investment. They don’t seem to be interested in the time and effort required in banning together with other affiliates in attempts to accomplish a goal, that based on this assumption, is extracurricular. Deep down, they probably know that no self composed affiliate bill of rights, best practices, seal of approval, or any other device, can be imposed on the industry in general, or particularly on other facets of an industry where the merchants [and networks] they affiliate with are as independent as they. I highly doubt that free coffee mugs or t-shirt slogan contests will be any motivation in persuading potential members to fork over their hard earned money or time.

So I begin to wonder if other organizations are seeing more success in attracting members than Affiliate Trust. If so, I would think the numbers would be touted and displayed for all to see. What are the Performance Marketing Alliance numbers? What are the Affiliate Voice Numbers. What are the Affiliate Trust numbers? If Affiliate Trust had thousands, you can bet they’d be prominently displayed on our site. I even removed the Affiliate Trust member count from public view. It represented a dismal expression of the true desire of affiliate marketers to contribute in any appreciable way to the health and welfare of the industry.

So as the parade turns the corner and only the fading beat of the throbbing bass drum remains, affiliate marketers will turn back to their monitors and return in step to the beat of their own drum.

AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

Affiliate Marketing - Leaky Merchants

In thinking about a couple merchants that were reported as having “leaks” on the Affiliate Trust Forum, I feel it necessary to find some value consideration in the method from the merchant’s perspective. Two very large merchants, Amazon and Overstock.com, were reported as having leaks. eBay has leaks as well. These are very large profitable corporations that can’t be passed off as being clueless to some negative impact from inclusion of external links (leaks) on their ecommerce sites. In fact, you can safely assume that these links are beneficial to the bottom line in one way or other since ROI drives corporate marketing methods. <SPECULATION>The links included on these big brand sites must belong to sister companies, companies having some vested interest, or companies with mutually beneficial agreements in place.</SPECULATION> There are undoubtedly other motivations for external links.

But as a merchant myself, with no sister companies or special agreements, external links make no sense whatsoever. Once we’ve attracted a shopper to visit the site, the only external link I want them to take is the one that authorizes their credit card.

So where does the smaller merchant fit into this grand scheme? At the Amazon end, the small independent merchant end such as mine, or somewhere in between? Is that “somewhere in between” simply the result of observing the methods of the big guns and following suit without an understanding of the ramification, lost sales?

For the marketing affiliate, leaks are another black hole that sucks potential commissions when they’ve delivered the customer. Affiliate Trust provides a mechanism for observation and reporting of leaky merchants. Merchant alert emails are sent as a result of these reports and a merchant representative invited to join the discussion and address the concerns of their affiliates. As we interact with leaky merchants many of these questions will be answered and published.

AffiliateTrust.org