Affiliate Success Story:
An Interview With Jeff Ostroff

http://www.carbuyingtips.com

One of my goals is to find out what works for affiliates by asking the best people I know in the business to refer me to successful affiliates. The following interview was conducted via email with Jeff Ostroff, and the opinions are great...and all his.

        A C T I V E A F F I L I A T E
        I N T E R V I E W

March 14, 1999

Hi,

I have heard about your success with affiliate programs and invite you to share some secrets of your success with our readers. We are interviewing successful affiliates; remember that success can simply be breaking even on your Internet costs, starting a great side business or two, or best of all, running a complete business strictly using affiliate program.

We would like your permission to reprint your approved interview; this will be to promote your efforts and we'll share the final draft to make sure everything meets your approval.

The goal of these interviews is to collect real stories of people who are doing well with affiliate programs. We will promote your site and approach to our readers, and hopefully eventually create a collection of examples for people to follow.

So feel free to add in extra questions or comments you think are important, and let me know if you have any questions.

1. Please share a little background about yourself; how did you begin to use affiliate programs on the Internet? Do you do this in your spare time or as a full time business?

Initially we only had one site, CarbuyingTips.Com. We used to pay monthly ad fees on a few auto related websites, and even tried a few high priced professional ad agency type placements with $20 CPM rates. These ad campaigns ended up costing us $2000 monthly, and had absolutely dismal returns. We were getting 10 hits/day from the high priced site, and 60 hits/day from a small site that we paid $150 a month for. So much for huge sites with huge monthly traffic.

We realized the hard way that for most websites, pay per impression advertising does NOT work. The internet as of 10/98 had about a 0.5% click through ratio, which is just awful. If 0.5% of the people click on your link, how many of those will convert to a sale once they get to your site? It's not worth it. I was doing the site alone in my spare time and had no time to play games. I was already an affiliate of several programs on ClickTrade and realized that there are programs that pay per click and realized I could setup my own affiliate program, then I only pay per click instead of by impressions, and I alone could decide how much to pay. It was a great idea, I started my affiliate program on clicktrade, paying $.07 per click in 11/98, and within 3 months, my traffic had quadrupled.

2. What type of affiliate programs do you work with? Feel free to list the names if you like; which ones do you like the best, and why?

We use clicktrade for our programs because of the realtime traffic reporting, and it's easy to review and approve affiliate applicants, and they handle all the billing and money collection, allowing me to focus designing more of our sites. We signed up to a turbotax program on Websponsors .com, but hate it because they only update every 2 weeks and their site seems to amateurish. To be able to appropriately gauge how well an advertiser is doing on your site, you must have real time stats so you can immediately make corrective actions and know whether they work in a timely manner. Too many affiliate programs out there don't realize the importance of this.

3. Do you have a specific, target audience for your affiliate programs, or do you promote a variety? What works best for you?

What works best for us and should for most sites is to spend the most money advertising on sites with similar content as yours. I'm not going to get a lot of people on a skiing site to click on my CarBuyingtips.Com banner because they are there to look at skiing. Even though one would think everyone's a car buyer, the odds are that surfers to a ski site that day are not interested in buying a car. But surfers to an automotive site are. We also run DebtWizards.com and try to get onto financial related sites, automotive sites, since carbuying and financing go hand in hand. We also try to get on consumer advocate sites as well. We like to approve online internet malls for our affilliate programs. The online malls all look like miniature yahoos, with their category type listings and that helps too. Each category is like a focused channel sending conumers to the proper subject. It's a lot cheaper than paying $65 CPM to be in infoseek's auto channel.

4. Name the 3 best marketing approaches you have used to succeed with your affiliate programs, and why they work. Feel free to name specific programs you have used.

1. Affiliate programs on clicktrade because of the speed of setting up, and ease of maintaining.

2. Advertise cheaply on "small time" sites related to your site's theme. If you can find a site that gets 500 or more hits daily, and they are related to your theme, it's worth it to email them and offer $100/month to banner advertise. any site that does not get 500 hits a day, will not filter any hits to your site. Remember, the formula is 0.5% of surfers click on your banner. If it's a focused category, maybe 5% will click on it.

3. GoTO.com is a creat place to advertise because you pay by the click, and you can bid up your keyword search term prices to exactly control where your site shows in the search engine results. For example, we bid the highest amount on the search term "credit report" on GoTo.com, so that we show up number 1. The amount was still low enough that we think they will buy a credit report through our site and we get a referral fee. According to GoTo.com only the first 5 urls that show up after a search will get any traffic. All the others get none.

5. Name 3 marketing approaches you would not recommend using, and why they don't work.

1. Impression based marketing, as mentioned earlier. People ignore banners for the most part. I would never consider advertising on free sites like Geocities or Tripod that give out free pages, as most of them pop up annoying windows that the user just shuts right down wothout reading.

2. Stay away from programs that don't put everything in writing.

3. Don't wast time trying to submit your site to 300 search engines. The only ones that matter are the top 5 like Yahoo, lycos, infossek, excite, webcrawler, goto. after that the results are negligible, and it's a waste of money to pay a service $50 when you can do it for free with many sites on the web that submit your link for free to the top ten directories. With the proper meta tags and carefully chosen relevant words in your title, you'll get a decent placement.

6. What advice would you give to people starting out with affiliate programs? Any traps or mistakes they should avoid?

1. If you pay per click, don't approve any sites from Russia, Turky, Italy, or China. They all cheat like crazy, getting their buddies to send fraudulent clicks to your site. You better have a damn good counter service in place that tells you where all your clicks are coming from so you can see when one entity is sending you 200 hits. Our best high qulity site sends us only 60 hits/day.

2. If you pay per click, think twice about approving sites on Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, Xoom, VirtualAve, and FortuneCity. Most of these sites give you free websites like Jeff.virtulave.com, but those stupid banners that pop up that you have to close really are a nuisance. People will close out the banner, then the site because surfers hate blatant advertising. Don't approve any site that has no email link. Open a window to internic and verify the ".com url of any site that submits. Just because it's a real nice flashy site, does not mean it's a U.S. site. We've seen some highly polished sites from Turkey that were just fronts for fraudulent click scams.

3. If you only make money from U.S. consumers, don't approve any sites based outside the U.S., you'll just be wasting your money.

4. The most conservative and successful method for us is to only approve sites with their own domain name, unless it is a nice looking geocities site on cars or something. If someone is too cheap to pay $70 for a domain name and $50 monthly for webhosting, you can't take them serious as a business, and many of them offer nothing but 10 different banners splashed up on the main page with "click on our sponsors" written all over the place. These folks just have their little fishing nets out and hope a few fish will enter, click and leave. These are not the hits you want, and you'll make no money from sites like this.

   You'll be better off with sites that incorporate your link into the story, or online malls that tell what each site is under each category. You won't have any trouble from legitimate ".com" sites, they are too busy working on growing their business than to mess around with the instant gratification of a few fraudulent clicks.

7. Rank the following in order of importance for succeeding with affiliate programs.

   
   _5_  Choosing the right affiliate programs for you.
   _1_  Targeting a specific audience for what you offer.
   _3_  Internet marketing techniques.
   _2_  Good advertising and marketing copy.
   _4_  Ability to update Web Site
   _7_  Ezines and/or opt-in email
   _6_  Good, trustworthy affiliate program company.
   __  Other (fill in what you like)

8. Name one or two essential keys to success with affiliate programs.

1. Advertise on similar related websites.

2. If you pay more than $.07 per click, you'll get better quality sites signing up. Never sign up porno or MP3 sites, they're all scum and they all cheat, and they keep popping windows tht you can't close.

3. Give your affiliates several graphical choices from standard 468x60 banners to small 100 size or even buttons, an make them look splashy, animated, and eye catching. Don't try to cram too much text onto a banner. Give them your best text copy to use. We have a quick 1 sentence copy text that I've seen most of the sites use, because it's beautiful. it should describe your site, what's good about it, and why the visitor should go there, in as few words as possible.

9. Are affiliate programs worth using?

Definitely! It offers you exposure and traffic to your site, paying the price that you want to pay.

10. What would be the best way to learn more about affiliate programs?

Nothing beats experience. Go to a site and just read all their online faqs, and study the programs and see which ones make you interested. And which ones don't, then remember why. Use that to help plan your affiliate program.

11. Would you be willing to share the kind of traffic and sales you have generated?

One site we run went from 200 hits per day in 10/98 to about 700 hits/day in 3/99. Some of the affiliate programs that advertise on our site have seen new records every month since then, indicating that the increase in traffic is helping. A few of our affiliates are reporting sales from our sites that are 3 times what they were in 12/98.

Finally, please share your contact info and invitation for people to visit your Web Site.

Jeff Ostroff
President, ConsumerNet, Inc.
email: ejo@zim.com
Carbuyingtips.com
DebtWizards.com
TaxAvenue.com
FurbyAvenue.com