There is a dramatic change happening in affiliate programs, and it all involves selling items within the context of the affiliate's Web Site.
Affiliate programs are changing from the original, "place my banner ad on your Web Site" branding approach to a new, integrated advertising effort. It is more important to place your content within their Web Site, to empower them to sell, than to simply drive people to your Web Site.
As Affiliate Programs evolve, a separation between pay per sale and pay per traffic is emerging. If the goal of your program is just to generate traffic, then offer a clickthrough or bounty for new customers is the model.
If you want to sell products through other Web Sites, the "In Context" selling that this issue focuses on is the critical factor. Here's how you do it:
1. Reinvent banner ads into text driven, lead generating tools
Banner ad space is a great place to get your brand out, but if your affiliates do not get clicks or sales on that space, your banner will not appear. I know, you have heard that again and again…but the only thing affiliate programs seem to share is their love for the banner ad.
Banner ad space is the advertising space at other Web Sites, but to improve your clickthrough and sellthrough from banners, and to empower your affiliates, try these techniques:
Here are three rules to follow:
A. Use text in your banner ads so they appear to be part of the site. Use only a few sentences with a compelling free offer so you can generate traffic.
B. Make your brand a small logo on each banner ad, and write call to action headlines on the banner. For example, "Click here to win a $20 gift certificate from XX Company" is much better than trying to sell your value proposition…one example I have seen is a company with the USP; "You are not alone." On a banner ad, this is vague and meaningless.
C. Make your offer and ad copy easy to understand; write for a 6-9th grade reading level, and keep it simple.
D. Underline your headline text in blue, so it appears to be a link. This fits in easily to Web Sites without appearing to be a banner ad.
E. Keep things familiar. Use Windows-like banners that include the normal commands, Go, and Click Here, that you see on a Windows interface. When it looks like the majority of their computer interfaces, your target customers will be familiar with it.
F. Drive your visitors from a banner ad to a form that requests more information. Most affiliate programs drive people from a banner ad to a home page, full of confusing choices. Or they drive people to a one product sale and hope for the impulse buy. The best approach is to drive them to an email request form; here you can reward your visitors with gift certificates, free reports, and if you have a more considered purchase decision (for argument's sake, anything more than $100 on the Internet is not likely an impulse buy. The comfortable price point for purchases online tends to be between $20-$40.), focus on your follow up. Send them an email, automate your follow-ups, and gradually introduce the sale. Most people won't buy until 3rd or 4th contact, no matter what you do.
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2. Build on your affiliate's "context" to get recommended.
The new mode of affiliate programs is to merge your products into the context of other Web Sites. As noted in the last issue, context literally means "necessary link", but before we get to how you make your offer "necessary", let's focus on how to understand the context of Web Sites you want to target.
Web sites are built around a certain amount of content, community, discussion boards, and communication that weave together to form the "context" of the site. Remember these important points when building your advertising to fit into the context of their Web Site:
A. Target sites with a buying context. It is easy to fall in love with the allure of millions of impressions at bigger Web Sites. You can pursue these people forever, and they are in love with selling their banner ad space. They should be in love, because selling banner ads, if you do it frequently, is easy money. But often the sites with the most impressions do not yield buyers. Once again, this is good for branding, but if you want to make sales, the context of the site must be towards buyers. For example, Edmunds.com offers automobile information. People look at the info and click onto other sites that sell cars and insurance. People at Edmunds are buyers, and the results they generate show that these buyers are converted to sales. Remember that banner ads rarely convert to sales.
B. Beware of "free" sites. The best things in life are free, but the best things in business are not. Most free sites, including all those community sites that offer free home pages, create a bunch of people who are often not willing to pay for a thing. They will post your banner ads everywhere, do little promotion, and expect a lot out of you. In our own testing, we have found that free sites generate more headaches, questions, and low volume of sales than anywhere else. While there are certainly exceptions, do not target free sites if you really want to make sales.
C. The best "context" is a Web Site with a following. Throughout the Internet, Web Sites have sprung up with considerable followings driven by integrity, respect, and a long-term business relationship built on trust. This kind of context is worth its weight in gold. For example, Jeff Ostroff at http://www.carbuyingtips.com offers advice on how to buy cars and save money. People trust this consumer advocate, and the affiliate programs he recommends by positing prominently on his site. The consumer is there to learn information about a purchase, and Jeff drives the process. His context is a selling context driven by the trust of these visitors.
D. Target media sites with a wide variety of content and see if you can get your products featured within the right content. Newspapers online share a wealth of information and will have problems selling ad space. If you are offering a product via an affiliate program, make sure to match your products to their content. For example, a book about dating would do well within the classified, personals section of a newspaper, or in the entertainment section. It would not do well within world news. Sound obvious? Look around at the next content site that features an ad for furniture on a page about computers; it is amazing how few sites match their content to the products being offered.
E. Select your affiliates on the basis of their content and traffic. Traffic alone is not a good judge of effectiveness for selling online. Many of the high traffic sites are unusual or odd in their appeal, and people once again are not in the buying context. The content of a good web site has to be updated frequently and fill a need for a specific niche. For example, many computer programmers repeatedly visit Web sites for information, because programming information changes frequently. These are great sites for products and services. Other sites, like the joke of the day kind of sites, are good for entertainment value, and maybe branding, but if you want to make sales, it just doesn't make sense. Do you see many ads in the comic section, except for entertainment? 'Nuff said…
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3. Make your affiliate offer a "necessary link" in the best space on their site.
One of the biggest mistakes made by affiliate networks is talking about your offer, like it is the most important thing to your affiliates. What is important to them is to make money, or at least add some value to their Web Site.
The affiliate not only wants to know what they can earn, but how your offer can fit into their Web Site. Take the following steps to make sure that your product becomes a necessary link to their Web Site:
A. Immediately address the needs of your target affiliates by showing why your product will enhance the value of their Web Site. Don't assume they understand, or love your product/service as much as you do. Assume that you love their Web Site as much as you love your own product, and you will have the right approach.
B. Teach your affiliates how important it is to feature your product on a prominent spot on their Web Pages, including the first screen people view at the site (640X480 area that they enter on), the left hand and right hand borders, and especially the lower right hand of the first screen they see.
C. Get them to feature your offer on a specific page; you can use content drive Web Pages to promote your product. For example, if you are selling travel to the Caribbean, offer your affiliates a Web Page with a special report on the best hotels or best seasons to travel. They incorporate it into the context of their Web Site, and it appears to be another Web Page, not just an advertisement.
D. Encourage your affiliates to promote your offer on the top and bottom of their Web Pages, so it doesn't necessarily interrupt the content of the Web Page. If they stick you in the middle, it is likely that your ad will be ignored.
E. In your email newsletters to your affiliates, remind them of the demographic and psychographic makeup of a typical customer. List related products and develop co-promotional opportunities with other affiliate programs. Teach them how to best sell to their visitors by clarifying who you are selling to, and what is the appeal of this product to their specific audience.
F. Bundle your affiliate program with other, related products and offer all of these as a necessary link. Like Microsoft created Office to bundle software, you can offer a bundle that gets featured as an important part of their Web Site.
G. Remember that the most necessary link is one that makes sense to the affiliate, and drives traffic and sales for you.
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4. Create residual income opportunities so they keep featuring your affiliate advertising.
At ActiveMarketplace, we focus on the three R's for our affiliates:
- Results: We want to send our affiliates a check each month.
- Relationships: Give them a reason to keep working with you, even if you don't make them money. Simple respect and responding to your affiliates will build up a long-term referral system that is not based solely on money. Good will is important to anyone in business, and too many affiliate programs treat their people like dirt.
- Residual Income: If you give them just once chance to make money off of you, they will leave. It is that simple.
Before exploring residual income, beware of a trend on the Internet among the "Netizens", who frequent discussion boards more than marketing their own business. They insist that they should be paid for every purchase a customer makes, even though they send that customer to you just once.
Residual income is not something earned by forwarding one lead; there are programs, especially those concerning automobiles, that pay commissions on repeat buys. But think of the logic here; I send you a customer once, and do no more work, and get paid every time that person buys.
While it is a nice theory, in application it stinks. Your affiliates will make little effort to sell your products on a regular basis. Obviously there is value in the promotion, but in reality the people who sign up for these programs are not generating repeat income.
To get them to earn residual income, make sure you give them ways to such as:
A. Build two-tier programs, so that any affiliates that sign up from your affiliate network generate sales, and commissions, to the person who first referred them to you.
B. Encourage repeat sales by offering specials pages that you can change, or changing your banner ads regularly to feature new offers. As long as the name of the banner ad graphic remains the same, you can instantly update this at your affiliate's Web Site.
C. Encourage your affiliates to generate email inquiries for your program, and place their affiliate code in your follow up emails. We installed such a program at ActiveMarketplace, it took just a few days, and the results were terrific, for us and for our affiliates.
D. Build on the repeat buying behavior of your customer base. If you know which products they will buy repeatedly, encourage your affiliates to promote these follow up products in their ezines, and at their Web Sites. Too many affiliate programs rely on the sale of only a few, unrelated products.
E. While many affiliate programs focus on promoting the lifetime affiliate commission as some sort of annuity, like Art.com does, the fact is, your best affiliates will make sales because they work their lists, and their Web Sites. Promising lifetime payments is nice PR technique, but in reality the best salespeople are motivated, not given an easy way to make easy dollars.
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5. Make your affiliate program a value-added service.
Setting up an affiliate program focuses so much on the actual sale of products. If you focus only on the advertising capabilities of your affiliate program, you are missing some of the most important uses of your advertising.
Take Homestead.com for example. This site offers easy to use Web Site design and development tools. Major affiliate programs, like FogDog and ProFlowers, can be added to any Homestead.com's customer Web Pages with the click of a mouse.
But looking closer you see programs like HotBot, who allow users to post their search engine on the site in exchange for a pay per click model.
HotBot becomes a value-added service to a Web Site; GoTo.com has also done this with their affiliate program. Do you really think it is the money these people are making that keeps them coming back, or the fact that the affiliate program adds value to their site whether they make money or not?
Travelocity's affiliate program is another example of an affiliate program that is more a value-added service than a way to generate cash. They pay small margins for plane tickets, because there are no margins to really share. What they do so effectively is match people to the plane tickets they are looking for. Affiliates enjoy the fact that the Travelocity brand (soon to become Preview Travel) is on their site, and those visitors can get plane tickets easily.
Making money is not always the best way to present your affiliate program. Often giving people a valuable service is as effective as offering them only a way to make money. Appealing to greed is one thing, but appealing to the value of a Web Site puts you in an easier position. Add value to their site with products and services that they come to rely on, until they can't live without you.
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It is that simple.
6. Be creative in your merchandising on their Web Site.
Throughout the Insider training system, the focus on moving beyond the banner is easy to understand. Merchandising of your affiliate program has taken the next steps, focusing on what really works within a Web Site. What works is fitting your advertising into the context of their Web Site, but more importantly, you need to understand what the real point of sale is at their Web Sites.
Most Web Site owners create these giant collections of information and figure that people spend endless hours surfing the Internet. If they would look at their statistics, they would likely learn another story; people visit specific sections of a Web Site repeatedly, if your Web Site is working.
Merchandise around these high traffic areas with the following suggestions:
A. Show your affiliates how to use statistical programs to understand where their traffic goes. Get them to understand the value of their Web Pages.
B. Teach them to post your advertising on the top 5 trafficked pages at their Web Site.
C. Create text-based merchandising that can fit into their Web Sites. If they focus on the text links, with small pictures, it is shown that response levels increase. Text can easily fit between paragraphs, in small tables with a background color that appears as an aside to what they are reading, along left hand or right hand columns, as well as in email.
D. Concentrate on your copy, not just the visual appeal. The Net is not as impressive as print when it comes to color advertising; it is a medium built on interaction, on people clicking through to what they want. Driving that click is what your merchandising is all about.
E. Don't show price on your affiliate's site. Your merchandising is not a catalog page on someone else's Web Site. It is a call to action, so the visitor moves from curiosity to fulfillment of the entire advertising message at your site.
F. Drive people from your merchandising to specific entry pages, known as hook pages. Focus them on the offer you are making and get their email on this entry point as well. Impulse buys do not drive sales on the Internet. Do not drive them to a home page or shopping cart with many choices if you want to make sales.
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7. Provide co-branding and private labeling opportunities that are easy to install.
In context advertising demands that an affiliate be able to put their words, logo, and contact information, along with a return link to their own site, on your affiliate offer.
Affinia and Vstore are revolutionizing this approach by giving them the full suite of tools to mix and match products to Web Sites. Savvy affiliate programs will put their products into these two networks if possible, as well as positioning their own programs.
But the real key is to make affiliate programs a 5-minute kind of deal. If you make them work longer, they will get frustrated. Wouldn't you? Here are two simple solutions to make it easy for them to work with you.
First set up framed pages that affiliates can place at their Web Site, with links back to their home page. You allow them to drop their affiliate code into your pages, and it all appears to be under their URL. Nothing could be simpler, more effective, and useful; you can update your affiliate offerings on your server, and have it delivered to their sites instantly, with neither party working too hard.
The second solution is to carve out a small section of a Web Page at your site for your affiliates to put their personal message on, or to add a link to their home page. Using our ActiveEdit technology, ActiveMarketplace puts this box in our affiliate's password protected area, so they can add text and links to our pages. They type in the words and/or HTML code, press a button, and this text is placed into the page from our simple, online database.
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8. Be sure your affiliates match your products to their content.
Does it seem like you have read this before? It cannot be emphasized enough. Most affiliates today simply sign up for products they think their customers would like.
They don't ask their customers, survey them, or even consider the wide variety of products that content can generate. They simply place banner ad space around their sites and hope for the best, in effect creating bad Internet merchandising that will disappoint them, and you.
The best way to get around this is to understand the best kinds of content sites to drive sales for your affiliate program. For example, if an affiliate has a Web Site about fly-fishing, it may seem logical just to put up related gear to fly-fishing.
But fly-fishing involves more than just the gear to do it. People travel to go fly fishing, and they charter guides to help them on their way. They may also backpack, camp, and obviously enjoy preparing fish to eat, so for some recipe books and tips for preparing fish are essential.
Now that we have a product line in mind for the content, it is easy to select which pages the best product offer goes. If there is a page about fly fishing tips, put in the gears and rods there. If there is an article on a great place to go fly-fishing, that is the place to offer vacations.
Finally, if an affiliate offers articles on preparing fish, that is a great place for recipes and cooking information. Your affiliate, if left alone, will likely stop at the easiest solution. But with just a bit of thinking, you can get them to focus on their content, and match the best products to it.
They will often not consider this on their own; after all, the Internet is filled with newcomers to business in general…especially at the bigger Web Sites. You should train them to always think about their content and how to merge your products into the content they offer…creating the context of selling at their Web Site.
Take the responsibility to guide them to the best solution for your affiliate program. Get them to match their content to your products.
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9. Optimize your affiliate program for ezine lists as well as Web Sites.
Email drives more sales than anything else does on the Internet, in my experience. Forrester Research that email generates 32% more response than other forms of marketing, yet fewer than 25% of Web Sites use email effectively.
The number of affiliate programs who focus on email is pitiful. Barnes and Noble has created a method of allowing affiliates to use email to promote their offers, a simple referral tool that should be available to BeFree clients in general soon.
The power of email is in the recommendation, the "friends and family" approach to pass the word on. The real trick is to achieve two objectives:
A. Write your copy in short, succinct paragraphs to drive people from email to a Web Site. Don't do your selling in the email; create the appeal in just a paragraph or two, then drive them to your affiliate Web Site to close the sale.
B. Shorten your affiliate URL's; email wrap after about 60-65 characters. To show how short that is, look at the following:
123456891234567891234567891234567891234568912345678912345678912
That is how long your email link can be; now count the characters in your affiliate email link. You will likely find that it is much greater than 65 characters. To overcome this you can either create a forwarding page at your site that moves them to a new page, where the affiliate code comes in, or make your system simple to use for email. Cory Rudl does this so well; you go to his affiliate program through links like http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/19539
That is less than 40 characters, easy to distribute via email, and effective. If you neglect ezine lists by focusing on ridiculously long affiliate URL's, you are literally telling your best salespeople that you cannot help them.
Don't make this mistake. Empower ezine list owners to sell for you by keeping it brief in your URL, or creating forwarding Web Pages that achieve the same goal.
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10. Create ways to update your advertising without making your affiliates work.
By this time you have noticed a pattern. Selling in context means making it quick and easy for affiliates to put your program on their Web Site. It should be as easy as a point and click interface, a copy and paste of your affiliate tracking code, or a framed in page that you can always update.
If you expect your affiliates to work hard, you lose. But the best part is, your competition are making them work hard. That is why so many affiliate programs fail. They don't make it easy for the affiliate to work, and make money, with you.
The real context is your affiliate's time, energy, and traffic. Do your best to make this an asset for your company, by selling in context.
Peace,
Declan
P.S. Be sure to check out how one entrepreneur generated $750,000 in sales
through innovative search strategies that can be applied to any affiliate program
at http://www.activemarketplace.com/net;
the book is "Nothing but 'Net: How
I Made $750,000 With Virtually No Advertising Costs". Recommended.
Links To Sales Content on this Web Site Copyright Declan Dunn and ADNet
International, Inc., 1999 (All Rights Reserved).
