Affiliate Census - Lessons for Merchants

1. "Insufficient quality and quantity of links is the principal reason that affiliates don't promote merchants after taking the effort to sign up for a program"

Add to that, the fact that many Merchants don't seem to know what they are selling and haven't a clue how to address their market!

Perhaps I am being a cynic, but providing they use the word "Discount" they feel there is little else they have to do!

I am relatively new to Affliate Marketing and like all newcomers signed up to a six well known merchants in my specialist (consumer good) area. I felt I had to put some effort into designing a page that would display each merchant's products to best advantage. The quality of the feeds were unbelievable poor.

One had a size problem - I tried every trick in the book to keep his illiustrations the size I wanted - to no avail. The other didn't understand that I didn't want his complete product range fed into my specialised topic page even though he allowed me to select what I wanted (or so I thought!)

The three others I signed up for have generated so little money (obviously they are not the market leaders they pretend to be!) and the commission rates are so poor, I have abandoned them.

I have one success story - I am earning a few hundred pounds each month from a retail chain - presumably because every one knows the name. It can't be the discount offers! I have to explain in great detail to my visitors what is offered and why certain discounts only apply to certain goods. It's got to the stage where I have to say "if you want an X, select this one, but if you want a Y as well, use this one! What nonsense!

"Confuse a customer, they'll buy more" seems to be this retailers motto!

Perhaps I should set up an offshore Casino comparison web site - the commissions look good!

Paul

3. Paul Winter:
"Add to that, the fact that many Merchants don't seem to know what they are selling and haven't a clue how to address their market!"

Whilst not a good excuse, a lot of small online companies don't have the time or human resources to sit an analyse their stats, some don’t even know how. I appreciate that online businesses need to keep testing and analysing in order to build a picture about their customers. But You need to be quite sophisticated, web savvy in order to achieve the basics. How many small merchants tag up their customer news letters to the point of… what part of the news letter was clicked on, how many customers even opened their news letter, how many went straight into hotmail spam or AOL spam or simply is considered spam? How do you contact MSN and AOL to tell them its not spam. We can all sit back and point out where they are going wrong and believe me, many a times have I had my head in my hands wondering how companies have managed to survive for the length of time they have. But who is sitting back and telling them how to do it right, if they don’t know what they are doing wrong in the first place? I suspect that no one told these companies when they first set up their store that they would need to have SEO skills, PPC skills, Marketing skills, web analytical skills, technical skills.. and so on. So it comes as no great surprise to me that some merchants do not know what they are doing. But… you would think the likes of bigger companies with bigger budgets would know better? Sorry to have to say but even some of the big online blue chip companies are just as clueless and they pour thousands into the online marketing budgets and get it so wrong.

“I am relatively new to Affliate Marketing and like all newcomers signed up to a six well known merchants in my specialist (consumer good) area. I felt I had to put some effort into designing a page that would display each merchant's products to best advantage. The quality of the feeds were unbelievable poor.”

yup, but the problem you need to understand is, to produce a csv or xml data feed (product feed) merchants are reliant on the ecommerce platform software. Most, not all, have the facilities to create automated froogle feeds which spews out the file (some have the functionality to create any kind of data export file). If your software can do this, then chances are you could get a tech to tailor it to the affiliates and affiliate network criteria. You need to know that a froogle feed, whilst great for froogle, is pretty useless when it comes to affiliates and affiliate networks. If you don’t have a technical person to help create an affiliate product feed, merchants may but probably don’t sit down and remap their froogle feed manually as it can take hours if not days depending on the amount of products you have (trust me on this one as some one who used to manually create a product feed for a merchant, its soul destroying). Some ecommerce platforms don’t have the backend functionality to create any kind of data feed at all. But yes, the quality of some product feeds are shocking and I gave up on product feeds a long time ago. Spending an entire morning sorting out a bad feed for my own affiliate site, financially it wasn’t worth it.

So partner with the merchants who have a good feed and update them on a regular basis is the simple answer. On a separate issue, I am a keen supporter for industry linking standardization where by, if you can’t produce a standard product feed in a set format, don’t produce one at all or… like the US maybe we need to get a company like this set up www.goldencan.com ?

ohhhh if you are a newbie, I would stay away from online Casinos unless you have money to burn. US has banned all online gaming and the UK is saturated. Unless you can offer some thing very different then other seasoned die hard casino affiliates are offering, then its going to be slim pickings Im afraid.

Cheers Paul, a very good post :)