Advice needed from affiliates and publishers please

[snoopdogg1]

Hello Everyone

We are an online retailer with a background as a wholesaler, we have been selling online with great success for a couple years now. We are now about to launch a new website and are looking at offering opportunity to affiliates. But as we have never used affiliates I would very much like advice on what service to use as a few other questions, we have looked at all the big guys like affiliate window and Trade Doubler. I ask here as I know I will get honest no BS answers from both people who make money as affiliates and people who sell through affiliates. My question are?

What affiliate programme would you use (we are a UK business)
What work can we do to attract affiliates and help them be successful?
Do we need to use an affiliate network? as it stands we will be paying a % to these guys and in all honesty I would rather give direct to the affiliates who are doing the real work, or are we better off using them?

Thanks in advance

 

[snoopdogg1]

A lot of views but not reply.. Am I asking the wrong questions?

 

[jatinmood]

Going without affiliate networks will be very tough for you......
you need to filter out affiliates which may involve cost....
you need to have an affiliate managing team...
You will have to spend heavily on tracking softwares like hasoffers and getcake....
it is advisable that you opt for affiliate agencies like cj and get your work done

 

[mackay22]

If you go with the big networks (TD/AW/AF/etc) there will be hefty downpayments on your accounts (like 5k+ on most networks)

The big plus is ofcourse you have access to their massive pools of affiliates, and can use there refined tracking software.

An alternative option to think about is loading up all your products concurrently on Amazon. This way you may be able to take advantage of there affiliate program without such a large upfront cost. I'm not sure if that would work though but it might be worth investigating.

 

[snoopdogg1]

Going without affiliate networks will be very tough for you......
you need to filter out affiliates which may involve cost....
you need to have an affiliate managing team...
You will have to spend heavily on tracking softwares like hasoffers and getcake....
it is advisable that you opt for affiliate agencies like cj and get your work done

Thanks for this, so we are going down the right track using a network.

 

[snoopdogg1]

If you go with the big networks (TD/AW/AF/etc) there will be hefty downpayments on your accounts (like 5k+ on most networks)

The big plus is ofcourse you have access to their massive pools of affiliates, and can use there refined tracking software.

An alternative option to think about is loading up all your products concurrently on Amazon. This way you may be able to take advantage of there affiliate program without such a large upfront cost. I'm not sure if that would work though but it might be worth investigating.

We currently already sell a lot on Amazon, but like most want to drive more sales to our websites.. I know it's not cheap to sign up o a big network but I think that is the route to go down. Thanks very much for your replys.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Thanks for this, so we are going down the right track using a network.

Unless you have major infrastructure and experience, you are on the right track outsourcing the affiliate business. Most reputable aff networks have been online since the 90's - you'll have to go through all their learning in order to reach the level they're at right now.

 

[GringoMonkey]

 

[snoopdogg1]

 

[GringoMonkey]

We sell real items, we have worked a 15% commission into our prices this would take us above the average of our competitors including the big guys like B & ? and h***b*se and this will also keep us very competitive on price. But what I have found is out of that 15% the affiliate networks want up to 5% of that and this worries me a bit.

I have looked into the networks that they are using and affiliate window seems to be the choice for most of them but I after doing some research I may go for one of the other networks as we intend to sell all over Europe long term.

Hi,

Based on what your saying and being in the UK I think you are in the home improvement niche.

It is a bit tricky to give you specific advice without seeing your site - perhaps you could get your post count up and PM me?

Typically the type of sites you should be looking at are review sites that will review a product you sell and compare and contrast prices. Or home improvement type sites that carry advertising. You could perhaps Google them and approach direct asking them if they would be interested in you paying for an ad / offering commission?

I don't know if you recall but a few years back when the iPhone was first launched in the UK, you could only get one if you signed upto the O2 network. That was a huge mistake by Apple and internet guys like me made a killing selling unlocked iPhones.

I did that 2 ways -

1. Buying traffic
2. I built a network of review sites and simply compared myself favourably. - You could do something similar with the products you sell that are of high demand / you make a good margin on / you have the best price.

Hope that helps.

 

[snoopdogg1]

Hi,

Based on what your saying and being in the UK I think you are in the home improvement niche.

It is a bit tricky to give you specific advice without seeing your site - perhaps you could get your post count up and PM me?

Typically the type of sites you should be looking at are review sites that will review a product you sell and compare and contrast prices. Or home improvement type sites that carry advertising. You could perhaps Google them and approach direct asking them if they would be interested in you paying for an ad / offering commission?

I don't know if you recall but a few years back when the iPhone was first launched in the UK, you could only get one if you signed upto the O2 network. That was a huge mistake by Apple and internet guys like me made a killing selling unlocked iPhones.

I did that 2 ways -

1. Buying traffic
2. I built a network of review sites and simply compared myself favourably. - You could do something similar with the products you sell that are of high demand / you make a good margin on / you have the best price.

Hope that helps.

Your close on the products. I would be happy to pm you the site but you guessed it I don't have enough posts. I don't want to post the link publicly on here for reasons that you may have guessed.

That is some great advice, I didn't even think of doing a reviews type site, we sell about 1500 different products so think we would pick a few of the top sellers and go from their.. I am also thinking about doing a high end site as the eCommerce software we have used allows mutili stores. The reason for the high end site would be to sale the items about the same price as the big guys if not a little more and offer a much bigger affiliates % . this way we still make what we are at the moment but maybe able to pull in the bigger affiliates.

what software would you use for the reviews site? wordpress I'm thinking

 

[GringoMonkey]

Your close on the products. I would be happy to pm you the site but you guessed it I don't have enough posts. I don't want to post the link publicly on here for reasons that you may have guessed.

That is some great advice, I didn't even think of doing a reviews type site, we sell about 1500 different products so think we would pick a few of the top sellers and go from their.. I am also thinking about doing a high end site as the eCommerce software we have used allows mutili stores. The reason for the high end site would be to sale the items about the same price as the big guys if not a little more and offer a much bigger affiliates % . this way we still make what we are at the moment but maybe able to pull in the bigger affiliates.

what software would you use for the reviews site? wordpress I'm thinking

Ultimately, if your selling branded products, for the consumer it is about price and trust.

Again it is tricky without seeing your site, but assuming your a small company I would say setting up a high end website would be a bit of a waste of time if your raising prices to above your competitors just to pay affiliates. Your better negotiating a better price with your suppliers or lowering your margins on affiliate sales.

For me the fastest way of increasing sales for these sort of products is carefully selected paid adverts not affiliates.

Setting up and ranking a comparison site is more tricky than it sounds unless you have experience and bearing in mind you have asked me "what software would you use for the reviews site?" I would say you don't.

I honestly believe, that as you don't have experience, you need to pay a professional to set up review sites / help with your advertising else you probably won't achieve what you want as it is a very competitive market.

 

[snoopdogg1]

Ultimately, if your selling branded products, for the consumer it is about price and trust.

Again it is tricky without seeing your site, but assuming your a small company I would say setting up a high end website would be a bit of a waste of time if your raising prices to above your competitors just to pay affiliates. Your better negotiating a better price with your suppliers or lowering your margins on affiliate sales.

For me the fastest way of increasing sales for these sort of products is carefully selected paid adverts not affiliates.

Setting up and ranking a comparison site is more tricky than it sounds unless you have experience and bearing in mind you have asked me "what software would you use for the reviews site?" I would say you don't.

I honestly believe, that as you don't have experience, you need to pay a professional to set up review sites / help with your advertising else you probably won't achieve what you want as it is a very competitive market.

I have a lot of experience when it comes to building eCommerce websites and programming, what I do lack is the affiliates experience, we are not doing bad online with 1.2m last year, we do ok with ppc and really well with email marketing, but with this site as it's new the seo will take sometime to kick in, I don't want to rush this bit, we are adding new content with two guys in-house doing just this, as it is a new site we are building back links slowly for the first 3 months, with affiliates we want to make sure all our bases are covered and as all our competitors are using affiliate networks I think we need to do this as well.

I would love to give more details in pm as links to all our sales channels would give you a better understanding of what we are doing well and what I need some advice on, and may make me look a little bit less like a dumb ass.