When a person gets a new phone number, or signs up with one of those new digital phone services they immediately get bombarded with phone calls from ADT offering them the latest in home security. And when I say bombarded I mean 3, 5 or even as many as 10 calls in a single day, every single day for weeks. You can ask them or hell, down right demand they remove your number from your list and stop calling, but they won’t. In doing so it seems to only encourage them to call you more often.
They annoy the living hell out of their customers. Sounds like a really bad business practice, right?
But you know what? THEY aren’t really doing it – their affiliates are. They seem to turn a blind eye to anything and everything going on in the name of making that sale.
And you know what’s even worse? So are a whole lot of adult website owners who run affiliate programs.
How much do you really pay attention to what your affiliates are doing?
- Are they sending out emails, spamming people?
- Are they promoting your content on illegal tube site?
- Are they scamming people via IM bots?
Affiliate programs are still a very viable form of marketing your websites, but you have to pay attention to what they are doing. It’s not something you can just turn on, and hope it all works out for the best.
You are pissing away a lot of potential money by dismissing affiliates as a great asset to your company. But that doesn’t mean you can set it all on autopilot. It’s your name, your brand and your money – so you have to pay attention.
So what can you do to lessen fraud and get the most out of affiliates?
- Consider every affiliate a TRUE PARTNER. Would you partner with anyone who asks you to? Of course not! Cherry pick who you want to do business with and get to know them! Look at each account, verify they gave you a real address and that they show you their real website. In other words, know who you are doing business with. Yes this takes time, but it takes a lot less time to get to know if an affiliate is legit up front than it does to clean up the mess afterwards. Wouldn’t you rather have 5 good affiliates than 1,500 bad ones? Then you need to start off on the right foot and get to know your potential partner up front.
- Once you’ve determined an affiliate is a real person, with a real website, then pay attention to their traffic and sales ratios. Visit their websites and find out if there is anything you can do to help them make more sales? So many people work hard to get new affiliates, but then do nothing to maintain those relationships. It’s your program, so it’s up to you to make sure your affiliates are performing up to their potential. Don’t go into this with a bad attitude. If you want your relationship with your new partners (aka your affiliates) to be successful then you’ll need to take the initiative … be the driving force that encourages your team to be the best that they can be.
The affiliate game isn’t dead. If you do it right, if you aren’t lazy about it, you can build strong relationships with people who will promote the hell out of your program and do a good job at it. The question is, are you willing to put forth the effort it takes to find and foster these relationships or are you going to be like so many others who sing the mantra “affiliate programs aren’t worth the hassle”?
I don’t know about you, but I would rather spend 10% of my day finding good affiliates to work with, then spend my time sitting around bitching about how affiliate suck. What about you?
Every time I see a program owner bitching about affiliates, I can’t help but laugh because I know the truth. I know there is still a lot of great affiliates out there, but some program owners are clearly just to lazy to go out there and really build those relationships. They want it to be easy. They want to just install NATs and walk away, hoping it all works out for the best.