The Affiliate Party Starts Here

If you want to be really successful in affiliate marketing you need to become the genial host of the party, introducing people you think will get along and creating the perfect surroundings for that little spark of “magic” to happen.

Imagine you’re hosting a party and you’ve invited your site visitors and your merchants. Too many affiliates just parade the merchants in front of their site visitors with an introduction along the lines of, “Here’s Mike, buy his stuff!” The usual result of this is that Mike gets no orders and your site visitors go home wondering why you were acting so just plain weird!

So let’s leave that disastrous party behind us for a minute or two and consider what our guests might actually want.

Our Site Visitors

The first question you need to consider is why your site visitors come to your site in the first place. Perhaps they’re visiting because you offer good advice, or your product reviews agree with their opinions. Maybe they find you entertaining, you might make them laugh. Whatever the reasons are you need to understand them.

Your visitors are an important part of your web site (as without them you’ve got nothing) so you need to spend time finding out what makes them tick, what they like and don’t like about your content. You can approach this by analysing their movement through the site of course, but why not ask them too? Feedback forms, forums, in fact any form of interaction will help you understand your visitors better if you pay attention to it.

OK, so let’s assume you’ve done all that and you’ve a pretty good idea about your visitors. Knowing what your visitors like about you helps you introduce the difficult subject of selling to them in a friendly way. Instead of saying, “Hey, buy this!” you can recommend products that you think they’ll be interested in, contextually to the content they enjoy.

To put this into context let’s use an everyday example. Let’s imagine you have a movie review site and your visitors come to you because they trust your opinion on what films they should see. You’ve just reviewed “Dodgy Cop 4, Return of the Pooper Scooper” and to be honest you’ve panned it. The film was terrible and you’re not shy in telling your visitors to stay clear.

Now imagine next to this review you’ve got an ad panel that says something along the lines of, “Get Dodgy Cop 4 Here, Great films at Great Prices”. This happens, and happens often when affiliate programs are implemented the lazy way.  All we’ve done here is confuse and alienate our visitor, while simultaneously damaging both our own credibility and that of the merchant we’re selling for.

Now, had we been more in tune with our visitors, we might have written into the review that this movie was a very poor rip off of the genre defining, “Super Cop 2” which if they were looking for a good cop film, they’d be much better off getting. The content could link to your review of “Super Cop 2” as well as using any associated ad panel to push the good film, not the bad one.

By adopting this approach your visitor’s trust in you is reinforced. By telling them not to buy a product you’re clearly not just in it to make a quick buck. Meanwhile your merchant has a much better chance of getting a sale of the alternative product as it’s now become a trusted recommendation from someone who’s credible.

Our Merchant Partners

So now you understand your site visitors and you can contextually place products that they are appealing to them in a way that’s sensitive to their needs. Great, but that’s not the whole story. You need to pay equal attention to the companies whose products you wish to sell if you want to really aim for the top.

The first thing you want to do here is find the right merchants to work with. This isn’t simply the merchant that pays the highest commission. You should thoroughly research the merchants in the market you’re looking at and ask yourself a few questions about them before leaping in.

• Do they have a good reputation in the market?
  Having spent all that effort gaining the trust of your visitors you can’t afford to lose it again by recommend bad suppliers.

• Are they competitively priced for the products you’re interested in promoting?
  Competitive doesn’t have to mean cheapest, but if they’re the most expensive you need to know this and emphasise why to your visitors if you’re going to work with them.

• How difficult will the program be to manage?
  Look at the implementation options, and level of support they offer. Is there an Affiliate Manager on hand to help when needed?

• What do other affiliates in the market think of this merchant?
  Visit affiliate forums. Listen to what people are saying and form your own opinions. As with all forums don’t believe all you read, but if you start to hear 50 different affiliates complaining that merchant X never pays on time, there could well be some truth in it.

Having done that you will now have a shortlist of potential merchants that you’d like to work with. The next thing you need to do is imagine you’re the merchant. Look at the market for potential affiliates. Would you be a desirable affiliate partner? Does your site pop up in searches that the merchant would be interested in?

If the merchant finds you desirable as a partner you’re going to get much more support from the start. If you aren’t obviously appealing, consider what can be done to make you more attractive as a proposition. Take what makes you unique and be sure to emphasise it when you talk to the merchant.

Finally talk to the merchant. Don’t just apply using a form and leave it there. Introduce yourself; tell them about your site and why you want to work with them. There’s nothing a merchant wants more than an affiliate who knows and understands their market and wants to actively work with the merchant to help sell their products.

Back to the Party

So if we just rerun that party analogy from the beginning. You’ve invited your site visitors along. You know all the party goers are interested in movies because that’s what the site is all about (our other example). As a special treat, you’ve also invited a few specialists from the industry who’ve got some great stories about the movie industry (our selected merchant partners).

Now, you’re not just scaring visitors with, “Here’s Mike, buy his stuff”, you’re giving visitors the opportunity to meet Mike, another film lover who can get us some great movies if we want to see them.

Congratulations, you’re a perfect host and a perfect affiliate.