In a way I got into running some affiliate programs through naivity and arrogance. One of my first pttches as an SEO was to a Figleaves I didn’t get the contract, so built up a website in competition with them, and got to number 1 on Lycos for Womens underwear, then phoned them up to ask how their other SEO agency was getting on.
I did it by buying up womens-underwear.net and generally doing what SEOs used to do at that time. Figeaves asked me to be an affiliate and for several years we were one of the best. But then it all came crashing down… probably about the time I gave the site to a new employee to learn the craft. For years we were one of their top affiliates. Last month we only made 9 sales – just a thousand dollars in value – about 100 dollars in commission. I doubt you’d find us on the engines for “womens underwear” any more. Why did it crash?
After the affiliate manager at Figleaves moved on to Buy-a-gift, he tracked me down on a boating day at a UK Affiliate event. He asked me what it would take to become a buy-a-gift affiliate. I said that developing a decent site takes time and needs a strategy. So I found that there are more merchants than decent affiliates. By a MILE. So the merchants will pay you to take the initial risk. These guys paid in the region of $6000 for me to just BUILD the site… We also changed the paradigm. Buy-a-gift feed is rampant in the UK and readily available. Huge problem with lack of unique content and also a problem with adding value. So we changed the focus to a family day out site. Got less readily abailable (and less commercially useful) content through a licence with the National Trust. Rearranged all the data into goeographical order and family friendly order. To this day (nearly five years later) the site grabs the Buyagift feed every midnight, changes it’s focus and presents fresh content to our users.
And it does OK in the search engines too.
Having learnt that merchants would pay for an affiliate, I also found at one point whilst selling our SEO consultancy that some customers, too, wanted to “only pay on results”. Now I hate that. But now that I knew that people would pay for the setup time – or at east offset my risk, I started on the next effective strategy. Taking control of the visitor. No affiliate tracking system Client only got the lead. Call center was mine I could have resold that lead to other “merchants” I could record conversations (for training and monitoring purposes) I could keep a database of contacts
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