Advantages to using an affiliate network

Something which does not appear to have caught on yet in New Zealand, probably because of the lack of market size, is the idea of larger affiliate networks with multiple affiliated products available for advertising.

All of the affiliate programs I have seen around specifically run by New Zealand sites also seem to be running their own internal development of the affiliate programs. This is a good idea if your company has large internal development resources but can be quite expensive in any other situation.

There are many advantages to being part of a wider affiliate network if you have a product to promote. The two main ones are having access to a large database of affiliates, beyond what a small site could recruit as well as having access to an affiliate network’s technology for serving your advertising to the affiliates.

Let’s hope we’ll see something like this emerge in the New Zealand affiliate market soon.

Labels:

New Zealand and Australian Ad-Tech, Sydney

Looks like I’ll be heading off to Ad-Tech in Sydney on the 7th & 8th of February. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an Australian Marketing conference and most of the top New Zealand companies and executives working online will be there so it should be a good catch-up in the local market. When you’re working online in affiliate marketing it is very easy to become wholly focused on offshore markets as they have significantly larger potential (read that as population) than New Zealand and Australia. Even so, there needs to be more focus on the local New Zealand affiliate market so I’ll be making sure I can find any insights relating to what’s coming up in 2007 for our local sites.

I just read on the Ad-Tech site that Jon Ostler from First Rate (New Zealand’s leading corporate search marketing operation) has sold to an Australian listed company. Jon impressed me after a few discussions we had at the first Search Engine Strategies conference in Sydney. This was around 2002, when Google had only just opened it’s Australian offices and search was only really coming into mainstream corporate focus in New Zealand. It’ll be interesting to see how First Rate deals with the takeover from an Australian company and opening offices in Sydney. Hopefully not too much of the local New Zealand focus will be lost.

Labels:

Affiliate Marketing and Press Releases

Press releases have become one of the simplest and most commonly used forms of promotion of websites. At one stage a press release had little to do with directly marketing but was related to getting information to media outlets or reporters who would then cover the release. Now, with facilities such as PRWeb it is possible for anyone to submit press releases (including of course those in the affiliate marketing space) and these releases can be disseminated across many sites around the world.

David Meerman Scott, founder of PRWeb (recently sold to Yahoo!), has launched the second edition of his e-book “The New Rules of PR”. This book is a must read for any affiliate marketers who are interested in promoting their websites. As Scott discusses in this e-book, press releases are essential to push information regarding your site out to the wider internet publications.

Labels:

Multi-tiered affiliate programs or sub-affiliates

There are many people in the affiliate industry that consider multi-tier affiliate programs to be a negative thing for the affiliate community. The negative association appears (from what I have seen) to be linked with issues regard pyramid scheme style programs. This can often lead to affiliate programs who have no relationship to these types of schemes being labelled as un-trustworthy, merely because they allow sub-affiliates to exist.

The ability to promote to other affiliates about a specific affiliate program and receive a commission for bringing that affiliate into the program, to myself, is a natural occurance. Why would an affiliate program not want new affiliates and why would the promoter not deserve a cut? It is the reason for affiliate programs.

Regardless of your stance on this, most affiliate programs that I have come across globally allow promotion to sub-affiliates although the revenue to the promoter is not usually very high as the margins are cut back significantly for the affiliate program when more than one person is involved. The key here is for the program to be very up-front with any joining affiliate when they have signed up through another affiliate’s tracking link.

Interestingly, in New Zealand affiliate programs, I have yet to find a program that allows for sub-affiliates and the promotion of the affiliate itself. I am unsure if this is a techincal issue, as many New Zealand affiliate progams are developed in-house and are therefore not as technically advanced as other larger programs, or if this is a larger issue with the New Zealand affiliate market believing there are problems with multi-tiered affiliate programs.

As I research further into the New Zealand market and the programs available we will see.

Labels: