Finding Affiliate Programs In Your Industry

There was a simple but often overlooked question in our Affiliate Forum over the last week that I thought deserved a post to help others out with their searching as well.

Hopefully the forum poster doesn’t mind me answering the question regarding Affiliate Merchants here;

I just joined the affiliate program forum a couple of days ago and I am completely new to this whole business. I am very interested and would be very grateful for any help regarding this concept. I am in the process of developing a web site related to the Travel sector in NZ. (Accomodation, Tours, Attractions, Rentals etc.).
Please forgive my ignorance in all this (as evident in the next couple of questions), but there is a saying in Spanish which translates to : “It is better to be really red with embarrassment only once than to be bright pink a hundred times”.

I know which merchants I would like to have an affiliate relationship with, (their seriousness, reliability, reputation, solid business practice etc.) but when I go to their web page I don’t find any link to affiliate programs. Does this automatically mean that they don’t have one? Or there is one but it’s not advertised and one must contact them personally? If I want to include a link on my site about “campervan rentals” I can understand if “Joe’s Rent-a Dent Camper Hire” doesn’t have an affiliate program but the major players?

Is there a site which gives me a list of affiliate programs in my particular field? Have contacted NZ Tourism but no joy there so far. As I mentioned before, very grateful for any sort of assistance.

Most websites or businesses that have an affiliate program will have an “Affiliate Program” link somewhere on their homepage. As it sounds like you’ve done, that’s the first place to look.

If they don’t have that link but you’re sure they a program, your next option is to do a search on the affiliate programs that have joined a few of the different networks that provide for the NZ affiliate market.

The obvious examples are clixgalore.co.nz, commissionmonster.co.nz and dgmpro.com. You could also have a look at the US networks like CJ.com which often have the larger international brands and may allow promotion to the New Zealand market. There are other networks that are limited regarding which affiliates can join as well e.g. tpn.co.nz.

Last option is to send the branded website you’re looking to promote an email through their standard contact form although this can have varying responses. Where you can, try and email a marketing contact at the branded site as often a general support team will not know what an affiliate program is…

Good luck finding the affiliate program you’re looking for!

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Busy season online in NZ ..

I’ve been a little light in posting and chatting in the forum around here for the last month and that’s mainly because of this time of the year being the busy season online in NZ.

While retailers have increased levels of shoppers at their doors over the Christmas and Holiday Season, web traffic is just as cyclical across the year just at different points.

Generally it’s the cold winter months, where people are locked away in their living rooms with the TV blaring away in the background (with the Olympics on at the moment of course) that are the peak periods for many online sites in NZ.

The Summer holiday season is when the average reader is out and about at BBQ’s, the beach or shopping down at the local mall.

With this in mind it’s good to prepare for the busy season you’re going to have by making sure your website’s already been through a development cycle as you come into the winter months. This way, while you’re dealing with the traffic increase you’re not also trying to re-launch your design!

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Finding the right affiliate program for your site…

One of the great things about working online from New Zealand is that we’re already in a local community that’s small and isolated enough from the rest of the world that we’re usually happy to help each other out.

Kotitihaere, a poster in our forums, has come up with some brilliant feedback to both affiliates and affiliate managers in what they, as an experienced affiliate, are looking for when searching around the web trying to find the right affiliate program to promote.

I like the start;

Nothing is more annoying than finding a site in a search engine that has an affiliate program then finding the link to it is a mission in searching!

You can read more on their Guideline for Good Affiliate Programs to sign up to.

Great feedback…

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Where to find NZ Affliates

The second in a series of four articles on New Zealand affiliate marketing from a merchant perspective by Antony Ellis (Affiliate Manager for NZ Fine Prints, New Zealand’s largest retailer of art prints and posters; www.prints.co.nz.)

Where to find NZ Affliates

As a merchant you need to make it very easy for NZ websites looking for affiliate programs to both find and sign up to your program. You should also reach out pro-actively to sign-up affiliates who don’t know about your program yet.

Immediate Steps:

Your first step should be to promote your affiliate program to your website’s visitors. Do it today. Place a link to a page describing the benefits of your affiliate program on your main navigation. Add a sign up button that works. Measure the effectiveness of your sign up page as a key conversion goal.

Next use your precious email list of customers - very cautiously (but see big exception below). Don’t erode the magic of your product in your customers’ minds by making your business sound like a multi-level marketing scheme! Add a subtle link to your affiliate program information page to your email newsletters (e.g. in the footer). Don’t promote your affiliate program brashly to existing customers - nobody likes the suggestion that you may have margin to spare…

The big exception to a softly, softly approach to promotion of your affiliate program to your email list is if your business wholesales products or services to other New Zealand business’ for resale. Promote your affiliate program in your emails to your wholesale customers prominently. This is a fantastic opportunity to extend your business relationship online. Be generous! Offer your wholesale customers the same percentage they would get if they purchased product or your services wholesale and added their markup. Because they will be getting traffic from customers who are looking for products in a similar industry to yours you should find that traffic from wholesale customers’ websites converts very well.

Then Go Forth and Actively Promote:

Affiliate Networks for New Zealand Websites
You will be tempted to promote your affiliate program through an affiliate network (of which there are thousands). However with steep non-refundable sign up fees (or the requirement for a large deposit to be used for as yet unproven commission payments in the future required upfront) and/or combined with commissions on top of what gets paid to the affiliates you can quickly chew through your budget without being able to test the effectiveness of the network first. Be especially aware that because 99% of the affiliates signed up to most affiliate networks are not New Zealand sites they aren’t going to be worth signing up to anyway (who is going to bother promoting your Matariki tablecloth range on their American website?). The exception may be Australian based ClixGalore which could be worth checking out as it has quite a few NZ publishers. (Please post a comment below if you know about a New Zealand affiliate network working with NZ based merchants and publishers or if you have had a good experience with a particular affiliate network promoting your New Zealand store.)

My Favourite Strategy for Finding New Zealand Affiliates for your Merchant Program
By far the most successful long term strategy to find profitable New Zealand affiliates is to research your market looking for websites that will deliver pre-qualified traffic (customers looking for what you offer). Budget at least ten hours to do this initially and a few hours a month long term (you will learn a lot about your market at the same time!). You need to find websites that attract your kind of visitors in good volume because they will typically need to send dozens of visitors to your site for each sale. If websites are not getting high levels of traffic they won’t deliver the volume of clickthroughs you need to make a conversion - leading to disappointment for both merchant and affiliate.

Start searching for websites in your industry, widen your search to related industries, then widen your search to general interest sites with good quality New Zealand content and websites that already participate in New Zealand affiliate programs.

Initially find websites in your industry that complement rather than compete directly your product range (you sell bookcases, they sell books) - direct competitors make lousy prospects. Widen your search to related industries (home decorating sites for your bookcase store). Then look for general interest sites that accept advertising (try searching their site for a ratecard), they may be happy to offer you an advertising deal on a pay per sale basis. An excellent pool of potential affiliates are sites with links to other merchants’ affiliate programs. Find out who is linking to other New Zealand retailers who have affiliate programs using Google’s link tool - these site-owners just need to be convinced about the saleability of your product or service as they know the benefits of New Zealand affiliate programs already! One NZ online retailer helpfully publishes a full list of their current affiliates!

Tread carefully with non-New Zealand sites (see previous article) as you don’t want signs for your business hanging in a dodgy part of town. They can also be a hassle to pay - consider using Paypal or post them a cheque as international bank transfer is expensive.

How to contact potential affiliates and what to say:

Contact by phone first to see if they are interested then send an email giving details - or send one polite email if they don’t list a contact other than an online form. Be prepared to share your statistics. For example know your conversion rate and average sale amount and use this information to build trust. Do all the work for your potential affiliates if your program needs forms completed - so all they have to do is add the code to their site to get started. Have some templates of successful ads and product links showing how to link to your site that they can copy. The ease with which a website owner can add links to your site is a very important factor in whether the affiliate relationship will get off the ground.

Once they have signed up:
Each new affiliate is a special relationship with a real person. Check that the links they are adding are working correctly. Check the statistics are recording what they should (eg clickthroughs). Encourage links to the most popular products so the new affiliate gets some sales as soon as possible to build your reputation. Their screen space is valuable and they want to promote only the most profitable links. Celebrate with them when the first sale is made. Create an email list of affiliates and help them with seasonal ads and news of new or hot-selling products.

In my next article I will discuss the key factors in a successful affiliate-merchant relationship from a merchant’s perspective.

I think Antony has really hit the nail on the head in his article where he says;

…know your conversion rate and average sale amount and use this information to build trust…

There’s nothing better than being contacted by an affiliate manager who can tell you their direct conversions therefore giving you the estimated value for the traffic you’re going to send their way.

If all of the affiliate managers understood the affiliate world as well as Antony the industry would be a thriving one in NZ!

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The community grows … slowly.. :)

Thanks to everyone for their support as we’re building a community forum here at AffiliatePrograms.co.nz.

So far we’ve had some interesting posts from people looking for for the best affiliate networks, reviews on NZ programs that have worked well for some local affiliates and program managers looking for feedback on launching their new program.

It’ll take us a while to get the community up and running but with a bit of input, we’ll end up with a strong voice for bringing affiliate issues to the forefront of the people managing the programs locally as well as joining managers with affiliates who are looking for the right product to publish.

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Affiliates are people too ..

If you’ve been an affiliate for a while or are an affiliate on any of the major networks, you can start to feel like you have username or account number stamped in your forehead because that’s all your affiliate manager ever actually considers you.

Sound familiar?

This is a reason why some affiliates prefer to work with smaller programs only. It’s not the answer to the best ROI (return on investment) you can get from your traffic but over the long-term this can be a way to help you stay sane and connected with real people.

Smaller affiliate programs are usually run by the main marketing people for the team and (assuming they know anything about affiliate marketing) this gives them the opportunity to get to know the affiliate a little better and build a bit more of a relationship.

If you manage to find a program like this, stick with it!

You’ll find that having that personal contact with the affiliate manager is gold when there’s something you need sorted out that’s specific to your website or business. Although it’s not always possible, nothing beats meeting and affiliate manager face-to-face. They then understand where you’re coming from and potential conflicts (where you both lose out because something wasn’t dealt with well) are reduced or even avoided completely.

I haven’t heard of any form of affiliate marketing meetings going on in New Zealand but if anyone else has let me know.

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“Lifetime Revenue” from an affiliate program

As businesses progress through their usual cycle, many end up going under or need to change their business model and invariably the affiliate is the one left in the lurch when the contract terms they agreed to at the start of the relationship with the program turn into something completely different.

I was talking to a website owner recently and his argument for not launching an affiliate program was that a potential purchaser would not be interested (or at least would frown on) contracts that exist with publishers (the affiliates) that are based on a lifetime revenue model.

Most affiliates who have been around the block before have had a relationship with an affiliate program cut off early due to some form of sale, merger or change in management where the affiliate program is no longer seen as a good idea and the clause in their agreement which usually says something like “we can do what we want to these contract terms” gets used and the affiliate looses all of the hard-earned and built “lifetime revenue”.

It would be great to say that there is an easy answer to this issue for the affiliate but there just isn’t. Trust is the single most important thing in an affiliate relationship as it’s the only thing that’s keeping the affiliate promoting the brand. When this trust is broken for business reasons there’s little re-dress.

The best an affiliate can do is to make sure they are not putting all their eggs in one basket so that their entire revenue stream is not dependent on one particular affiliate program. Letting other affiliates know through forums and posting around the web about their experience and what has happened is a positive thing for the community as well.

If you have some experience you’d like to share about an NZ affiliate program feel free to post it in the comments here.

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Update on the Adsense Affiliate Program

Google have already back-tracked a bit on the removal of the Adsense Affiliate Program. It looks like they only removed it for certain areas and just assumed that if an affiliate was in a certain location then they were only referring users from that location. Now that’s a pretty basic mistake for any affiliate program to make. In my experience it’s pretty rare that affiliates are only targeting their own local population unless it’s a non-English language site.

From the email;

Since announcing the changes, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher rather than the referred user. After carefully considering this feedback, we have decided to modify our planned changes.

You can usually read that type of language from any affiliate program as marketing speak for “Half of our affiliates vehemently complained, we admit we screwed up and now we’ve been forced into changing the policy” :)

That might be a little harsh, Google are doing well to keep the communication lines open to affiliates.

The changes they’ve put forward are;

Specifically, you will have the option to add a referral unit for AdSense within your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.

So, one would assume that in countries where they have an overwhelming market share and everyone uses them as the first option for online marketing (this is pretty much how it works in New Zealand with their 95% share) then they’re dropping the affiliate program completely.

Sounds like a pretty solid business decision.

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Into 2008; Adsense affiliate program removed

There’s been a bit of a hiatus on posting at the moment due to a new addition to the family of a bouncing little baby girl so affiliate market updates will be a little light for the next few weeks but hold in there as some new developments are in the wind for AffiliatePrograms.co.nz :)

Fresh into 2008 and Google have announced that they have quashed their affiliate program for referrals to Adsense. Here’s the full text of the email;

Hello,

We are writing to share some important information with you about
referrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts to
optimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we’re
constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as
well as tweaking those products already available to our
publishers. This is the case for referral units directing visitors
to sign up for AdSense. After experimenting with this program
over the past year, we’ve concluded that there are other products
that are of higher value than this program to publishers in your
region. As a result, referral units for the AdSense program will
be retired in the coming weeks. Referrals to other products and
services remain unaffected.

If you’re currently displaying referral units on your site
directing users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for details
about what to expect in the coming weeks.

In early January, the option to add referral units directing users
to the AdSense product will no longer appear in your account. You
will continue to accrue earnings for all existing referrals yet to
generate $100 until late January, at which point the program will
be fully retired. Existing referral units will continue to appear
on your pages.

By the end of January, you should remove all referral units
directing users to AdSense from your pages. Referral units
that you do not remove will continue to be displayed on your pages
as normal, but conversions will no longer be recorded. We
suggest you replace the AdSense referrals with referrals to
another product or service or an additional ad unit.

Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. We
apologize for any inconvenience this news may cause.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Darn. There are bound to be a lot of people who have many links through-out their sites promoting Google Adsense. It’s a frustrating experience whenever an affiliate program (no matter who it is) completely removes their program.

There have always been questions about this happening and the amount of traffic that the program continues to receive from old links that webmasters have either not found to change or are just never bothered to be updated.

Interestingly, Google appear to have replaced this affiliate program referral to Adsense with advertising Adsense itself through their own Adwords system. I consider it more than a bit questionable to have a company competing with their own clients (particularly in any form of bid system) to promote their own internal products. Very questionable, as the cost is nil to them but may drive up the price for other advertisers who are bidding to show their ads on affiliate related keywords. Perhaps Google should front-up and let the community know if their own Ads on Adsense affect the bids of others?

If anyone has heard of Google talking about this in the past let me know and I’ll update this post.

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Question and Response on the NZ vs US affiliate market

I received an interesting (if broad) question today by email and thought it was worth putting the details up;

Question:

Hi,

Found your great site and got your contact details. I’m new to the affiliate mktg game but motivated and keen to get moving. However being based in NZ was hoping to start in the NZ marketplace but it does not look like its happening in terms of merchant availability and motivation to use affiliates. I’ll think i’ll start in the US market? Am i thinking straight? Any advice appreciated.

Cheers…[name removed]

Response:
Hi [name removed],

Good question, although it’s a pretty big one :)

Do you ignore the NZ market given its current lack of affiliate programs and target the US market which has more than one program for everything you can sell or do online or do you stick with the NZ market because it’s what you know best and deal with the restrictions?

Sadly it’s not something I can answer properly as it depends on what you are interested in promoting and how you want to promote it.

Affiliate marketers worldwide tend to work on more than one site at a time. Perhaps the answer is to work on both?

Having exposure to different markets can be a very positive thing as if there is a down-turn in one it does not necessarily mean the other is also heading down.

The key for the NZ market is to make sure you think long and hard about what you’re planning on marketing and make sure there are already promotional options available. There’s no excuse for building a website and then saying “there’s no-one to pay me for it”, your research before you built the website should have included how you are going to fund the revenue from it.

The obvious default answer in New Zealand is to use Google Adsense however this will not always give you the best value for your traffic.

In the US market, the same thing applies. Make sure there is not too much competition in the market you are looking to enter, or that you have a strong enough offer and/or content to beat out the competition. As long as you’ve already seen advertising avenues for whatever it is you’re promoting, then go for it!

Cheers

AP

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