Commission Monster Application

I’m happy to say that Commission Monster came back with a reasonably quick acceptance of the application with a nicely done information email describing the services.

There are many affiliate programs who do not spend enough time looking at what their affiliates say when they apply and do not fit quite the same setup which the affiliate program is looking for. Commission Monster are obviously not one of these. Good service!

I also received a follow-up email suggesting a couple of programs. They may not have been targeted to what I’m promoting (e.g. New Zealand affiliate programs) but at least they are being proactive about it.

An initial look through their system shows an easy to use interface with a well laid out selection of reports, features and ways to apply or search for programs to apply to.

If you’re interested you can Sign Up to Commission Monster.

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Commission Monster Review

I haven’t discussed Commission Monster in any in-depth way yet as I had not seen many New Zealand affiliate programs using this more Australian based network.

Late last week I came across an NZ shopping affiliate sign-up (stoffels.co.nz) which is using the Commission Monster network as its program so I figured it was time to become familiar with the network.

Commission Monster is part of the Viva9 Group (viva9.com) which includes Commission Monster, Monster Mall, Rewards Palace, Wildkard and Postclick. All groups appear targeted mainly at the Australian online publising market. Lead by Shane Murray (former CEO of BMCMedia Ltd) with Peter Brighton heading up Commission Monster itself, the group has quite a powerful level of experience in building publishing networks online.

They have some heavy weight brands in the online industry that they show as their clients including; InterFlora, Virgin Money, Wizard Home Loans, Nestle, HSBC and AOL.COM.AU.

The network is very slick from the front-end and appears to be quite up-front with who they are working with and what else they are up to online.

I started to apply by going to the Publishers section and came across something I haven’t seen in an affiliate application before. The first piece of information they require is your email address and the following statement follows;

Please note: Commission Monster requires you to use an email address affiliated with the website you have nominated in this application e.g. www.flowers.com = myname/info/admin@flowers.com. If you cannot do this, please place the words ‘Powered by Your Full Name’ at the bottom of your home page or another page you nominate in the space provided below.

This is quite surprising. I understand that the network would want only publishers who have spent the time and effort to register their own URL and have an email address attached to it however that’s not the only reason people may not standardly use an email address which is attached to their URL. Many people now use webmail systems like Gmail and others to bring in all of their email (this may increase now that Gmail have launched IMAP capabilities) and do not have an email address setup on the site they are looking to promote.

It’s quite understandable that they have done this but it definitely must reduce the amount of legitimate publishers who decide to sign-up to the network. I use the email address affiliate[at]nzbase.com for this website and do not have an email address setup under “@affiliateprograms.co.nz” for no particular reason other than I didn’t really need yet another set of email domains.

I’ll register with this standard email address and see what happens :)

If you’re interested you can Sign Up to Commission Monster.

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Google takes on the affiliate market with Referrals 2.0

The New Zealand affiliate market just became a whole lot more interesting.

Google have now fully launched their “Referrals 2.0″ through Google Adsense.

For some time now Google have offered referral fees for promoting their own internal products; Adsense itself, Google Toolbar + Firefox and others. Now they have rolled this Referrals 2.0 product (another name for an affiliate network) out to all Adsense publishers.

There was a beta for the Referrals 2.0 launch in March and now it has launched properly into Adsense accounts with a small advert on the overview page of Adsense saying;

NEW Congratulations, your account has been upgraded to include the all new Referrals 2.0 - click here to get started

Is this relevant to the New Zealand affiliate market? Yes.

On a search for “New Zealand” on the products offered within the Adsense Referrals 2.0 there were 10 results including accomodation programs, flights (of course), rental cars (as expected) and interestingly even Green Lipped Mussels!

This is a major step forward for NZ affiliates but is it the best step forward? Specilised affiliate networks live and die on close, personal communication with their affiliates. Will Google be able to live up to this?

I would think it isn’t a huge focus for Google as they already have the majority of the market in PPC advertising in New Zealand anyway so publishers are bound to flock to them.

So, Google Referrals 2.0 is likely to be an excellent option for lower level affiliates but the top level affiliates (who cover 80% of the market, as usual) may well be cautious on using this system as they will lose the ability for one-on-one deals with the affiliate managers.

Time will tell but Google Referrals is here to stay and will become a dominant force in New Zealand where there is a lack of quality affiliate networks.

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What kind of affiliates do New Zealand merchants want?

I’m happy to introduce the first in a series of four articles on affiliate marketing in New Zealand 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.

The next articles in the series will be;

What kind of affiliates do New Zealand merchants want?

Why should a New Zealand merchant care about the kind of website that is signing up to their affiliate program?

No retailer wants to set up shop in a shady part of town. They want to associate their brand and products with quality websites. If your affiliate program offers the option merchants should always thoroughly check the content of sites that apply to join their affiliate program. Infringing copyright? Objectionable content? Think hard about whether the extra sales are worth associating your company, brand and products with dodgy looking websites.

Merchants should read the applicant’s “About Us” or “Contact Us” - check who owns the site. If this is not clear try using whois or domainz to look up the owner. It’s hard to trust any site that doesn’t have clear contact and address details. I’m not bothered by the lack of a physical address - many of our best affiliates are run from a home office and don’t want people dropping by as a matter of course - but a contact form with no other details will make a merchant less likely to accept your affiliate application.

If your merchant program includes pay per click think very hard about the signals you pick up from your research. Unless you have sophisticated tools in place to prevent it click fraud may mean paying out more to the affiliate than they deserve. Pay per sale is harder for a dishonest affiliate to fake - but there is always the possibility the site owner is just signing up to get a discount on your products for a one off sale!

A word on expectations. Owners of new websites in particular may have unrealistic expectations of what they can earn in the short term. Let you affiliates know how much traffic your site needs to make a sale (your conversion rate expressed as sales per 100 visitors) so they don’t give up on your program within a couple of weeks if they are not sending through much traffic. Savvy affiliates will also want to know the value of your average sale. Remember that your merchant ads are competing with alternative affiliate programs for screen share on the affiliate’s site so be as open with them as you can - while imagining one of your competitors is reading the email too so you don’t let slip any commercial secrets in you haste to impress an important affiliate!

Merchants - once you have signed up the right kind of affiliate make sure someone in your company is given the job of keeping in touch with them so they send you visitors for many years. It’s hard for a merchant to find quality New Zealand affiliates - a problem that I will explore in my next article.

Learn more about the New Zealand Fine Prints Affiliate Program.

Thank you to Antony for his contribution.

Close communication with the affiliate market is a very important tool for Affiliate Managers to show their commitment to providing value in the industry so I’m glad to see the Fine Prints Affiliate Program is willing to help the community of New Zealand affiliates.

If you have any comments or contributions feel free to contact me on affiliate@nzbase.com.

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New Zealand Online Research for Affiliates

One of the difficult things when working in the New Zealand online market is finding just the right place to research the habits of New Zealanders on the web.

Many of the tools which you might use for a global campaign are not as relevant to the New Zealand web. A good example here is Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool. This is an excellent online research tool for your affiliate marketing keywords on a particular topic when you’re interested in promoting in the US affiliate market however it is reasonably limited from a New Zealand specific market perspective.

So, you need to have a good look around and find some research tools as well as something like the Google keyword suggestions which will give you a better perspective on the local New Zealand angle.

One excellent local option here is the Hitwise New Zealand Data Center which has monthly reports like the Top 20 NZ Websites (here), the Top 4 Fast Moving Websites in NZ (here) and of course the most useful Top 10 Industry Keywords in NZ (here).

Keeping an eye on what’s going on from this sort of freely available New Zealand online research data is going to give you a good chance to make sure your research is as targeted to the New Zealand demographic as possible.

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Search Engine Boot Camp and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM)

The search engine market in New Zealand is finally starting to heat up a little…

I attended the Search Engine Boot Camp in Auckland, New Zealand last week and was impressed with the level of understanding on online search issues at the conference. While the seminars were pitched at a mixture of SEO and SEM understanding levels it was refreshing to see that some difficult questions were asked and some very useful technical points were on offer for webmasters or developers who are reasonably new to the search world.

There were a few stand-out speakers with the keynote from Craig Wax, Managing Director of Yahoo! Search Marketing in Australia and New Zealand. Craig took the attendees over the imminent launch of the Panama system from YSM for the New Zealand market. If you haven’t heard about it, Panama is the build name for a whole new approach to the YSM bid system (formerly the Overture bid system).

This new version of YSM brings in most of the tools which we expect to see from working with Google Adsense and also offers a few more. The largest change for Yahoo! is the addition of a Quality Score system, similar to Adsense, which means the bidding is no longer going to be a pure price war.

Panama is launching “in the near future” and will launch at the same time as Australia.

The key reason why the Yahoo! Search Marketing platform has not been successful to date in the New Zealand publishing market is the inability to target New Zealand only locations. In the current system advertisers are forced to target “Australia and New Zealand”. This will be a welcome change although it is likely to take some time before Panama has enough advertisers bidding for broad keywords to have the same level of cross vertical exposure that Google Adsense has in New Zealand.

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Further discussion on duplicate affiliate programs…

I was emailed recently regarding my previous post on my annoyance surrounding offering duplicate affiliate programs on a sign-on page and thought it would be worth further publishing my response here.

Here are the details from the email. Hopefully the person concerned does not mind the post going public as I believe this type of discussion is exactly what the New Zealand Affiliate Market needs to shape-up it’s thinking. Both views have good merit and until these things are worked out for the specific NZ demographic then the affiliate market will continue to struggle;

I’m writing in regards to your post “Duplicate Affiliate Programs”.

Let me explain why merchants do this.

Most publishers/affiliates only join one affiliate network. And some high profile publishers/affiliates need to join the merchants own program because they negotiate special terms with the merchant.

If the merchant was to join only one affiliate network, that merchant would miss out on advertising from affiliates who are members of a different affiliate network and are not interested in joining any other affiliate network.

And why should merchants only support one network?

Deciding not to join the merchants affiliate program because the merchant supports more then one networks is extremely disappointing. It’s like telling a manufacturer that you won’t buy their product because their confusing you by supplying it to too many different retailers. How lame is that?

Perhaps you just didn’t understand the concept.

Thanks for your comments although I believe you mis-understand my original point as well as my experience and understanding of the affiliate market :)

There are a couple of things to tackle here in a response.

Firstly the email suggests;

Most publishers/affiliates only join one affiliate network

This appears to be a good part of the premise for the email and mis-understanding.

My opinion (based on discussions with many affiliates at conferences internationally) is that affiliates are joined with many networks at any one time in order to give themselves the maximum opportunity to promote relevant products. Granted, there are some affiliates who will say that they will only ever promote products from one network due to the specific reporting or tracking that network has however in my experience this is often bluster from the affiliate, they are usually joined to other networks as well with a preference to the one they are promoting. The key point here is that the dollar rules. If an affiliate can see that the relevant product they know will work on their site is only available through another network then they are most likely to join that network as well.

On the statement;

And why should merchants only support one network?

This is a very good question. My initial post was not suggesting that merchants should only join a single network in every scenario, it was suggesting that they should not be pushing all networks they are a part of, as well as their own program on the same page as it creates a confusing decision for specifically a new affiliate who is not part of one of these networks.

I do believe that an affiliate program should be very selective in the affiliate networks it may join, for example it would not be my suggestion to join more than one affiliate network in the same geographical market (e.g. the New Zealand market). Creating partners of your affiliate networks is a strong necessity in this situation and I would freely admit that the New Zealand affiliate market is just not mature enough yet to have strong affiliate network partners who are promoting the affiliate programs in the way they should.

If an affiliate program is part of a network and they are looking for affiliates who they believe are part of a different network then it is in the best interests of the affiliate network to work closely with that partner to source the affiliate concerned.

Finally;

Deciding not to join the merchants affiliate program because the merchant supports more then one networks is extremely disappointing.

I couldn’t agree more and do not believe any affiliate should do this. It is counter-productive to the whole idea of building the highest returning business online that the affiliate can!

My problem with the program in question revolved more around usability and the way in which an affiliate program offers its wares to the affiliate. In this case I was in a rush, wasn’t already joined to the networks offered and didn’t have the time to research which option was the best (e.g. which offered the higher %).

If the program had promoted its own internal program first on its site with logos for the networks having a lower weight on the visual display of the site (just to show they were part of that network if you recognised the logo and would prefer that option) then I would have had an easy choice. I was there to sign-up and would have if I knew which network / program was my best option.

On the question of negotiating a higher affiliate percentage;

And some high profile publishers/affiliates need to join the merchants own program because they negotiate special terms with the merchant.

This type of statement is exactly the reason why I didn’t sign-up to the program that day. How would I as an affiliate know (without researching every term and condition on every network) that I could only receive an increased percentage through high traffic levels by joining the affiliate program of the site itself? Affiliate percentages should be negotiable based on traffic levels irrelevant of the network the affiliate is part of. In this case I would have joined the program through a network that I happened to be already signed up to and would have there and then made the wrong choice based purely on the way the options were presented.

If you have any thoughts related to this I would be happy to post them on here. Just email affiliate@nzbase.com.

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New Zealand SME Expo ..

I was at the Auckland small business expo for the day yesterday and have to say I was impressed with the level of online presence in the expo.

Many exhibits (there were 500+ I believe) were pushing their website as the main point of contact for the company. It makes sense to do this however I wasn’t sure how prevalent it would be in the New Zealand SME market before I arrived.

There were a lot of web development firms who were pushing their abilities to design, develop, promote and do anything else you can think of with an SME’s online presence however I was surprised that not a single one was promoting the use of affiliate programs for SME’s to bring in traffic to their site.

apnfinda had a heavy showing at the show however this was probably the only company there who were interested in online advertising and promotion. Every other online company (and there were a lot) were only interested in the development dollar and on discussions with most of them the all said “Oh yeah, we throw in some Google Adsense for the website as well but marketing is really up to the site”.

What a waste!

All these SME’s wanting to promote their websites, all these web development companies and only one online advertising company?

The Director of apnfind in his local search seminar was onto it, discussing the confounding problem that NZ business only spends 2.5% of its marketing budgets on online advertising where Australia is on 8.9% and the UK on 18%. This was especially shown to be lacking by the actual percentages of media consumption in New Zealand where online sites take roughly 40% of the media time of consumers.

Very insightful.

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Duplicate Affiliate Programs

A practice which I find particularly annoying in the New Zealand affiliate market which I believe is due to the small size of the market itself is when a website joins more than one affiliate network and also has an affiliate program on its own site as well.

Affiliates don’t need choice when they are on a website and select the link to sign up for the program to promote the site. Choice in this scenario just creates confusion, specifically if the affiliate is not already part of one of the networks that the site is offering.

The example of this I found this week has a site showing the options to sign up to it’s own program, the Commission Monster Network or the ClixGalore Network when you click on the “Affiliate Program” link on their site.

My first question on coming to this page is which program gives me the highest commission? Affiliates are invariably motivated by higher commissions so if you’re an affiliate program and expect to have affiliates sign up through a page like this then you’re going to have to spell out the pros and cons of each program. A flat choice just doesn’t work.

The program in question has the following quote on the page;

All programs provide outstanding affiliate tracking resources that will help you make fantastic profits from the range of products. Each program automatically calculates and tracks your commission and arranges direct payment to you. You can check the commissions you’ve earned 24 hours/7 days a week, simply by logging on to the relevant management interface.

In the end I couldn’t see what the pricing differences were and didn’t have the time to compare terms and conditions on each network so left the site without joining!

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ClixGalore and the NZ market

I had a good chat with the General Manager of ClixGalore.co.nz late last week. Nice guy, quite passionate about his company.

They have built proprietary software and have an impressive list of features on the software they have designed. The complete inclusion of impression stats, clicks and the ‘google like’ use of EPC (earning per click) reports gives a nice indication of the performance of sites you’re promoting on their network.

I would have to say that the usability of their system leaves a little to be desired although this is purely from a design stand-point. Priorities have obviously been in the right direction for this company in building what affiliates want in the reporting and functionality first.

Something he mentioned which I was quite pleased to hear was that ClixGalore use their affiliates as their decision base for developing new functionality into the software. If affiliates ask for it, they get it.

They are also opening up a New Zealand team soon. At the moment, while they have a fair few NZ affiliate sites on their system they do not have anyone on the ground in NZ but apparently that will change within a few months.

Keep an eye on them as if they start to bring on some of the bigger affiliate brands in the New Zealand market like they have in the Australian affiliate market then they will be quite a force.

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