Hi there,
here’s my question.
I am a blog/site that recommends products for my readers to purchase. Everything I have read about affiliate programs is written for the “retailers website”. I wish to know if an “affiliate sales tracking thing” can be set up from my end, where I convince the sales website to pay me commission when I send them a sale.
I hope this make sense.

The short answer to the question is sadly a simple “No”.

That said however it’s worth explaining why and what else can be done.

It is of course up a to a retailer to decide whether or not they’re going to offer a retail affiliate program with a commission available for sales that are passed through. This decision is usually a question of margins and whether or not the retailer has a margin that is large enough for both the affiliate and the retailer to earn revenue that is worth the out-lay of effort in generating the traffic to their website.

This tracking takes a reasonable level of technical setup and therefore usually development cost by the retail website to allow for correct tracking right through from the in-bound traffic to the sale to be able to tell exactly where the sale came from. This is something that just can’t be set up by an affiliate from their side.

While there are more and more simple tools that can help to track affiliate sales (Google Analytics can do it in a basic form) there is still a lot of time and effort that goes into the setup and running of an affiliate system.

So, what is the best way to convince a retailer to get involved with an affiliate program?

Talk to them.

Give them a call, let them know you have traffic and you’d like to send it to them and see what they say about it and if they’re not interested in spending the time setting up affiliate traffic tracking, perhaps they’ll be interested in directly paying for the traffic?

If you’ve hit a bit of a brick wall in convincing the retailer to bring tracking online, the last option would potentially be to send through a reasonable level of traffic for free that will generate sales to prove to the retailer that they are going to receive value from your promotion.

Prior to doing this you would of course need to know that the retailer can at least track the referrer of the traffic (e.g. your website) through a statistical package like Google Analytics.

A big part of the problem was that AffiliatePrograms.co.nz was running on a very old and unstable version of WordPress which needed a lot of background work to get it back online. That background work has now happened and while there’s a bit of work to do to bring back our lovely green branding, we’re now happily running on the swish latest stable of WordPress 3.0.1.

The Affiliate Forum still needs a bit of work as it’s stuck in the dark ages of phpBB but we can report that the spam which was turning up on there is no longer going to happen!

Last but by no means least, the New Zealand Affiliate Programs List is being updated over the month of August to check that the programs are still live. If you’re reading that list you’ll find a point half-way down where it shows that the affiliate programs above that line have been checked to be live and current.

Again, thanks for your patience if you’re a reader from some time ago and if you’re new to affiliate marketing in New Zealand have a look around the older posts via the category pages and you’ll find lots of interesting discussion about local affiliate programs.

If you have any feedback about what programs are no longer live on the list mentioned above, just add them to the comments below this post and they’ll be updated in August.

Good luck with your promotions!

Gary, AffiliatePrograms.co.nz

As you’ll most likely know, affiliate programs are all about gaining advertisements (or links) from other websites through to your own to promote your product.

What you may not have considered is what affect this could have on the SEO for a company if the affiliate program is designed in such a way that all of the in-bound links to the website being promoted are also passing SEO weight.

As a side note, generally Google frowns on allowing advertising from one website to another to pass page rank (if you don’t know what that is, have a read about page rank although if you’re reading this I’m sure you do).

Here’s one post from 3DogMedia from some time ago that describes it quite well. Basically, if you give affiliates static URL’s that they can promote your product through (e.g. http://yoursite.com/affiliateid/) then they’re linking directly to your site on a link that Google can track and pass SEO weight for.

There’s also a post from Stephan Spencer around that describes this with the focus covering the need to make sure that the links used are also 301′s (permanent redirects) so that the search engines know the weight should pass to the resulting page (e.g. the homepage).

Overall the above posts cover some good advice if you’re looking at running your own affiliate program and have the ability to select the URL structure that the program runs on. It’ll help pass SEO weight to your site and is a more user-friendly structure anyway.

It’s a good question so I thought I’d post the Q & A here;

Good morning Gary,

I live in Whangaparaoa and I am interested in learning about Affiliate marketing as a means to earn a supplementary income.

Are there people you know of close to me who are into Coaching people like me?

Regards

XXXX  XXXX

Stanmore Bay
Whangaparaoa

Here’s my response;

Hi XXXX,

I’m afraid there is very little in the way of direct coaching for affiliate marketing in New Zealand.

The best I can suggest is online research and getting involved in forum communities to ask as many questions and read as many answers as you can.

One thing to note is that there isn’t any need to buy any services (e.g. e-books) related to affiliate marketing strategies / tools.

In my opinion you can find anything you need to know that will be in those books elsewhere online on an affiliate resource site or by chatting in forums.

Good luck with it.

Regards

Gary

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!

The affiliate newsletter is commonly under-utilised when, done well, it can be one of the better means of building a community around a program.

If your an affiliate, it is important to make sure you’re signed up to the affiliate newsletter for your best performing (or most sophisticated) programs as this is going to be your quickest way of keeping up to date with whatever is new in the program and potentially give you tips and insights into what is going to perform best for you as you work with the program.

Affiliate managers should understand that the affiliate newsletter is the second most important tool in keeping an affiliate community up to date with what’s happening in the business. The first is, without doubt, shouting the affiliate a beer at the bar during an affiliate conference

Affiliate managers who are looking to build a community will often find a way to get more into the newsletter than just the latest promotion. Whether it’s a featured piece about a top affiliate, the best performing product that they have or ideas surrounding the next meet up of like-minded internet geeks, you should be receiving a newsletter that helps you interact with the program and learn ways of improving the ROI of your time spent promoting their program.

If you’re not receiving tips from your most preferred or profitable affiliate program (they’re not always the same) then you should be talking to your affiliate manager to start getting them more involved with building your community and potentially even offering to help.

Who knows, you may get some good contacts out of helping out.

As much as affiliates can feel like they’re out on their own in the world and don’t want to pass on any secrets of their performance, there are many situations where getting involved and helping the community as a whole will help lift the affiliate program you’re working with thereby improving your bottom line and hopefully enhancing your affiliate knowledge.

The discussion elements available as part of collaboration on a specific document (including stunning multiple editing features) seems to set it apart from others in a way the industry hasn’t really gone down yet.

Will it revolutionise the messaging (email / IM) industry?

Who knows, there are too many factors to inlcude in that call at this point.

Will it take over the existing online document collaboration elements available?

I would think so.

The real question at this point is how much weight are Google going to put behind it? If they go hammer and tong force feeding people out of Gmail and into Wave then there’s going to be a lot riding on it.

Watch the presentation yourself and comment on what you believe it will change…

It’s a reasonable argument that there are a lot of people who are currently using Twitter as purely a promotional tool for pushing their online products or services to a wider social market however affiliate marketing on Twitter is using a social tool to trick a user into clicking on a commissioned URL. That’s pretty close to spam in my books.

A big part of Twitter is the use of short URL services and there is no way for a user to know that they’re clicking through an affiliate link. If you’re going to be completely up-front about the use of affiliate links in shortened URLs then you should be notifying the potential clicker that the link is an advertisement or at least that it’s an affiliate link.

There’s nothing wrong with using Twitter to promote your affiliate site (particularly if you have good content on it), that’s what a large portion of people on Twitter are doing however even in that scenario it should be relevant content that you’re posting on your site for your Twitter followers.

PPCVillan.com is a laugh, it’s a great take on what you can actually find out there in the PPC world and covers the best of the best in terms of what not to do…

Here’s a link to the top ten signs you’re a PPC Poser

The idea behind the service provided is to solve the problem of the ever increasing length and complexity of URL’s.

Many sites will have increasingly difficult and long URL’s that do not suit linking the entire URL within a piece of content on another web page.

My understanding is that these services started out as a way for people to link to content within emails, specifically so that long URL’s do not wrap to different lines on an email, they have however evolved into more common usage for content services where short URL’s have major advantages.

News articles, particularly excerpts, are starting to use these shortened URL services as well as the new micro-blogging systems (e.g. Twitter) where the amount on content in any single post is limited to a number of characters so space is a premium and the shorter the URL the better.

Since their launch, URL services have also been promoted by their companies as a way for affiliates to link to an affiliate URL without displaying the fact that it’s an affiliate link.

In its worst form, there are people who have started to use services like Twitter to link to ‘interesting’ information where the link is in fact a hidden affiliate link.

The real problem here is the user who is clicking on the link has no way of knowing where the link is going to take them. This leaves the situation quite open to abuse by either trusted parties or potentially by someone who could hack the URL shortening service itself.

One of the immediate benefits of some of these services in affiliate marketing is the option to include tracking statistics on things like the number of clicks and timing of when people have clicked through.

If you don’t already have a tracking system in place, this can be a good use of a freely available system to track certain links e.g. email links or even links through social networks.

Here are examples of some of the services that provide the short URLs:

• tinyurl.com
• is.gd
• bit.ly
• snurl.com
• twurl.nl
• eb.cx
• elfurl.com
• shorl.com
• url.fm
• shurl.org
• qurl.net
• notlong.com
• url123.com

The key in using these URL services is about trust. Make sure you don’t leave a feeling like you mislead the user into clicking to somewhere they didn’t know they were going. If you’re always clear about where the link is going to take the user or at the least what service it will take the user to then the Short URL’s can have a real place in your marketing.