Affiliate Setup Costs

[AssetDomains]

Do any acorners have experience being on the other side of the affiliate table.
What are the cost of becoming an affiliate to drive sales to a site
has any one done it if so who did you go with what sort of cost are involved.
Do any of you have experience in maybe running your own in house programme

 

[martin-s]

Interesting - I was trying to find out about this yesterday. Awin took 5 minutes to even answer the phone and then I got put through to a real "duurrr-uuhhh-uummm" person who couldn't answer a single thing.

Paid on Results are supposed to be better value, but they didn't even answer my call.

 

[AssetDomains]

I emailed a few companies requesting info The Affiliate People got back to me and said its free to setup there. so I'm going to investigate that further just wondered on the costs of some of the more well know networks.
Starting looking at a few software bolt on solutions today as well maybe testing the waters with that I've seen scripts ranging from $20 - to the low $100 its probably not that difficult to code something but I'm guessing affiliates would prefer to go via a recognised company

 

[Edwin]

There's a bit about fees and a massive amount of good advice here:
http://www.sean.co.uk/a/webdesign/affiliate_marketing_faq.shtm

The most important point seems to be not the fees themselves (ok, if you can't pay them the rest is moot) but the offer you're making to affiliates.

If everything else is equal, then the more clued in affiliates are going to work with the higher paying merchants.

They're not necessarily going to choose the HIGHEST paying (because they might not like the affiliate network they're using for the programme, or the marketing collateral, or the target site itself may look as if it doesn't convert).

But if you can't even get your offer into the same ballpark they're very unlikely to take a chance on you.

So one important piece of research would be to identify who your competitors are, and what they're paying their affiliates. Can you match that? Can you go one step further? What would attract a "super affiliate" to work with you rather than them?

 

[Edwin]

(The 80/20 rule applies to affiliates too - though it's probably more like 99/1. From chatting to several companies on the other side of the table over the years, they told me that a handful of top affiliates are responsible for the bulk of all sales. So having 100 or 1,000 affiliates may make very little difference - but having the right few top affiliates will.)

 

[AssetDomains]

Thanks Edwin that was a great read loads of info to take in and a few new software options to look at

 

[martin-s]

Edwin is right (of course), but it's also a bit of a pain to have to work with lots of different affiliate providers.

I'd be tempted to choose one of the big 3/4 at least.

 

[Skinner]

About 5-6 yrs ago we set up with PaidOnResults, I can't for the life of me remember the exact costs, I seem to have about £2k setup stuck in my mind, and I think they initially talked about having to "load" the account with £X to cover affiliate commissions before getting a credit account with them.

On another site we used the idevaffiliate software, so hard to build trust in your own solution though, even harder to get good affiliates. However if your sites are established you should have no problems doing this.

Edwin hit the nail on the head, I'd say 75% of our affiliate based sales came from 10% of the affiliates, even amongst that 10%, you'd have a few who stood above the rest.

A sliding scale is a good way to encourage them. I don't remember the exact numbers but we had like

1+ sale pcm = 3%
10+ sales = 4%
25+ sales = 5%
50+ sales = 7.5%
100+ sales 9%

The big guys come in and offer a "taste" so they'll smash the 100+ sales in a week and then ask what the best percentage you can offer is, worth having this in mind and how much you can cut into your slice.

Its also important to pick an affiliate network which suits your product, for example MoreNiche works well for propriety supplements and manufacturers with big commissions, PaidOnResults works better with main stream supplements (resellers) and adult toys/lingerie, and so on.

Edit: its about 3 yrs since I was involved in these, so could tell me very out of date and old software options.

 

[dog]

There is a premium WP plugin, Affiliate Royale. It allows you to setup your own affiliate program with WP. I know there are other plug-ins too.

I don't use AR but do use PrettyLinkPro, made by the same guy. PLP is great.

 

[Edwin]

I doubt the biggest affiliates will to touch a WP plug-in with a bargepole. Put yourself in their shoes - why would they? It screams "fly by night outfit" and they're raking in 6-7 figures in sales so why would they want to put any of that at risk?

 

[dog]

@AssetDomains asked

Do any of you have experience in maybe running your own in house programme

Affiliate Royale is a solution to do this.

Is a WP plug-in right for every single person that wants to run an affiliate program? No, but we don't know what the OP is looking for.

I've been happy with PrettyLinkPro and mainly use it for affiliate links.

I doubt the biggest affiliates will to touch a WP plug-in with a bargepole. Put yourself in their shoes - why would they? It screams "fly by night outfit" and they're raking in 6-7 figures in sales so why would they want to put any of that at risk?

 

[AssetDomains]

I'm not sure I'm up for the setup cost of one of the big boys yet but may have to investigate some of the smaller companies more. Thanks for the info dog it looks like a decent little plugin but Edwin's right for this project wp wouldn't really work.
The security issues if it gets slightly out of date are just to much of a headache at the moment I've found script that Laravel based so I'll probably dig around that and combine it into my existing site and start with an in-house offering