This is a continuing series of “Affiliate Marketing Tips” posts to share marketing and promotion strategies for affiliate marketers. If you’re new to the series, you might like to check out the first in the series “The Industry and Getting Accepted”
Note: This is a paid product review of the HasOffers affiliate network software.
Owning your own affiliate networks sounds like the perfect gig to many new affiliates – you sign up a couple of merchants/advertisers, find affiliates from blogs and forums, then recruit them, matchmake affiliates to offers and collect the difference. That is, if you can afford the $10,000 or so that it takes to get started on an affiliate tracking platform like DirectTrack.
Unfortunately, things aren’t as simple, especially since there’s a whole lot that goes on behind the scenes than just emailing/calling advertisers/affiliates and signing them up.
And on the affiliate network platform, there’s a new player on the scene, Adapp (which is a sister company of the Tatto Media affiliate network), which has developed an affiliate network tracking software, HasOffers.
HasOffers has 3 tiers of service, from a free solution to an enterprise grade solution costing $799 per month (as of the time of writing).
At least one affiliate I know, Josh Todd, has built his affiliate network, TriFoxMedia, on the HasOffers platform.
HasOffers Service Offers
Here’re the 3 grades of offers:
Free
Up to 250,000 Clicks per Month
Free Subdomain (ie: yournetwork.hasoffers.com)
Chat and Email Support
99.5% SLA guaranteed uptime
Pro ($99 per month)
Up to 500,000 Clicks per Month
Access to all features within HasOffers
Custom Application Domain (ie: http://www.yournetwork.com)
Custom Tracking Domain (ie: yourtracking.com)
Custom Branded Layout
Chat and Email Support plus 5 Phone Tickets
Data Migration of offers, advertisers and affiliates
99.8% SLA guaranteed system uptime
Enterprise ($799 per month)
Unlimited Click Volume
Unlimited Access to all features within HasOffers
Unlimited Chat, Email and Phone Support
Advanced Data Migration of Offers, Advertiser and Affiliates
Custom Application Domain
Custom Tracking Domain
Unlimited Storage Space
Custom Branded Layout by our Graphics Team
Dedicated Server Resources for Increased Performance
Increased Storage Limits
99.8% SLA guaranteed system uptime
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Although the 250,000 clicks that the free solution may seem like a lot, you can expect to see your network hit it’s quote pretty quickly, especially if affiliates are promoting offers on social media, PPC, PPV or media buying. A fledgling network with a handful of experienced affiliates would likely hit the clickcap within a week or maybe two.
If you’re new to this, probably the free version is a good option to test drive the platform, and you’ll eventually find yourself upgrading to the professional or enterprise version as your revenue justifies the expenditure.
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So what does HasOffers do?
If you’ve used other affiliate management software, you’ll find the Web-based HasOffers to be an easy software to work with. The software has a distinctly lead generation/CPA-slant to it, so if you’re inclined toward CPA affiliate marketing, this could be an ideal solution.
With a couple of mouse clicks, you’ll be able to (more…)
As mentioned before, Convert2Media goes beyond just being just another affiliate network because it’s founders and affiliates take the time to provide guidance (note: this is not the same as handholding) to optimize and refine your affiliate campaigns. To give a boost to newer affiliates, C2M’s head boss Ruck got in front of his webcam last Saturday to answer questions affiliates had sent in.
You can check out the recording from the hour long session: (Note: the volume was increased after a few minutes)
I mailed Ruck a bunch of the most common questions I receive on the blog and he answered all of them during the session.
Some highlights from the session:
PPV (pay per view) traffic: The majority of users are targeting on a domain level. If you spend some time thinking through, a keyword-based bidding strategy might work. (Especially since some affiliates are doing $1 million off of that approach)
Getting started with PPC (pay per click): Go with Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), Microsoft Adcenter if you’re new. Use features like YSM’s bulk upload and Adcenter’s upload features to save time. Also look at image ads, as the competition is lower in most cases
Keep at your campaigns: Unless you’re lucky, most affiliates will lose money on a campaign before it breaks even or turns a profit. Then again 95% of affiliates quit before their campaign becomes profitable. The difference is at C2M, the affiliate managers are ex-affiliates themselves, so they can give you feedback on refining/optimizing your campaigns. (note: you should have worked on your own campaign and brought it as far as you’re able to before talking to your affiliate manager. Going to your AM and asking them to handhold you from start-to-finish is likely to get you yelled at or labelled a “noob” in their books)
Becoming a sucessful affiliate is a process and you need to work your way there. Although you may hear the advice to test 3-5 offers, note that these should be within the same niche (ie: dating, weight loss, biz op). Trying to cross into too many verticals at the same time is likely to burn through your budget.
Focusing on a single vertical and testing/rotating multiple offers within the same vertical will give you a better idea of the performance/behavior of the vertical and move you towards building a proftable campaign.
There’re more coaching sessions scheduled this month and possibly a couple of “spur-of-the-moment” sessions coming up.
In addition, C2M maintains an active coaching forum and the affiliate managers are available for consults over instant messenger.
Their compliance efforts to weed out fraud affiliates also means that new affiliates might have a hard time getting in.
If you’re a new affiliate, you might find the “Affiliate Marketing Tips” series useful for getting started. I’ll be continuing to add new content to the series each week.
CashTactics.net’s head blogger and an experienced affiliate Kris Trujillo stopped by the Friday Podcast to give his opinion and insights into issues that affiliates might face as they work on their campaigns.
Some of the issues we discussed included:
Kris’ affiliate wishlist for CPA (cost-per-action/cost-per-acquisition) networks
Terrible domain name aside, Technorati, one of the benchmark of blogging success, looks like it’s attempting to crawl back into relevance with the launch of a new service aimed to bridge the worlds of blogging and Twitter.
The new site, Twittorati, looks like a mashup of twitter updates from top Technorati users. The site looks like quite a mess, and with most Internet users looking at twitter updates via clients like TwitterFall, TweetDeck or the web interface, is going to a third-party site relevant to the process?
Affiliate marketers can benefit from some of the trend information the site offers, especially if they’re keen practitioners of demographic profiling.
Looking at some of the hot hashtags:
I’m a little surprised that #MichaelJackson isn’t on that list.
CashTactics.net’s head blogger and an experienced affiliate Kris Trujillo stopped by the Friday Podcast to give his opinion and insights into issues that affiliates might face as they work on their campaigns.
