{"id":1096,"date":"2010-08-19T15:39:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-19T07:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/?p=1096"},"modified":"2010-08-19T15:42:30","modified_gmt":"2010-08-19T07:42:30","slug":"merchants-how-does-your-cost-per-sale-affiliate-program-stack-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/affiliate-marketing\/merchants-how-does-your-cost-per-sale-affiliate-program-stack-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Merchants: How Does Your Cost-Per-Sale Affiliate Program Stack Up?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In parallel to developing my own products and promoting CPA offers, I&#8217;ve been promoting CPS (Cost-Per-Sale) offers since 2006.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been looking into doing more of such programs recently and have set up some sites which will be trafficked via SEO and social-based traffic. There will be more such sites being launched further down the pipeline.<\/p>\n<p>Which the affiliate can do everything possible to bring the traffic over and pre-sell the product, it just feels that some merchants are going out of their way to sabotage their own success.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s some examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Failing to benchmark your affiliate program:<\/strong> Whatever you may think, your affiliate program does not exist in isolation. Most diligent affiliates will compare affiliate programs across the variety of product providers, especially if it&#8217;s a commodity items like a beauty product, computer equipment or a musical instrument. Offering a 5% commission on the sale value when your competitors are offering a 10% or 15% payout makes you uncompetitive. There are some exceptions, where if you are the only merchant offering a particular product or your prices are low enough that the majority of buyers would buy through you, rather than another merchant.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Failing to offer appropriate affiliate tools:<\/strong> If you have 1,000 products in your inventory, whether books, music or movies, isn&#8217;t it silly to give a link to your root domain? Don&#8217;t you think it makes more sense to provide product-specific links, or even better, the ability to deep link to any page within your website? This gives affiliates the option to use creative marketing techniques.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Offering invalid URLs, expired coupon codes, failing to give what you&#8217;re supposed to give:<\/strong> If you claim to give product specific links, having that link (complete with a &#8220;productID=&#8221; field) go to the root domain is a &#8220;FAIL&#8221; in my book. Even worse is having the link go to a 404 page. What were you thinking? Same goes with giving coupon codes which have expired, exceeded the number of uses. Ditto for failing to reply to email, or if you&#8217;re away, failing to set up an &#8220;away&#8221; message or give an alternative contact.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are probably some of the sins that&#8217;ve been irritating as I&#8217;ve been putting together campaigns. The cardinal sin that some merchants are making is failing to realize that you&#8217;ll probably never get a second chance to make a first impression once you&#8217;ve lost your affiliates for good.<\/p>\n<p>If that&#8217;s the case, why&#8217;re you even offering an affiliate program?<\/p>\n<p>PS: I&#8217;m documenting a couple of sites I&#8217;ve been working on at <a title=\"ppv playbook\" href=\"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/link\/ppvplaybook\" target=\"_blank\">David Ford&#8217;s PPV Playbook forum<\/a>. If you&#8217;re not a member yet, be sure to check out the <a title=\"ppv playbook discount code\" href=\"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/affiliate-marketing\/ppv-playbook-discount-code\/\" target=\"_blank\">PPV Playbook discount code too<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In parallel to developing my own products and promoting CPA offers, I&#8217;ve been promoting CPS (Cost-Per-Sale) offers since 2006. I&#8217;ve been looking into doing more of such programs recently and have set up some sites which will be trafficked via SEO and social-based traffic. There will be more such sites being launched further down the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1098,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions\/1098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}