How NOT to Ask an Affiliate to Participate in Your Program
Every couple of months, I receive the following email from a program manager in the dating niche with the subject line “Affiliated with ProgramName.com”.
I’ve changed the real name to ProgramName.com in each case so as not to give unwarranted publicity to this affiliate program.
“To Whom It May Concern,
We have visited your web site and have found it to be of a very high standard. I would like to enquire as to whether you would like to buid a partnership with us?
Is it possible to place our banner or text link on your site? We will pay you $30 commission on each sale you drive to us and link back to you.
For more details, please email me at ProgramName[at]gmail.com or go to the below information link:
ProgramName.com
Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
First Name
Affiliate Manager
ProgramName.com”
OK, let’s look at this request point-by-point.
- What the heck kind of grammar is ‘Affiliated with ProgramName.com’? Reading this subject line gives a really good indication of the author’s lack of professionalism, and a really bad first impression.
- My name is not ‘To Whom it May Concern’, it’s Rosalind - a fact that is easily discovered if indeed this affiliate program manager had ‘visited your (my) web site’ and gone to the ‘About Us’ page which is linked from every page on the site.
- Speaking of having ‘visited your (my) web site’ — which site exactly did you visit? She should have the courtesy to include the appropriate domain name just in case I am one of those affiliates with hundreds of sites (which I’m not, but they don’t know that).
- “We will pay you $30 commission on each sale you drive to us and link back to you“. Huh? Some more weird English… but I got the jist that in addition to paying a set fee per sale, she was also offering to link back to my site. That set off the affiliate alarm bells, so I looked at the site and sure enough, she has a links page. Ugh. (More about that later).
- She includes only her first name in the message which is only a step above signing off with ‘Affiliate Manager” but still appears unprofessional.
What I’ve found particularly frustrating is that I wrote back to the affiliate manager the first time I received one of her emails, and explained that I would consider their dating service a valuable option for my site visitors, except for the fact that they were linking to other affiliate sites as well as their own merchants directly from the homepage.
I explained why such linking was a deal killer for any super affiliate and mentioned my affiliate marketing credentials (author, speaker and consultant) and offered to help her (at no charge) to make her affiliate program more attractive to all affiliates — and therefore more lucrative.
Not only did she not extend the courtesy of a reply, but despite several requests she has failed to remove my email address from her mailing list which makes her a spammer, which of course is the biggest deal breaker of them all.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Attract MORE Super Affiliates to Your Program
If YOU are an affiliate manager or online merchant with an affiliate program who wants to increase affiliate program sales by attracting Super Affiliates, I can’t recommend any better training than Affiliate Classroom’s, “The Affiliate Manager - 1st Edition“. HAPPY affiliates make for HUGE returns.
Popularity: 4% [?]
I Could Hardly Believe My Eyes
I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw this note in my Inbox a few mornings ago…
Hi, My name is Ian and I am an Account Manager here at Linkshare. Nice to meet you!
I saw your blog post about the iTunes affiliate program. I manage that program here at LS as well as Apple. The holiday season is indeed a big time for iTunes. I noticed that in your link to sign up as an affiliate you mention the Apple Store’s affiliate program and wanted to let you know that iTunes has a separate program. So if you want to sell songs you’ll need to be in iTunes, but iPods and Macs in Apple…so why not be in both!
Let me know if you have any questions and thanks for the good word.
Best regards,
Ian
WHY was I shocked? Well, for a couple of reasons… Read more
Popularity: 4% [?]
Merchants: PLEASE Keep Your Links Updated
Cheese me. I was in the Linkshare interface the other night getting Allzine links for blog posting about on the Roamsters.com site. Thirty magazines were returned in the Travel & Leisure category. I grabbed about ten of them, creating ten draft posts with magazine pictures and titles and planned to write descriptions of them later.
Well, good thing I clicked on some of those links. More than half of them no longer exist in Allzine’s product database. Really, when I searched the Travel & Leisure category within Allzines itself, only 9 magazines were returned, meaning that 21 TWENTY-ONE!!!! of the Linkshare links were no good.
Of the nine that WERE good, some of them had broken graphics.
Lesson to affiliates: Check the merchant’s site first to see whether or not the product is still offered. It’s a hassle, I know, but better than wasting your time putting up product links that don’t work and thereby frustrating your visitors.
Suggestion to merchants: Kindly make sure your product links are up to date!
Popularity: 3% [?]
He’s One SMART Affiliate Manager!
I found the following included in the MPwH (an HPV dating site) affiliate newsletter.
“By the way, if you want to really get into the affiliate marketing business, we highly recommend the book by Rosalind Gardner, well known as one of the Internet’s most successful marketers.
I read this book and it was how come I ended up setting up our affiliate program the way it is. It shows how to run your website to make the most from affiliate programs.
Rosalind was our first affiliate - after we came up to the standards laid out in her book!”
AJ, the affiliate manager at MPwH, told it like it happened… I didn’t agree to promote MPwH right away, but helped him get his affiliate program together until it worked like a charm for affiliates.
I also noticed that AJ linked to the Super Affiliate Handbook with his own affiliate link.
Now, that’s one smart affiliate manager! Not only does he build a better program, he wants to have trained affiliates.
Do your affiliates need training?
Send them to the Super Affiliate Handbook and earn some more affiliate coin in the process!
Even Clickbank merchants can benefit.
Simply add a brief description of the SAH to your own affiliate signup page (you DO have one don’t you?) that pops a window to the Handbook.
You’ll earn a commission from the sale… and better yet, your affiliates will sell more of YOUR product.
Talk about a win-win-win proposition that makes everybody happy.
Visit http://superaffiliatehandbook.com/affiliates.php and join our affiliate program today.
Cheers,
Ros
P.S. If YOU would like to receive training as an affiliate manager or online merchant with an affiliate program, I can’t recommend anything better than Affiliate Classroom’s recently released, “The Affiliate Manager - 1st Edition“.
That’s ’cause there isn’t anything better. 
Popularity: 6% [?]
Training for Affiliate Managers
On June 27, 2006, Anik Singal’s Affiliate Classroom will be launching their new Affiliate Manager Training course.
As you probably already know, one of the best ways to market your product is to have OTHERS sell it for you… and this new course will teach you how to do exactly that.
You’ll learn how to set up an affiliate program, recruit and train your affiliates, then keep them motivated to keep sell your products.
Some of the contributors to this project include: Yanik Silver, Shawn Collins, Jeff Mulligan, Ben Edelman and yours truly.
Affiliate Classrom is also offering “Can Affiliate Sales Change the Course of Your Business?” as a free report.
Included in the report are:
- The Six Types of Affiliates
- The Three Best Ways to Communicate with Your Affiliates, and;
- some Straight Talk from Top Marketers about Managing Your Affiliates
Although the course doesn’t launch until June 27th, you can get your copy of the “Can Affiliate Sales Change the Course of Your Business?” report right now.
Cheers,
Ros
Popularity: 4% [?]
Affiliate Manager? Like to Write?
Revenue Magazine’s senior editor, Maria Sample, is looking for affiliate managers to contribute to their ‘Manager’s Corner’ column.
To keep things spicey over there at Revenue, they’re looking for input from a different affiliate manager for every issue… so it’s not a long-term commitment.
So, if you’re an affiliate manager with an opinion and who likes to write, check out Maria’s entry on Revenue’s Blog. You’ll see her email address posted at the bottom of the entry.
Popularity: 3% [?]
