Affiliate network for a startup

[Will Wright]

Does anyone know a good affiliate network for a startup? Alot of sites have hefty sign up fees which aren't realistic. Any info on the likes of affiliatefuture.co.uk would be much appreciated

 

[splashweb]

Haven't worked with any of the networks as a merchant, but as a publisher. Don't overlook the importance of joining a network that can demonstrate it has enough suitable publishers for your products, or whatever the fees you'll be wasting time and money.

 

[Darren C]

Don't overlook the importance of joining a network that can demonstrate it has enough suitable publishers for your products, or whatever the fees you'll be wasting time and money.

Absolutely, and ask to see evidence of this rather than some generic claim about having thousands of niche bloggers and such.

I would be tempted to use an in-house program and to actively look for sites in my niche that are obviously promoting my competitors.

And, rather than just say something like 'we have this great product and you could be earning a lot of money, blah, blah (which they'll get every day and ignore) I would say something like 'I notice you are promoting our competitor, etc and are you happy with the deal you are getting, what could they do better and what could I offer you to give our company a try?'

In other words, talk to people who can actually produce sales for you and not some network looking to just take a skim from the sales you're already getting.

It is possible you'll still be ignored but you might get some interest and a bit of valuable feedback that you would never get elsewhere.

 

[Will Wright]

Thanks for the advise Darren! I think I'll go down the in house route first!

 

[Lipsa]

If you want to be affiliate marketer with web hosting industry, then I would suggest you to check out Scopehosts, godaddy and hostgator.

 

[makeusvisible]

We have gone through the process of joining an Affiliate network for a few of our customers in the past few years. I can give you some insight into what is likely to work, and not work....what costs you can expect.....and how to manage your expectations.

Firstly setup
Getting up and running with an Affiliate network, eg AWIN is not an easy task from a technical perspective. We recently integrated AWIN with a quite complex eCommerce website, and I kid you not the work took us around 40 hours to achieve the correct attribution of categories, discount codes and traffic source in order to assign the right discounts to the right affiliates. The sales people may tell you setup is "easy" and you will be up and running in 2 weeks..... but in particular for a network like AWIN, if you want to fully utilise their platform, the setup is complex, and requires significant coding work. AWIN have a plugin for Magento......they might as well not bother, as it is effectively useless.

The up-front cost, from memory was around £3k to join the network. there is then a monthly cost of a few hundred, plus a % fee on commission. Yes, the costs are not for the faint hearted.

Which Affiliate Network
You will not find a better one than AWIN. Full stop. You will find cheaper ones, with low joining fees.... but they will not have the membership or quality.

Conversion rate
The main thing to consider.....and I cannot stress this enough...... DO NOT jump into an affiliate network until your site has a fantastic conversion rate. The clients we have done this for have been converting on their website at between 10% and 15%. If you are not....or you dont yet know....then joining an affiliate network is the wrong thing to do. Why?..... because every time an advertisers drives traffic to your site, it has cost them 2 things;

1) Time
2) Money

No advertiser is going to waste either of these two valuable resources unless your site is converting the traffic at a fantastic rate. If your site has a low conversion rate, advertisers will quickly realise that the efforts on promoting your website are wasted, and will focus on better sites.

Commission
The other thing you need to be offering in order to drive decent traffic, is a good commission rate to your advertisers. Depending on your conversion rate, your advertiser needs to be sure that they are going to be well paid without needing to drive thousands of sales.

Some stats
To give you some real life stats of one of our better affiliate campaigns;

Network:Awin
Setup Cost: £2k (for technical implementation)
Joining fee: circa £3k
Monthly fee: £300

They are offering between 5% and 15% depending on product category. For this particular client it equates to around £3 per sale commission.....which compared very favourable against Adwords.

After 12 months the client has done around £12k per month of sales, and paying £1,200 p/m in commission. This is roughly half the cost per conversion they are paying on Adwords.

Summary
If your site converts VERY well......if you can offer a better commission rate than competitors on the same affiliate network...... if your products are prices competitively.....affiliate networking can be a fantastic revenue stream. It's not to be jumped into lightly, and its not a magic bullet.

The initial cost means that it is not a decision to take lightly, and you need to have a strong handle on your expectations, your margins, and your startup costs.

Best of luck.

 

[synotio]

When I was doing a lot of Affilate marketing me and my circle of affilates at the time were approached by a hosting company called brain host and they paid us all very well. When we met up with the account managers we asked them how did they find us as they weren't advertised on any of the affilate networks, they said they just looked on all the I.M affilate sites and looked for the top affilates and courses and reached out to us this way. I would recommend to go that route as even though you sign up to the networks your not guaranteed to get the affilates on board, its all about the relationship and trust, and with affilates I find they normally in a tight click so if you convince 1 you convince them all

 

[StevePoster]

Usually active forum sites specially internet marketing and its marketplace wherein most of the popular and trusted affiliate networks were assembled and talked about.