Affiliate Networks & B2B Advertising

[IconicDigital]

Hi

Does anyone have any experience with affiliate networks for B2B advertising? We would like to advertise our UK based job search engine (jobportfolio.co.uk) to local businesses but I know many of the affiliate networks seem to be aimed more towards B2C promotion.

Thanks

Oliver

 

[eventdomain]

Na, their B2b and always have been. The trouble you've got is the publishers (the sites where you'll potentially be placed) they get very bad partnerships (shafted is appropriate here!) and low payouts - thus publishers either dont get enough traffic or their visitors wont be interested in clicking your links/banners.

What happens is publishers quickly realise they can't make money and very swiftly remove whatever ads not converting, therefore bang goes your advert.... I'd suggest a publishing site needs 100k of visitors every month to make the affiliate thing worthwhile for them, most sites wont depend on affiliate sales anyway, they'll have another income source superior to affiliate ads for sure, so why struggle eeking out a few quid on banner clicks, its not worth the effort setting up the affiliate ads.

 

[IconicDigital]

Thanks for the reply, I understand what you are saying. I guess the vast majority of businesses would rather advertise to consumers instead. I guess one approach would be to cold email job boards etc to see if they would like to sign up to the website.

 

[eventdomain]

Email other job boards, why? You surely want to connect with potential advertisers eg: accountants, retail stores etc so they add their vacancies for free/trial service... which I see is what you're already doing, so thats good, and is how the others got to where they are.

If you don't mind me saying, you've entered one of the toughest areas of web publishing/recruitment. Your job board looks very general in nature eg: trying to serve all, so what is your USP, how are you going to entice employers onto your service?

Monster and Totaljobs own the market basically, but others are stronger in specific areas eg: JobServe deals with I.T only which is their strength, so what makes you stand out as the best guys to go to for job hunting?

The key here is to fill it up with vacancies/employers, which gives you a product to sell to job seekers, which is the product for the advertiser.

 

[IconicDigital]

Hi

It is an area we are considering. We aren't trying to be a job board in the traditional sense i.e. Monster or Total Jobs because that area of the market is already covered well. We are trying to be an all of the market search engine so potential employees can quickly browse jobs from different boards in a single place. I think that is the USP.

We do however want to cater to both the individual business as well as job boards. So a small company can post an individual job and a larger company can post a job feed. In this case we currently process both XML and RSS feeds. The idea of a featured account is to allow the jobs posted by the account to appear higher in the search results than a job posted by a free account. Hopefully increasing the referral rate for the user.

 

[lgco2012]

Hey there! affiliate networking for b2b advertising is good. it is really a great help in making your business establish a well presence in the internet.

 

[moutt]

We as a company have been looking for a good b2b affiliate company and tbh they dont really exist. You may be better off using a online advertising platform where you can promote through banners, then you can either pay by impression or click. adizio are in the UK

 

[PixelbyPixel]

The reason most do not touch b2b compared to b2c is because the market is so much smaller, this means payouts need to be higher.

Weve run some successful b2b campaigns, but 9/10 just do not work.

 

[DonnaEdwards]

I guess the vast majority of businesses would rather advertise to consumers instead.