"Affiliate Programs: You CAN Make a Difference"

By Rosalind Gardner
Posted Thursday, December 9, 2004

Negotiate with your affiliate managers for win-win solutions. One of the rules of affiliate marketing, is to partner with merchants that don't have too many external links on their sites. This is especially true if you pay to advertise your site. You might just as well burn your money as send it to sites that steal your traffic.

If the site does have links out, then those links should be coded with your affiliate ID. You should be credited for sales made through those links.

As I learn and grow in this business, I get pickier and pickier about such things.

For specifically that reason, I recently stemmed the flow of traffic to one of the dating networks I've been affiliated with for years. Soon after doing so, I received a call from the president of the company, who wanted to know what it would take for me to start sending traffic back to their sites.

I asked that each of the links out to their other dating sites either be removed, or coded with my ID. Although he discounted my request as being irrelevant in terms of lost commissions, he agreed to have the links removed from my affiliate sites.

Ask and ye shall receive, right?

Not quite. I checked back a couple of weeks later, and saw that the changes hadn't been made.

Easy enough. No changes made, no traffic sent.

Shortly after that I got another call from the company, this time from the affiliate program manager. I told her about my conversation with the president, and the remaining 'leaky' links.

She, fortunately, took my request very seriously. Not only that, but she had the sense to do a little research into 'the problem'.

Today I received the following from that affiliate program manager.

...based on the performance, there was a 30% increase in conversions when we did remove the "other" links. Thanks to this test and your persistence in removing the "other" links, we will soon be implementing this feature for all the sites.

Here's the data:

Before: Free Signup/Uniques: 10% Paid/Free Signup: 3%

After: Free Signup/Uniques: 13% Paid/Free Signup: 4%

I will keep you posted as to when this should take place across the board.

Those numbers may LOOK small, but they are HUGE! Have you ever had a 30% pay raise? Well, if you are an affiliate of this dating network, you just got one!

Proof positive that ANYONE can make a difference.

Be persistent and Be successful.

About the Author
Rosalind's amazing Internet business success story has been profiled in Secrets to Their Success, Six Figure Income and numerous other publications. Learn how you too can can build a lucrative eBusiness, by reading her entertaining, informative and hype-free newsletter, the Net Profits Coach, available at: (http://RosalindGardner.com)