Spam vs Quality Affiliates
July 2nd, 2009 Affiliate Blogger Posted in Affiliate management, All articles, Other Stuff | No Comments »
I had a chat with a ‘black hat’ SEO affiliate today, about the techniques he uses to make ‘quick bucks’ on the network, whilst there’s no doubt these techiques are quick winners, they don’t exactly drive the kind of quality or offer the consumer the kind of value-added that would make such strategies viable in the long term. More importantly I’m of the mindset these techniques ‘game the system’ and will eventually be found out.
As far as the industry goes, given that affiliate marketing is still viewed as a dirty word to marketing managers, often (miss) associating Affiliate marketing with Spam emails and viagra, these techniques can only serve to alienate already skeptical merchants to the detriment of the entire industry.
I thought some of the techniques could be altered to be a bit more legit and actually fit in with ‘white hat’ affiliate marketing, however i think it’s important that merchants and affiliate managers can spot the difference, after all they are responsible for approving and affiliates application to a campaign, and often flase assumptions are made about the legitimacy of the site.
So here’s a few handy tips that will help both sides make the right decisions when it comes to approving affiliates -
Affiliates -
- make sure your sites are good quality and well finished with readable content and working navigation
- if you have more than one site, use the description field in the network to give more information and use a holding site that gives information on your sites as your listed site in the network
- some networks require you to validate your site, much as its a pain, you’re gonna have to do this, hence why I avoid using Trade doubler if possible, I understand the need, but with 80+ sites, i don’t have the time to flaff about with that, especially when they still may not approve my application, grr!
- find the affiliate managers at the networks and merchants and explain to them how you intend to market their campaigns.
- (obvious) adhere to the merchants terms and conditions
Merchants -
- Learn to tell what a quality affiliate site is
- if there are other affiliate programs on the site, there’s a good chance the site is legitimate
- make sure you read the description in the networks if these are actually informative and reveal informationa bout how the affiliate is marketing then there’s a good chance its a legitimate affiliate, if the description isn’t then you may have a dodgy affiliate
- check the affiliate sites and navigate the site checking links work
- do a whois search and check that the registrant name is that same as that in the affiliates network profile
- check email addresses, if the affiliate’s email address is a free email address make sure you look more closely at the account, this doesn’t mean the affiliate is dodgy, but that you should be more wary.
- contact the affiliate, make sure you get a response, this also gives you a chance to find out more about their strategy and build relationships with affiliates.
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