What Can The Networks Do Better? Thats Right The Networks Should Be Taking Notes!

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Nice post smax ... You do seem to be a very innovative & respect worthy guy.

smaxor said:
Another thing I constantly battle with is big affiliates want me to share nothing. Unless I'm sharing stuff with them of course. Where little affiliates I want to help get to be big affiliates. What is the right amount of help and ideas to give people? We'd never ever give away anyone elses landing page or campaign information. But we do a lot of cpm media buying, search, content, social ppc, etc in house and we find a lot of stuff on our own. Once we milk it some I start sharing some of those ideas and niches with people. However I've had some big affiliates get mad at me about it. What's right here? I constantly stuggle with this and would like to get some feedback from people.
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You're walking a very fine line sharing information from your personal campaigns with noobs. Inevitably you will be using some of the techniques that your other affiliates use which will lead to mistrust on their part.

I see a market for a new network that caters to "paranoid" affiliates. No epc, no need for affiliate mangers (no tips given to Affs), flat payouts, etc

mkrongel said:
What is a fair margin for networks to keep?
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Fair could range from 5%-35% depending on the offer and what you are willing to do ... as long as it's not a secret. You guys work your ass off and float huge amounts of money, affiliates understand that.

A volume based 3 tiered payout would allow your company to take more from high maintenance affiliates who always produce low volume. The seasoned vets who don't need their hand held and can push hundreds of leads per day can still be very profitable for you even at a lower margin, and it will be much more stable this way as affs wouldn't jump ship for a higher payout.

People like up front and honest. Trust is hard to build in this industry and putting your cards on the table would go a long way in building it.
 


I see a market for a new network that caters to "paranoid" affiliates. No epc, no need for affiliate mangers (no tips given to Affs), flat payouts, etc
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Paranoid Media? Hmm... But then the approval process would have to be equally paranoid. No international spammers & frauders mucking up everything. Everyone claims to be an "exclusive" network, but who really backs it up? It could work. Not a bad idea.
 
I have no problem with network owners sharing info with newbies - as long as it's something they came up with in-house.

It's absolutely no different to Nickycakes posting a tip on his blog, he's just not a network owner. If you figured out the trick, by all means let your affiliates know. Just don't take something someone else told you and go blabbing it around.
 
Hahah this thread totally got jacked. Can we please get back to the subject at hand. No need to keep beating this dead horse.

I agree with all the suggestions and it's tough to give out EPC's because they are all skewed from different traffic sources and people pull the wrong links so it'll never be 100% accurate. That is where a good AM will be able to hook you up with the info you need specific to your request.

Love the idea of the merchant agenda too. Again though a good AM should know this or be able to find out. I've got tons of guys on one offer slay it just because I talk to them and let them know the "deal" with this one. AM's should know the "sensitivity" of each merchant too. Are these guys lil punks that are gonna hunt for an excuse not to pay, freak out at volume, etc. or are they caz and some shit can slide ;)

Goals are huge too. A mutually beneficial goal is clutch to keep everyone motivated. Again your AM should be able to set this up. I work with my affiliates to set up something that is realistic for them and us, we keep each other motivated, and then hook them up if they attain it.

Minus the API/Postback sounds like you cats just need to pick up the phone and talk to someone that knows wtf is up.
 
Aequitas said:
Pixals are un-reliable and there is absolutely no need for them when using your sub-id fields correctly.
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Aequitas said:
In that case ok it would be slightly easier to use a pixal but even if you don't using the sub-id method with the right software would only take an extra 5 minutes to set up over the pixal.
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There are plenty of situations where pixels work better than sub IDs. For many of my search campaigns, I use sub-id tracking only since I can't get pixels placed through CJ. Search is fine with sub-ids, but when getting into media buys (or even Google content network), sub-IDs may not be able to be appended on a per-site basis, or a pixel will give much more granular statistics to assist in optimizing a campaign.
 
mkrongel said:
To be honest the payouts in your sig are not realistic. I 100% as an experienced internet marketer for over 10 years knows that something isnt right with those offers, just another highest payout BS marketing technique that doesnt work with real affiliates.

To everyone:

What is a fair margin for networks to keep?
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$1-2 per lead imo, on something that pays $40 I'd say it's fair for the network to keep $1-2, and probably something bigger where volume lacks.

Aequitas said:
Honestly as an affiliate as long as the market payouts keep at a norm and don't drop like a bastard, and we can remain competitive and profitable then I personally don't care what the networks cut is.

Hell if your paying out a $3 or $4 lead to us and we can bank from that offer, I could care less if your making $20 from the merchant for that lead.

Obviously those are not real numbers but the point is as long as the affiliate companies are not flat out giving us the shaft, then they deserve to earn there cut.

I see a lot of people bitch that the affiliate companies have a 10,20,30 percent cut and they say hey if they only took a 2 or 5% cut we could be making way more.

Well for those greedy bastards they can go fuck themselves, cause the great thing about being an affiliate is that I don't have to go out and deal with merchants, I don't have to go our and deal with hundreds of companies, I don't have to do a large majority of work that would otherwise be required if the affiliate companies were not there.

Yes they are middle men and yes they do make tons of cash but to all honestly most of them deserve it.

Notice how I said most and personally I can only say that I honestly trust 3 companies in this industry and those are Copeac, MaxBounty, and Neverblue ads, the others I've dealt with I never did like or there always seemed something fishy about them.

Also that last paragraph should not be assumed that I'm saying all the rest are shit or otherwise doing something wrong but its to make the point that I believe in having a trustful working relationship with the companies I deal with instead of having an all out war.
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There are a few more I'd trust, the ones in my sig and one or two more. But I'd join them all and decide if I feel comfortable there, not based on what others say unless they're blatantly fucking people over.

Janaic said:
I love this guy... lmao.
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Fuck, who doesn't love the wolfe!? (ROIShare excluded)
 
Who cares what the network makes. They pay me every week, on time. I have NO risk, if a customer charges back or refunds I STILL GET PAID. I don't care if they are making 200% off of me, thats some shit I don't want to deal with and it's worth every penny they make off of me.
 
andyt said:
If a network was really smart they would work with Wes Mahler to try and build a plugin for prosper202 since it's open source that lets affiliates setup offer links directly from prosper202 since that would save alot of time for affiliates and also get you a bunch of new affiliates.
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Not to dick ride but that's so right!

I don't see how you could be a reputable network and not ALREADY be working on this.
 
Another thing I constantly battle with is big affiliates want me to share nothing. Unless I'm sharing stuff with them of course. Where little affiliates I want to help get to be big affiliates. What is the right amount of help and ideas to give people? We'd never ever give away anyone elses landing page or campaign information. But we do a lot of cpm media buying, search, content, social ppc, etc in house and we find a lot of stuff on our own. Once we milk it some I start sharing some of those ideas and niches with people. However I've had some big affiliates get mad at me about it. What's right here? I constantly stuggle with this and would like to get some feedback from people.
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We do the same, we run email offers internally, we have agency relationships and contacts with all the major search engines (and hope that Facebook etc. take note), we have an extremly large media planning/buying team and analysts as part of our extended group (read parent company) so do a fair amount of display and we piss about experimenting with some of our money so our affiliates don't have to piss about with theirs.

An affiliate with a Google Slap is a network with a Google Slap, so if people want to work this stuff out themselves we are cool with that, if they want us to help we are also cool with that.

Ultimately, if we don't adhere to guidelines we could end up losing offers, other than that commission only sales people should be treated with the respect they deserve, it's their money they are risking.

Keep the feedback coming on what you'd like to see networks do.

I'm particularly interested to hear about international stuff. We've had cause to lower some payouts because the advertiser pays us in £ and we pay our US based affiliates in $. Any margin we made was eroded by currency fluctuations and whilst we absorbed as much as we could on the basis of swings/roundabouts with a 25% + fluctuation it hurt too much and the trend has been downwards for a long time.

Sharing EPC in most cases would be more harmful than beneficial in my opinion, as has obviously been pointed out there is no point trying to work out whether it's the search/email/banner link because NOBODY will grab the right links, and we don't care. We also encourage affiliates to switch off subid tracking sharing with us, we don't need to know what they are doing, only that they make money doing it and the boundaries we operate for the offer are adhered to, and those tend to be advertiser boundaries. We tend to tell advertisers who come forward with too many caveats or hoops to try a non-CPA network, they jump through hoops we don't, no matter who they are.

Small/new affiliates we can help with lots of really broad generic advice which is giving nothing away, and we hope that they try things out. Most of our most successful campaigns/keywords have been flukes, but the more we do the flukier we get.
 
I'm trying to reconcile this statement
jimbanks said:
we piss about experimenting with some of our money so our affiliates don't have to piss about with theirs.

An affiliate with a Google Slap is a network with a Google Slap, so if people want to work this stuff out themselves we are cool with that, if they want us to help we are also cool with that.
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With this one:
jimbanks said:
Small/new affiliates we can help with lots of really broad generic advice which is giving nothing away, and we hope that they try things out. Most of our most successful campaigns/keywords have been flukes, but the more we do the flukier we get.
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So do you really help your affiliates or just give them broad useless information?

Hope that didn't sound harsh. I'm just trying to get a feel for your network.
 
So do you really help your affiliates or just give them broad useless information?

Hope that didn't sound harsh. I'm just trying to get a feel for your network.
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Didn't sound harsh at all.

We just don't "force" help on people, if they want it we can provide it, based on OUR own experience with OUR money. I know some affiliates are uncomfortable with networks that are also running offers, I guess because of that same concern that we will take the knowledge and use it for our own good, but the trust thing Smaxor said is what is important.

The trust is also a two-way thing. And starting out trust is something people have to earn.

I'd say a decent amount of networks are pretty leveraged by one or two offers/advertisers/affiliates delivering a disproportionate amount of their business, the removal of one or more of which would leave them fucked.

At least if we have internal capabilities we can always sustain a business and with display/email/search/local/design/programming capabilities if any of our affiliates need help or need to be left alone or need a new creative or something like that we can oblige.

But, I would say we are not going to be the network for everyone, and we are cool with that, we don't want to have 50,000 affiliates who are just CD numbers, we want to be able to hang out, have fun and for everyone (including us) to take money off the table and to not feel like they've been bent over the table instead.

Let me know if there is anything else I can help with.
 
andyt said:
if you don't have an account you should sign up by typing in the url directly instead of clicking on someone's referral link because you will get a better payout if you don't have a referral.
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That can't be true...... can it?
 
If someone is recruiting good affiliates on our behalf into the network then the network should have more leverage with the advertiser to get more money for bigger volume.

So technically the answer would be that it depends which network you talk to, and even whether they even have a 2nd tier program or not.

Some networks will not pay more because a referral is in place. Personally if someone recruits for us it means we can spend less time doing that and more time on other things.

I wish I had time to come up with a jazzy sig file, or is that a jizzy sag file......
 
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