Best Affiliate Program?
March 25, 2009
How I’d love to be able to say I’ve found the best affiliate program.
Instead, I think I’ve found one of the worst.
I have a number of sites that promote affiliate products and I’m always on the lookout for a relatively open sub-niche to explore. I thought I’d found one about an hour ago. They offer you a fully branded website store that you can load onto your own domain. Great. The commissions are only up to 2.5%, but repeat business is good and it’s ongoing commission so it seems reasonable.
I signed up, completed the various branding forms and downloaded an entire site, ready to upload onto my own hosting account. Then I had a look at the actual code of the website. There were a couple of places to configure such things as keywords, descriptions and so on, to make the site a little more personalised.
But then I discovered what was a major problem:This particular company has been quite smart, as in ’smart cookie’ smart, not Harvard researcher smart. They don’t actually provide any content in the downloaded files. What happens is that every time a visitor comes to your site their content is put into your site in an iframe. So all the internal links go straight to them. That’s not really a problem, as such, but what follows is – for me at least.
In an effort to avoid any ‘duplicate content penalty’, they insist that you have a robots.txt file on your site that basically tells the search engines to go away. If you go in for natural link building, as I do, then when the searchbots come knocking at your door and find it slammed shut in their face there’s a pretty good chance they won’t bother coming back. So your chances of getting any organic search traffic are very slim. Very slim indeed.
So what can you do to get traffic? Well, you can have direct referrals from the links, of course, although that will probably never be anything like as much as you’d get from good organic searches. What’s left? PPC.
That’s right, you can pay to advertise their products. I know that’s a common affiliate promotion strategy, but what if it’s not one you normally use? Should you have to resort to PPC to get some traffic to such a site? What if you’re someone like me, who gets decent free traffic using organic techniques? I don’t want to start having to get into PPC. For one thing I’m not very good at it, but I know how to get traffic for free to my sites and I could certainly generate traffic for this new site that way.
What I’m left with is a great looking website that I don’t want to use. The product is good, the conversions are good, the website is professional, but I’m left with little choice for promotion. They offer a number of different websites and I would have built my own sites around pretty much all of them. BUT since they effectively want my site to be dead to the search engines, I won’t do it. So I lose out and so do they.
I think it’s important to control what your affiliates do. Spamming, for example, should be a no-no every time. False advertising and misleading claims should also be jumped on and punished, quick. But to penalize someone who doesn’t want to use PPC because he can get free traffic to the site? That, to me, seems just crazy. Especially since the duplicate content thing is pure myth.
Still, there are lots of other good affiliate programs out there so I’ll just keep looking. If I ever find the best one I’ll let you know!
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There are numerous affiliate programs that can be found in the internet. You just have to be aware and beware of the scammers. If they are asking you some registration fee without telling you what would be in store for you, then think twice. For more info, pease visit [snip] .com