Greener Pastures

I hear from time to time about another new affiliate network starting up from an affiliate who wants to make more money in the industry. I get asked, how much does it cost to start an affiliate network?

I tell them that it’s not about how much is COSTS, it’s about CASH FLOW.

So I ask them, how much cash flow do you have to cover your first month or two of payments? Take in consideration that your net payment terms are not going to coincide with advertisers and you need to manage and carry the balance from your affiliate’s earnings. Do you have the cash flow for that? What happens when you don’t get paid at all?

Another thing I think about is why this affiliate would even want to start an affiliate network? Do they feel the need to progress in this direction to maintain stability in this industry? Is this just something they think is an easy task to do? What’s the motivation here?

How is it that the already established networks can leverage their traffic for better payouts, payment terms, and campaign management? And then in turn, become mega affiliates themselves?

Is the Grass really greener on the other side?

My answer to these questions is no. If you’re an established affiliate looking to expand in the industry, don’t. Expand in yourself. Why would you want to compete with other well established networks, some of whom you’ve been working with for years?

You remember how hard it was to initially get into this game? It’s like starting over again. Only now you’re a ‘network’ and you have ‘affiliates’. Keep in mind some of the points I said in my previous post.

Being an established affiliate is great! Why would anyone want to venture outside of that? If you want to build, build relationships and partners. Leave the negotiating payouts/offers/payments/terms up to the guys who already have those relationships with the advertisers.

For those who will continue to strive to build quality networks after becoming great affiliates. Good luck, and may the best network win!

Communication and campaign management

I came across a campaign the other day that was performing well at the beginning of the month and slowly but surely dwindled away towards the middle/end of the month. As I noticed this trend of the campaign, my initial reaction was to contact the owner of who was running this offer. After a couple phone calls and a few emails sent out to the publisher, I had received no response. Now there are two things I could have done at this point. Let it run through the rest of the month, or redirect the offer to something else. Redirecting offers is not something I like to do, there are ad copies that need to be considered, keywords that might be being bid on, and/or targeted email lists that this campaign may have initially been set up for. I chose to let it go hoping we could get in contact with that publisher in order to discuss and agree on something else.

I finally get a call back from this particular person running this offer. As our introductions finish, I mention to them that the current offer they’re running is sucking ass. They mention to me that this offer (and my company) was the topic of conversation this morning and how can they run anything else from me based on this particular offer. ???.

I can completely understand when an offer sucks that it doesn’t reflect well from that merchant. But what some people fail to keep in mind is that as an affiliate network, we’re receiving campaigns from SEVERAL merchants at any given time. I asked them to take this in consideration and not be all too quick to judge my entire company as a whole based on one single campaign.

I didn’t want to divulge too much into a traffic issue. So I suggested that I inquire about the offer with the merchant and we see what may have happened to the campaign. I know this might not have been the quickest solution but, given the speculation of the way my company runs, I have only limited of options for satisfaction.

What I’m saying with all of this is, don’t be so quick to turn the back on a network as a whole based off a single issue. I can understand payment issues, sure, or even maybe consecutive problems with reporting, OK fine. With what you might take away from a simple phone call, early, could save a world of stress for both you and the guys on the other end.

Cheers!

Twitter getting a clue

Today I read about twitter implementing what they should have started off with initially. Advertisements. I know that you can only run an ad-free platform for so long before you have to start making money. It’s just too bad they had to wait this long to finally go about doing it. some of the small edits are as follows;

Following a large amount of users or following and unfollowing, or following and unfollowing the same users in a short amount of time

- Having a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following

- Updates that consist mainly of links.

- Large number of people who are blocking a particular user

- Posting duplicate content over a number of accounts

- Attempting to sell followers

- Posting multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #

- Sending large numbers of unsolicited @replies in an attempt to spam a service or link

It was only a matter of time before they figured out they need to MAKE money for this upcoming social network.

What do you think you’re going to start promoting on twitter now?

Too long to count

White Hat SEO
In recent years the concept of SEO has gained a lot of importance. The terms White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO have emerged universally as a marketing strategy to increase a website’s relevancy and ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The SEO industry uses various techniques which can be ethical or unethical depending on the approach SEO professionals wish to adopt for optimizing pages.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results and also boosting real time traffic to your website. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of the White Hat SEO process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings and also rank stability.

The whole idea behind White Hat SEO is to ensure that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. The content that you would find on the webpage would not be solely for the search engine but also keeping the visitor in mind.

White Hat SEO Tactics:
Internal Linking
A simple way to hinder a good website ranking on the search engine is by making it tough for the search engines to spider and index pages. Several websites may use scripts to provide fancy drop down navigation and so on but unfortunately these scripts will not be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots. They will go unnoticed by the search engine spiders since they are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, scripts, frames, directories, etc.

Creating a site with scripts and fancy navigations may enhance the look of your website; however, it will prevent the spidering of your site. Therefore, it is essential to add text links at the bottom of your landing page linking to your most important internal pages including the sitemap.

Reciprocal Linking
Building reciprocal links is another White Hat SEO technique where you exchange links with other sites to get additional incoming links to your website. However, you must remember the following points when linking to other sites:

Link to sites that are relevant to yours
Consider linking to sites which have content that will appeal to and interest your visitors
Link to sites that have keywords you wish to target

Since this process is tedious and time consuming, avoid randomly linking to any site that you come across. This will not only lead to wastage of time and effort but also not bring in any results in terms of achieving a high search engine ranking.

Creating Content
This is an important part of the SEO process where compelling text has to be created that will attract more visitors to your site and add more value to your web pages. Creating a content rich website will not only boost visitor traffic to your site but will also lead to better recognition and indexing of your pages. Also, there would be many webmasters out there who would want to link to your site if they find it to be a good resource on their subject. Though content creation may take a lot of time, it will be worth the time and effort in the future.

Optimizing Your Website
This is another White Hat SEO technique which has gained a lot of popularity in recent times. Optimizing your site to improve its layout, structure, presentation, and content can help you gain better visibility and exposure.

The two way road of business

When people actually do business together it shows cooperation, teamwork, collaboration, and good ethics. There are some relationships in business that are this way, and there are some out there that think creating good business is a one way lane. I’m here to tell you that if you run yourself down this one way lane, you will burn, and you will crash. On the other hand, people who understand that creating good relationships are centered on the “give and take” conduct.

There have been many instances where I’ve worked with people in the past and eventually generated a good revenue stream. The relationship was good, the communication was there, but when it came down to reciprocating business together they didn’t think twice to bail. This is not only frustrating, but puts you on an untrusting level for any other person you view as potential partners.

There have also been instances where my relationship was very generous from both parties. If I ever needed any suggestions or help with something I knew I could go to them and have no problem getting what I need. And I would like to think that I was able to provide my partner with any experience or knowledge to better themselves. This relationship has lasted years and our partnership has been prosperous.

What it boils down to is, building a partnership in order to conduct long term big business, is never a one way road. If you’re thinking of using a person for what they have, and not being reciprocal, chances are then, you’ll burn through partners faster than sage grass on fire, and your reputation only diminishes each time until eventually you’re not in business.

Take a minute to think about what it is you have to contribute to your current partnerships and ask yourself who you haven’t been able to share this with.

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.

Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931)

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