Finding it hard to attract quality affiliates

[reydoog]

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Hi guys, I'm after a bit of advice. I am a relatively new merchant with the Affiliate Future network in the UK. I have a few hundred affiliates signed up but do not think that any of them are sending significant leads my way. I think that I have laid the foundation, my website works and customer feedback suggests that it is easy to use and I seem to have above average conversion rates and epc for my sector. I also think that I have quite generous programmes offerring upto 60% of my sales or up to £1 for a free signup. My question is what is the best way to attract new quality affiliates to my program? I have a PPC campaign with Google and Overture running but it does not seem to be bringing the affiliates in.

Thanks,

Ian

[Lee_Owen]

In advance of me getting decent traffic back any time soon, what's your conversion rate like? I get a quid with 'lycos love' and although lycos is worldwide they only pay out for the UK - yeah add that to the affiliate grumble thread - I just remembered...

[Graham@Buyagift]

Have you contacted your 'few hundred affiliates' to get feedback from them? There may be a simple reason - maybe they've signed up but haven't got round to putting your links live yet. A quick email or phone call could easily remedy this.

Graham

[smn2]

Basically, you need to find the superaffiliates - sorry for stating
the obvious! - and offer them a better deal than whoever
they seem to be heavily promoting!

Neil Shearing developed some software to do just that
(apparently). Think it does searches for specific keywords,
finds out if the sites found are owned by affiliates, etc.

Have no idea if it works, but it *might* be worth a try
(do a search for Internet Success Spider - believe it
or not, Neil is a brit!)

Otherwise, I'd use this forum, and maybe update your sigfile
encouraging superaffiliates to give you a go. Then make
lots of useful posts

I have a PPC campaign with Google and Overture running but it does not seem to be bringing the affiliates in.

Is this campaign aimed at finding super-affiliates?

Cheers,
Steve

[drivetowin]

Ian

I'm not sure how many quality dating affiliates you think there are but I would doubt that there are more than a dozen in the whole of the UK (and off the top of my head I have to be honest and say I can only think of one affiliate who makes significant revenue from dating).

Most affiliates will just take a couple of dating banners and stick them on their sites to bring in a few extra pennies now and again. And I think it is here where you have your problem - your offer simply isnt compelling enough.

Although you offer 'up to £1' per free signup, thats for more than 100 signups a month. As dating is not an area I specialise in I know I only generate a handful of signups a month so I then look at that figure - 50p. Now I can get that from datingdirect and from datetheuk - both established schemes and both with thousands of members (I did visit your site and did a search for females aged 20-40 which returned only 150 results nationwide - which if I were on the dating scene I'm not sure would be enough 'potential' to make me sign up - therefore as an affiliate my suspicion is that the sign up rate through your site would not be as high as with the established players.

So for me to be interested you'd probably have to offer a rate of at least 75p per free sign up (or give a clear indication of the conversion rate from free signups to paying members so I can judge the long term potential of the programme)

[Cetus]

" I would doubt that there are more than a dozen in the whole of the UK"

That's not true , there's about 40-50 who cover all the different dating 'sectors'. PM me for more info!

Thanks,

Peter

[ben01]

I'm guessing that Cetus might have a slightly different opinion of what constitutes "significant revenue" to Kbudden! I have to say that what I've seen of the UK dating sector concurs with Kbudden's views.

Cheers,

Ben

[richardc]

It's not just simply a case of offering a high percentage of revenue or a decent amount per free member sign-up.

What the affiliate needs to see is how well, in the case of rev. share, your free customers convert to paying customers.

In the case of paying per sign-up of a free member the affiliate needs to be sure that this will still convert. Some dating sites have a very complicated sign-up procedures with lots of questions over several pages which must be fully completed before the affiliate sign-up bounty becomes payable.

On top of all this the affiliate needs to know that your tracking of the members that they have referred is reliable and accurate.

Affiliates like comprehensive stats and like to paid very quickly after month end, in most cases directly into their bank account.

Affiliates generally like to work with merchants that have been around for a number of years who have trusted brands and who have built up a reputation of reliability and honestly.

Affiliates like to have tools that will allow them to use your program to differentiate their site content from other dating affiliate programs.

Offering XML feeds to your affiliates of the latest members profiles and photos etc. are a great way of making of giving them some content to use on their site.

Using a PPC campaign to recruit new affiliates will probably just waste your money and cause you to attract only a handful of very mediocre affiliates.


Richard Conway

Co-Founder and Business Development Director

datingagency.com Limited

www.datingagency.com

Hi guys, I'm after a bit of advice. I am a relatively new merchant with the Affiliate Future network in the UK. I have a few hundred affiliates signed up but do not think that any of them are sending significant leads my way. I think that I have laid the foundation, my website works and customer feedback suggests that it is easy to use and I seem to have above average conversion rates and epc for my sector. I also think that I have quite generous programmes offerring upto 60% of my sales or up to £1 for a free signup. My question is what is the best way to attract new quality affiliates to my program? I have a PPC campaign with Google and Overture running but it does not seem to be bringing the affiliates in.

Thanks,

Ian

[reydoog]

Hi everyone, what a busy board this is!!!

Our conversion rate
As a few of you Lee_Owen, kbudden and richardc wanted to know my conversion and as I know that some affiliate networks (Affiliate Window and Trade Doubler) publish these as a matter of course I thought that I should share them with you then with your experience of my competitors you maybe could tell me where I am going wrong! We appear at present to get a free signup at about 1 in 40 clicks, we get 10% of the free signups converting and average conversion amount is £22.

For our basic combined scheme 50p per sign up and 30% of revenue this amounts to earnings of ~£2.90 per 100 clicks and for our basic 'sales only scheme' 50% of revenue this amounts to about ~£2.75 per 100 clicks. Obviously earnings are higher if you get only our preferred affiliate schemes.

As kbudden pointed out we do not currently have as many members as some of our competitors and so I would expect our conversion rates to increase as we get more members on board.

Of course the reason we don't have lots of members is because we don't have super affiliates on board so we seem to be in a circular argument.

[richardc]

To be honest your conversion rates are lower than the industry average.

You mention that the reason why you don't have many members is that you don't have any "super affiliates".

Even if you were able to attract some "super affiliates" then that still would not be sufficient to grow your database to a sufficient size in order to compete with the major industry players.

It just is not possible to build a successful online dating business on the back of using affiliates as your single member acquisition strategy.

We have spent millions of pounds building our brand through other areas of marketing. Whilst we do attract many "super affiliates" to our affiliate schemes, the percentage of new members joining from affiliate referrals still remains relatively low.

To grow your database you are going to need to spend significant sums of money in marketing in order to be able to compete in this marketplace.


Richard Conway

Co-Founder and Business Development Director

datingagency.com Limited

www.datingagency.com

Hi everyone, what a busy board this is!!!

Our conversion rate
As a few of you Lee_Owen, kbudden and richardc wanted to know my conversion and as I know that some affiliate networks (Affiliate Window and Trade Doubler) publish these as a matter of course I thought that I should share them with you then with your experience of my competitors you maybe could tell me where I am going wrong! We appear at present to get a free signup at about 1 in 40 clicks, we get 10% of the free signups converting and average conversion amount is £22.

For our basic combined scheme 50p per sign up and 30% of revenue this amounts to earnings of ~£2.90 per 100 clicks and for our basic 'sales only scheme' 50% of revenue this amounts to about ~£2.75 per 100 clicks. Obviously earnings are higher if you get only our preferred affiliate schemes.

As kbudden pointed out we do not currently have as many members as some of our competitors and so I would expect our conversion rates to increase as we get more members on board.

Of course the reason we don't have lots of members is because we don't have super affiliates on board so we seem to be in a circular argument.