Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Networks Vs. In House

[joewills]

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Hi,

I am doing some research for a company as to the benefits and drawbacks of Affiliate Marketing using Affiliate Networks and doing it in-house.

An obvious benefit in-house, appears to be the potential to control link building and build authority around your website. By going through an Affiliate Network, campaigns are almost always in JavaScript, wich has no benefit to link building. Is it possible to split the JavaScript and HTML link and if so is this a frequent thing that Affiliate Networks do?

The down side of in-house is that you may struggle to attract affiliates as many affiliates are drawn to the larger (and smaller) Affiliate Networks.

Any feedback or new suggestions would muchos appreciated.

Cheers,

Joe

[3wdl]

In my opinion, you should not look at Affiliate Marketing to help with your SEO. The two things should be seen as completely seperate.

We use both an in-house program and a variety of networks for our different sites - using a network exposes the program and at the same time some affiliates prefer to work directly, however the take up of the in-house scheme may well be industry dependant.

[pricethat]

How affiliates link to you quite frankly is non of your god damn business, think about your words before you start down the affiliate marketing route as affiliates really will not be too kind to you with that kind of thought process behind it.

Your words translate to, i want to run an affiliate scheme so that lots of affiliates will link to me and increase my ranking for free but i am only going to pay them if i make a sale anyway.

As for networks linking via javascript this is in fact quite incorrect, we link to the network tracking url which logs our click and then it redirects to the merchants site. The reason why we link to a network instead of sign up to individual merchants is because we are not here to build up your company or clients for free, we are businesses here directing traffic to your site to make a sale. This is not free traffic that we just so happen to have and we are not a bunch of scallywags that need to be treated any differently than any other business relationship.

I appreciate you are new to the forum, and its probably a bit too harsh and i could reword much of the above to sound a little less confrontational, but the feeling is the same.

You have full control over who links indirectly to your site via any network so you have no benefit over a running your own inhouse service. In an honest opinion the cost of maintaining and running an inhouse campaign would greatly overrun any network costs by the time you take wages, programming, service and payments into account.

If you run with a network there is a 10% chance that affiliates might give your program a go at some point over a year, with an inhouse program you could be searching for needles in a haystack, depends if you know who are the big boys in your industry already.

As for me and the larger majority of affiliates, you are not getting onto my pages unless you run through a network and more commonly lately on prepay so i know we will get our money. Going with a network suprisingly is not that expensive any more there are many good companies with zero or little setup costs now. Even if you plan to go inhouse and are secretly hoping for a link benefit then i am afraid it just wont happen, any affiliate with common sense would mask their urls anyway so they would not be directly linking to you anyway, as i said, we are here to make money, not a free link free for all.

I hope that is of some help

[zipzip]

Actually, the way Google is working at the moment, I'd love to direct link to merchants sites - if you have the right kind of site yourself, you'd own every term the merchant wants and there would be NOTHING they could do about it (well, nearly nothing)

[joewills]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes I am new on this forum and I think a bit of constructive criticism is fine. I am just researching Pro's and Con's for in-house and using Affiliate Networks for Aff Marketing.

"....to control link building and build authority..." My choice of words are not the best here I agree. And for sure maybe SEO and and Affiliate Marketing should be looked at completely separately as 3wdl suggested

Your words translate to, i want to run an affiliate scheme so that lots of affiliates will link to me and increase my ranking for free but i am only going to pay them if i make a sale anyway.

I think this is a bit harsh. Primarliy I am looking to genrate more traffic to a site and am currently considering Affiliate Marketing and more traditional SEO techniques. I am not looking for a low cost option, but trying to see the big picture and consider all benefits possible.

Of course if the affiliate scheme is not attractive to affiliates it will not be used - its as simple as that! I have not stumbled accross Affiate Marketing and thought 'hey, what a great free link building idea'!! I just thought that in-house Aff Marketing might also help with the Merchant's link building - just a consideration to present to my boss, that's all.

Cheers,

Joe

[8601cam]

Hi all,

I think a number of valuable points have been made here and ultimately it points to the fact that it's a custom solution that suits all parties involved.

We have found some merchants who, rather than want to benefit (SEO wise)from affiliate links, just want to ensure it doesn't have an adverse effect on their own SEO (regardless of whether this may or may not be misguided). Likewise affiliates have the freedom to choose who and how they work with merchants but many feel they get a degree of safety and support from networks.

We have therefore developed a system that allows us to use 'direct linking' but maintains the role of the network as a value added intermediary. There's no latency, it allows the use of all current linking methods and has been tried and tested as a robust solution.

It does involve more devlopment and setup by the merchant, but for some this an adequate trade off, if it protects both the merchant and affiliate to the levels they require.

I'm not advocating our 'direct linking' as the best option, it's just a different tool for the job.

Kind Regards

Mark Walters
Affiliate Window

[Keith]

Hi Joe

If you dig deep you will find some other threads on this subject heres one for starters http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=26395

[Lee_Owen]

It's simple really, as an independent you have to be a hit from day one or the majority are going to forget about you as you're not in their face on a network being promoted, it's even possible to miss programs on networks and forget about them so what chance has the independent got of being remembered past the first couple of weeks, then you've also got the bother of logging in to check how it's doing.

I can name many programs like that, bet365, a couple of cv merchants who may or may not be creating sales who knows, aint looked in ages, loads of others that just get forgotten about, I have casino accounts that are independent which I look at maybe twice a year, I might (probably not) make money with them but because they're independent I forget about them.

There really should be a piece of software out there, similar to awin's alert system or idev's that can tie in all of these sites without the need for giving details to a third party. Perhaps skinkers can develop it and sell it individually, then maybe independents may get more of a shot. Just the ability to load up a program and be presented with one click access to all my networks and independents would be great.

There's also payment, trust, reliability - not even all networks get that right all the time, so how would an independent fair? basically you've got to be good to last, you do on a network as well but I think you get ten times the chance and coverage.

And by the by, as an affiliate I don't care about your seo, site position or anything other than decent product descriptions, but good banners without url, good communication, content feeds and obviously xml for the more knowledgeable, response when emailed a problem, I'm getting really fed up with some companies at the moment, a continual live site, decent design and easy to navigate once they land and tracking always working with a decent commission.

[allaffiliatepro]

We did some research on this a few years back, comparing the advantages and disadvantages to both. It caused a bit of upset at the time, but it was nice to get behind the propaganda on both sides. We ended up putting it all on the site Why Affiliate Marketing?