Coast Digital Blog

Getting your affiliate program off the ground isn’t always easy, especially if you aren’t promoting a brand that everyone knows. Here are a few easy steps to help get things going.

1. What are you offering?

The first thing you need to decide is what you’re going to offer affiliates to encourage them to join and continue to promote your program.

Don’t rush this. You need to ensure your offering is cost-effective for you but is also significant enough to get affiliates to promote it. After all, if the offering isn’t going to give enough back to the affiliate then they won’t bother.

Don’t forget, any commission you offer will be subject to an override (generally 30%) to the ‘network’. An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and (merchant) affiliate programs. It allows publishers to find affiliate programs, which are suitable for their website and it helps websites offering affiliate programs reach their target audience.

2. Lay down the law

Set your program’s terms and conditions, particularly in relation to pay per click (PPC), and be sure to make them as watertight as possible. Loopholes WILL be discovered and taken advantage of!

For example, if you’re already running a successful PPC campaign, you don’t want affiliates claiming commission on sales that you would have already made. This won’t add any value to your online marketing. Don’t be afraid to specify exactly what affiliates are allowed to bid on and what they’re not.

But if you’re not running a PPC campaign, why not let the affiliates take it? It won’t cost you a penny unless they make you money, and generally PPC affiliates are great at what they do, so everyone’s a winner!

3. All aboard

Next you’ll need to find your affiliates. Let’s face it, there’s no program without them. (It’s very important to remember that, as we’ll see later on.)

Write a page of information on the program. Not too long; a bit about your company and what you do, and more importantly what the affiliates have to do to earn their commission and how much they can expect to earn.

The network will (in most cases) ask you to do this anyway. Once its done, ask the network to show it, persuade them to put it in their newsletter to affiliates. And create a page on your website for this information, and place a link to allow people to join directly from your site.

Now for your most deadly weapon as an affiliate marketer: The Affiliates4U forum. A4U is the biggest gathering of affiliates and merchants on the web. Most (if not all) your affiliates will be registered members. So make sure you post all of your communications there as well.

If you’re still not getting enough affiliates, why not try an incentive? Again don’t rush, think about your offering. Giveaways work well, but you want to make sure you get a return. Perhaps offer an incentive on an affiliate’s first sale, rather than just from signing up to your program. 

4. Attracting attention

You need to give your affiliates the creative they will use to advertise your site. The network will have restraints in place on file size; they will also suggest a list of banner sizes. Make sure you offer ALL of the banner sizes the network suggests, and if you have the resources make a couple of banner sets in different styles.

You want to make it as easy as possible for affiliates to get your banners and put them on their site, not offering the right sizes will just get on everyone’s nerves!

5. What do affiliates want?

Money! At the risk of making affiliates sound shallow, they want money. The easier it is to make money on your program, the quicker your program will take off!

Incentives are a great way to not only increase the sales that affiliates are already generating, but will also persuade other affiliates to start working with your program as well.

Get your thinking cap on and be creative. Cash prizes work very well, but don’t underestimate the power of consumer electronics for cheap and desirable prizes!

Avoid rewards based on “most sales from an affiliate” as this will almost certainly be the same person every month.

A general rule of thumb: 80% of sales are made by 10% of affiliates.

6. What about the consumer?

As stated earlier, you want to make it as easy as possible for affiliates to make sales on your website. So give consumers something that will encourage them to buy through an affiliate. 

7. Special offers and discounts

Discount codes work well. People love getting something for nothing so offering a free X when you buy Y will work very well.

Special offers are good as well. Try giving sales from affiliates a discount or something similar, again BE CREATIVE! There’s no limit (other than the law) to what you can do…

8. Keep a watchful eye on sales!

Bear in mind orders get cancelled. For whatever reasons, some orders get returned and some credit cards get declined, but you don’t want to pay out commission to affiliates when you haven’t got the revenue for the sale.

Take a look through the sales once a week and cancel any commission that hasn’t produced revenue for you.

Unfortunately, as in most industries, there are some unpleasant characters out there. This is the main reason to check your sales. If an order looks too good to be true, then it probably is.

9. Be harsh but fair

If you’re not happy with an affiliate, or the way they are producing sales then don’t be afraid to approach them and ask them to stop what they’re doing. The network should also support you and if the affiliate doesn’t stop what they’re doing, suspend them from the program until they change their ways.

Don’t let the network call the shots. As the merchant, it’s your program; without you, there’d be no program. The networks want to make money too, and I have known them (on very rare occasions) to take the affiliates side on breaches in program terms purely because if these sales get cancelled they’ll lose their commission too!

10. One last nugget of information

So that basically wraps up my guide, but there’s one last point: Communicate.

Communication with affiliates is key, even if it’s just to let them know about a new product on your site, or an update on the month’s competition. Make them feel loved, and they will work harder to make you the sales. 

Here are my musings on the relative merits of quantitative versus qualitative research in web development. I hope you'll find the information of value to your daily work. I've conducted various types of research online but it should be clear which method I think adds the most value to our clients’ businesses.
 
If this post interests you and you want to find out more you can't beat Jakob Nielson’s website at Useit.com (he would be willing to gain usability at the loss of visual design - but his heart's in the right place).

If you would like to further discuss Coast Digital's experience of user reviews and web design work then drop us a line - we'd be delighted to speak with you about your business needs.
 
Quantitative research
Quantitative research has the potential to give you reams of data and strong statistical significance. It also gives you lots to talk about, but ultimately only provides feedback against the criteria and questions you asked. Ask the wrong questions and nothing of much value will come back.
 
Quantitative research often requires significant time investment at the inception stage - say the set-up of a user satisfaction questionnaire - but once the survey has been developed it can be rolled out across the internet for minimal overhead.
 
The beauty of quantitative research is that you can collect all this data and run some statistical analysis to prove that the results aren't flukes, and, with a little interpretation, draw some conclusions and pretty bar charts. It’s great to wow people with the sheer weight of information but just how relevant is it in web development?
 
Qualitative research
Those with leanings towards mathematics often believe that qualitative research is the poor cousin of stats-based research; because the sample sizes are small there can be little statistical significance and nothing can be truly proven. 
 
Qualitative research in web development does have its challenges:

• You need to source and recruit relevant test candidates.
• The person conducting the user testing or interviews can unwittingly 'lead' users into making statements they wouldn't have made without prompting.
• Each individual user session takes a considerable amount of time to conduct, record and analyse.
• Expanding the sample size to compensate for a lack of statistics is both prohibitively expensive and needless.

However, what qualitative research lacks in statistics, it makes up for in depth of information and potential for insight. Read on...

Qualitative user review testing - a sound solution for web development
In web development or web redesign work you need specifics; information about areas of weakness or opportunity not generalisations or measures of feelings.

You might feel that you can cut corners by sitting down and brainstorming what features your new website should include and how users should interact with it. And you might think you've got some brilliant ideas, but, chances are they're based on hunches and gut-feelings.
 
From my experience, if you are tasked with finding out why a website isn't performing, you can't beat getting people to use it:

• Set them objectives, goals, scenarios and sit back and watch. 
• Do not get too drawn into the tasks themselves; simply sit in as an impartial observer and ask the user to “think aloud”. 
• If the user gets stuck at any point in a process on a website ask them "what are you thinking?" 
• Make notes, or even better, record the whole session on video and/or screen recorder and analyse the session later. 

When it comes to valuable research outputs, you simply cannot beat a summary document highlighting the core areas that already work and those that need additional developement work.

This document should be backed up and cross referenced with a copy of the actual videoed sessions. This way you should successfully remove conjecture and personal opinion from your research piece.
 
In conclusion
When it comes to web development I would encourage you to steer clear of bulky surveys and personal hunches. Instead, strike through the middle; invite a limited set of core users to use your website and observe them. You’ll be absolutely amazed by how many valuable and actionable items their feedback produces.

This year social networking has taken the online world by storm. According to latest research Brits are logging on to social networking sites more than any other country in Europe, spending an average of 5.8 hours per month.*

UK social networking usage is now the highest in Europe, with 24.9 million unique visitors – 78% of the total UK online population – participating in social networking communities.

Clever companies, like eBay are due to set up their own social networking service based around shoppers’ interests, whilst smaller businesses have taken advantage of free online tools to build their online PR presence.

The online hangouts have also provided the public with the power to influence and voice their views, share interests and create new communities. I commend organizations like HSBC and Cadbury for listening to Facebook groups by responding positively to the “Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off Group!!!” and the “Bring Back the Wispa” campaigns.

Another trend with Facebook I’ve noticed is that people are using it more for work as well as play. As a marketeer, I think it has the potential to become a new way of learning and gaining customer insight, taking away reliance on traditional market research focus groups.

Initially, it was great to use the tool for socialising and to catch up with old friends and family, but now I’m actually using it to network and learn about my professional field. It’s also great for teachers, SEO specialists and people with common interests. It’s slowly becoming my mini search engine tool too, giving people the choice to research, recruit, learn and socialise (out of work hours that is!).

Many people I speak with disagree or simply don’t like the way we are exposed by the concept of social networking…. But I think it’s like the mobile phone, eventually it will become accepted as the social norm. Having a phone on you all the time wasn’t always accepted, but now I don’t know anyone who doesn’t carry a mobile. Do you? 

* Research figures supplied by ComScore  www.comscore.com

Google’s surpassed itself again by (according to comScore) powering more than half of all online searches by itself.

That’s right. It sounds insane, but Google powered more searches than Yahoo, Badiu, MSN/Live, NHN, eBay, Time Warner, Ask, Fox and Lycos combined in August this year.

In the UK Google’s grasp is actually much higher, somewhere more in the region of 75% of searches, and this seems to be increasing all the time. It's no surprise then that Google’s share prices have recently gone above the $600 mark!

This makes you wonder, how much longer the other big players such as Yahoo, MSN and Ask will be able to hold on as competitors.

Over the past couple of years the internet has increasingly dominated my life – so much so that I get a bit panicky when I’m ‘offline’. Working in digital media has sharpened my senses to the fundamental shift that’s taking place, but it’s staring each of us in the face really.

Nearly every day there’s yet another news story about Facebook or some other aspect of the internet. It makes me wonder how much more our lives are going to change in the next few years.

One change I’m acutely aware of is that if I want to read the news, and I mean the ‘breaking’ news, I certainly won’t find it on my television. Citizen journalism is a reality – stories are ‘broken’ by people at the scene, by texting, blogging, emailing and taking pictures, even videos, and posting them online.

For example, there was a major incident at Liverpool Street Station recently during the evening rush hour. A huge exclusion zone was set up sealing the whole area off. I learned this from a friend at the scene who called me. Concerned, I switched on my TV news channel… and nothing. The ‘breaking news’ on TV had been the same all afternoon. But had I been able to get online I’m sure I’d have found out what was happening.

Most ‘old’ media businesses worth their salt woke up to this reality years ago. Check out the BBC’s help us make the news feature or The Guardian’s news direct to you range of functionality; with g24 you can even print off your own PDF for a more old-fashioned read – updated every 15 minutes.

The Guardian has arguably been at the forefront of successfully translating traditional journalism online – with their website updated by the minute, winning awards, and offering amazing usability and choice. There’s an astonishing level of engagement with their huge range of blogs, where a new post can collect hundreds of comments in literally minutes.

As Howard Owens – a prolific journalist/blogger – recently stated:

“The user is in control. They decide what, when, why, where and how to consume media. Users aren’t interested in newspaper deadlines and their desire to have the full story before publishing. They want to know what we know when we know it. They want their news now.

People want to participate. They want to talk back. They want to add to our stories, correct us and just spout off as need be with their own opinions."

Absolutely. And I welcome the ongoing efforts on the part of publishers to embrace the web, but what I’m really looking forward to is someone inventing a way for me to find the time to read everything.

In the battle for the top of the SERPs it’s clear that the weight of correctly optimised content can deliver astonishing results. E-commerce websites in particular have the potential to perform well – with huge numbers of product pages ready to be indexed – but only if they are effectively optimized with SEO planning from the outset.

Despite this many web developers still make fundamental errors when creating e-commerce websites. Perhaps the biggest mistake of all is focusing on design at the expense of usability and SEO. Good usability is essential to achieve sales, and SEO of course will enable your customers to quickly find you.

Planning for usability and SEO
From personal experience I have found that SEO and usability studies tend to strongly complement one another. In fact SEO and usability are very similar in that both point towards common sense and logical thinking.

I believe it’s particularly dangerous to consider SEO as an afterthought to web design and development. But on a positive note over the past 2 -3 years I’ve noticed SEO is being more commonly brought into play during website pre-production.

It’s not rocket science
There also seems to be a growing perception that there’s far less science involved in the practice of SEO. True enough, and perhaps due to increasing user sophistication; as rapid growth in the use of social websites and online interaction has created a new generation of web-savvy users.

The positive upshot is that more and more online marketing managers are confident about exploring the possibility of utilising SEO.

With effective SEO planning from the outset the end product should be a fully optimised e-commerce website delivering excellent content for customers and for the search engines.

Make sure all your pages are indexed
And once a large e-commerce website has been effectively optimised Google should index all of its pages; with each having the strength to achieve a natural listing in the SERPs.

The key to delivering a successful e-commerce website is achieving a fluid website architecture. Large, information-heavy product websites should deliver streamlined content in an organized-fashion – targeting keywords along the way.

Achieving natural results with large e-commerce websites is about looking at the big picture.