One of the main drives for most affiliates is money, makes sense really. They look through the programmes available for a certain sector for example travel, see the commission rates available and the tools offered and then decide to build a site around that area. Now this can work… and can be done very well, but most of the time doesn’t.
Focus on the user, give the user a reason to come back and make your site valuable to both user and merchant. In my line of work (always wanted to say that) I see hundreds, maybe even thousands of directory sites and half baked guide sites built by people that area already affiliates just wanting to grow their earning potential. They decide they want to make their 7% or £25 CPA commission and starts the site with huge ambitions, global hotel directories for example. Do you really think its going to be easy for one person to have a directory of all the hotels in the world and keep it up to date?
Now the title of this is ‘non affiliate affiliates’ basically people who have built sites out of the love of a certain thing. They have been kept out of the affiliate circles and don’t even understand how it all works. These affiliates can easily generate a lot of sales, their audience are relatively unexposed to adverts and are usually highly targeted. It might take a week or two of exchanging emails and calls with these site owners to convince them that you are going to pay them, and that it is possible to track a sale from them. In most cases you even have to give them the HTML code to integrate your links onto their site – but is it worth it? Yes.
Affiliate marketing is about the pre sell and pre qualification of visitors, an affiliate who understands this will manage themselves. However there is a huge untapped market of content sites out there that don’t even know what an affiliate programme is, this is where an affiliate manager who understands online marketing and really has a good grip on affiliate marketing can turn a non affiliate into an affiliate and as far as im concerned that’s half the job.
