Affiliate Marketing training and tips!

This month Big Mouth Media launched their 2010 affil­i­ate sur­vey. Unlike pre­vi­ous sur­veys con­ducted, Mer­chants and Affil­i­ate net­works were not invited to take part. The sur­vey was intended to pro­vide more insight into UK Affil­i­ate Mar­ket­ing trends, and help bet­ter under­stand­ing of the UK Affil­i­ate, their pro­mo­tional meth­ods and their feel­ings towards their mer­chants. Pos­si­bly also their out­look on the indus­try as a whole. What I think the sur­vey did best how­ever was sub­stan­ti­ate the claims that Affil­i­ate Mar­ket­ing can be both a very pow­er­ful tool for Mer­chants, and an excep­tion­ally prof­itable busi­ness for affiliates.

It is not unusual to read blog posts pre­dict­ing the end of affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing; as recent as last month many were pre­dict­ing “The End” with the release of Google’s instant search, and a cou­ple months before this it was Google’s Caf­feine update that was going to leave us all on the high street beg­ging for change. So it can be a lit­tle con­fus­ing when you read that 24.4% of those that responded to this sur­vey make between £5k and £10k per month and a stag­ger­ing 70.8% cited Affil­i­ate Mar­ket­ing as their full time occu­pa­tion. This does not hold the hall­mark of a dying indus­try, in fact if I was not already an affil­i­ate I would be seri­ously con­sid­er­ing it about now. I do believe how­ever that it is the full time affil­i­ates that are the most likely to respond to such a sur­vey, so this is prob­a­bly not the average.

The big win­ner in this sur­vey appears to be the much loved Affil­i­ate Win­dow Net­work. Just under half the respon­dents to this years sur­vey stated that it was their net­work of choice, and although I did not com­plete this sur­vey I do agree. This year has been a dif­fi­cult one for many of the net­works as the full effects of the eco­nom­i­cal down­turn started to trans­late into poor sales results for many high street brands, and affil­i­ates alike. 2010 is the year that the DGM Net­work went into admin­is­tra­tion, leav­ing many affil­i­ates and cred­i­tors severely out of pocket, and high­light­ing the impor­tance of choos­ing a net­work that is finan­cially sound. I was never a mas­sive fan of the DGM Net­work and there­fore rarely used them, so when the admin­is­tra­tors came knock­ing I was owed a mere £5.38. Other affil­i­ates how­ever were not so lucky, with one being owed a stag­ger­ing £70,089.64. So what makes Affil­i­ate Win­dow our favorite? Some of the rea­sons stated included that they were trust­wor­thy, reli­able and also pro­vide an easy to use inter­face. Affil­i­ate Win­dow appears to be going from strength to strength, and with their pur­chase of Buy.at ear­lier this year, they cur­rently have over half the UK mar­ket share.

It appears that trust in the mer­chants to pro­vide a great con­vert­ing web­site and cre­atives is low, and many affil­i­ates cite this as their largest con­cern, with com­mis­sion rates falling in to sec­ond place. In fact affil­i­ates appear to be so con­cerned about their mer­chants online mar­ket­ing strat­egy that 76% of the respon­dents believed they were bet­ter at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing than the mer­chants they were pro­mot­ing. Con­cerns were also raised over com­mu­ni­ca­tions between mer­chants and their affiliates.

Another area of con­cern high­lighted by the sur­vey, and of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to me is the large amount of fraud­u­lent traf­fic that appears to be going through our affil­i­ate links. I have noticed recently that a larger pro­por­tion of sales gen­er­ated are being rejected by my mer­chants and can only assume (from the lim­ited data that I am pro­vided with) that this is a direct result of fraud­u­lent trans­ac­tions. This is a seri­ous mat­ter, and to be hon­est plays on my dis­trust­ing atti­tude towards some mer­chants. I would expect a lower per­cent­age of declined leads and sales when send­ing traf­fic to larger mer­chants with the finan­cial resources to com­bat such activity.

In con­clu­sion the report prob­a­bly does not tell us a great deal that will help us in our day to day busi­ness but does make an inter­est­ing read. If there is one bit of infor­ma­tion that can help you become a prof­itable affil­i­ate (bear­ing in mind that 70.8% of respon­dents are full time affil­i­ate mar­keters) it is that 61.2% of those respon­dents con­cen­trate on con­tent mar­ket­ing and SEO as their main sources of traf­fic. Also, 46% of respon­dents cited retail as their main sec­tor, fol­lowed by travel (24%), Finance (8%) and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion & gam­ing last (4%).

I would like to say a big thanks to Big Mouth Media for con­duct­ing this sur­vey, and pro­vid­ing some inter­est­ing insights into the UK affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing indus­try. Please down­load the full sur­vey here.