Traffic Whales!

[cj]

Originally posted by pushpills@Feb 26 2005, 11:32 PM
Most progams seem to get the fact that there's more competition out there and they need to treat their webmasters well. Someone sending 3 sales a day...if the program is making say 30 bucks off each sale, thats 90 a day..just under 33 grand a year profit for the program owners...so taking the time to give them support, custom ads, or to "go after" someone just to get a couple sales a day is time well spent. If you go over the top and have some custom ads done or some programming done for a webmaster, and it puts 100k in your bank account over the course of a year or two...that's time and money well spent.

you used the numbers 3 sales a day as your example so I'll use the same ...

you said 3 sales a day = $90 for the program a day which is $33k profit a year.

where do you get the idea that 3 sales equals $90 profit? profit is how much the program makes after everything is paid, not how much is billed to the customer ... If an affiliate is paid 50%, that's $45 income per day for the program (assuming that all 3 signups even spend $30, which is extremely unlikely).

From that $45 comes cost of content, hosting etc, so the program owner may be left with $20 ... $10 ... $5 ...

then if there's a chargeback or a refund, the program owner is out of pocket the $30 ...

The lack of understanding between affiliates and affiliate programs causes so many issues ... how can the 2 sides of the business work in partnership if an affiliate thinks his 3 sales makes the program $90? I'm not saying you should know every detail about the business model but understanding how your sponsor makes their profit goes a long way to helping the relationship along ...

Some of the big programs just dont have the management giving a shit about the longterm $ from smaller webmasters....and thats something they heads of the company needs to really drill into the support peoples head.

There is a reason for this in most cases ... the longterm $ aren't what you think they are, and are usually short term headaches ... In the case of clickcash, if you do $10k a month in business with them (or ANY consistent amount) they should show you the courtesy of treating you better than it sounds like they are, but many affiilates - and you definately fit this description - think the program will fall over without them & try to throw their weight around accordingly ...

you mentioned how much competition there is these days, and its not just in programs - there's competition in affiliates too. If you don't send me your traffic, there's 10 webmasters doing exactly what you are doing who might send me their traffic ...

There's several ways to approach having an affiliate program, some go for saturation and try to get every single webmaster - which guarantees volume, but your webmasters are competiting against each other & affiliate support is a nightmare - the affiliate thinks its your fault that another webmaster took their SE spot or whatever. There's only so many spots in search engines for the key terms that relate to a sponsors site (especially in niches) ...

mailers are a good example too - if you have 10 mailers each with a 10 million list, that's 100 million emails ... according to this http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are only 800 million people online ... probably half of which don't speak english, even more who we don't have billing methods for etc ... eventually your webmasters are just mailing/promoting over the top of each other.

With all that said, 5 - 10 a day webmasters are my favorite group to work with ... they have enough volume that it is a profitable relationship for both parties, and are usually easier to work with ... & won't ruin your program if they lose their SE spots or leave the program.