Setting up an affiliate program...

[sarettah]

Originally Posted by SirenaRose

I'm working on setting up an affiliate program for my site, and was wondering if anyone could give me some good tips -- in laymens terms! Remember, I've just gotten into the "business" in November. I want to expand my site, and my membership.

I've been told to set up a "leak free tour" - but what exactly does that entail? What all should I give to my affiliates? Galleries? How many pictures in each gallery?

Also, I've signed up for several other affiliate programs -- but how do I maximize the potential on those? Most of them have free galleries for me to use, so I guess I just need to figure out where to put them & how to maximize the interest there, without taking people away from my site, completely, right?

Hi Sirena

I have looked at your site www.sirenarose.com a couple of times. I am not the most expert person to answer all your questions but I will try to go through what I see from the affiliate point of view. I am sure that anything wrong I state will promptly be corrected by those more knowledgeable than I )

I don't like the links you feature throughout. They are all leaks as far as I am concerned. If I send traffic to a pay site, I want that paysite to try to convert the traffic and put money in my pocket. If the surfer gets to your site, whether I send them to the warning page or past the warning page, they have opportunity to click out without going into your site. This is fine if when they click out you are sending them to another sales opportunity and providing me credit for the sale, but it is not fine if it is going to a free site or one of your sponsor sites. So, I would get rid of pretty much all the outbound links, all the "as seen on", etc... Unless you are going to open those sites into a smaller new window and keep your site on the bottom. Some of them can be ok that way (remember, this is all imho, others may not agree)

Your links menu to the guest areas for home, gallery, blog, webcam and store work pretty good as a tour, I would get rid oof the links to the tour (that doesn't yet exist) on your main menu. I would prefer to see your "Links" that are on your main menu removed from the guest area.

I haven't seen the inside of your members area and really don't care about it ) If, once they have bought a membership, you want to ship them off somewhere else, I have absolutely no problem with that.

You can use your sponsor links in a couple of different ways. The primary one I see is building galleries and free sites around your content and putting your own banner and promo in the top ad spot and putting your sponsors ad down below or in an exit console. As far as using the FHGs and stuff, I don't know how you would work that into the context of your site as a paysite. However, you could always build a little tgp site in a subdomain or in another domain and skim some of the traffic off to feed your paysite and pass the rest into fhg's and send them off to sponsors. Remotethumbs works really well for that sort of stuff. In addition, you could put the free sites and galleries you built into the mix too.

I was going to add in what I would want from you as an affiliate too, but my wife has just told me that my life is in jeopardy if I don't get up there for dinner )

Hope this helps.