Practical eCommerce

mbettis@pec

As noted in Kerry's "welcome" note below, we have a new columnist who will be tackling various issues regarding affiliate marketing. If you have questions — basic to not — about affiliate marketing, Mr. Jones would like to hear about them. He'll use those suggestions for future columns.

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Fri Feb 09, 2007 7:54 am **Subject:**

How does one approach potential/desired affiliates who do not already have an affiliate program in place?

Any suggestions as to how to formulate a proposal so as to convince a business that it could/would be advantageous for them to allow you to become an affiiate of their product(s)?

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Tue Feb 20, 2007 5:05 pm **Subject:**

Hey Kerry/Brian .... Perhaps this topic would be a good article for the next issue of Practical Ecommerce.

I'm sure there are netrepeneurs out there who would be willing to share their experiences and advice with regard to "cold call" approachment of potential sales/affiliate partners.

PamelaHazelton · **Date:** Wed Feb 21, 2007 5:27 pm **Subject:**

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:26 am **Subject:**

For those of you with an affiliate marketing program in place for your business, how did you come up with your commission/payment structure?

Was there another site's model you used as the basis for your program?

Tiger Motion · **Date:** Thu May 31, 2007 9:17 pm **Subject:**

We have an affiliate program running on both www.neoscooters.com and on www.legendbootshop.com The scooter site by far is the more active program since my average sale is $350 and we pay out a 5% commission to our affiliates.

Signing on is purely a passive process. The affiliate wannabe goes to http://www.neoscooters.com/affiliate.asp and completes the form, gets their sample code with no involvement from us at all.

I see the orders come in, and pay out every three months or generally every $100 in owed commissions. Every three months I write checks that total typically up to $800 max. Higher at Christmas, and during scooter season.

There's not much to tracking since my www.ecommercetemplates.com platform calculates the total sales for each affiliate and I then multiply by .05%. If I get return or chargeback I copy the affiliate on the correspondence.

Our Affiliate sign up page has a page rank of 4 and ranks #2 on google for scooter affiliate so we get a number of folks who sign on. But of the 75 affiliates on record, theres roughly 5 that do all the heavy lifting.

I only make a 15% margin on the product line so I will not go any higher than 5%. One competitor pays 7.5% AND pays a third party affiliate host, so he has to move some volume. With my rankings I don't think I need the exposure that third party affiliate host would bring me, and do not want to cut my margins any further.

Affiliates are great. Not only do they bring you traffic, but they also do the pre-sell for you. The good ones will put together a better site than mine (check out www.scooterwiki.com for such an example) Here is an actual selling page: http://www.scooterwiki.com/directory/gas_scooters/evo_gas_scooters/evo_2/ that feeds right to my less impressive page.

Regards,

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