“Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission” - Fred Allen
I’ve been spending a lot of time poring over advertising figures recently, something I abhor - a process of realizing that you’re being fucked, either deliberately or by incompetence, that there will be no orgasm and if there is - it’s merely evidence of fiduciary rape.
Affiliate programs aren’t bad, but they are risky. Websites using them place responsibility for their marketing with affiliates (that’s you and me) in return for a promise of shared wealth when sales are made. They have nothing to lose as they’ll only every pay you a portion of what they’ll make from each customer. You have everything to lose - if for some reason you can’t make sales it’s your pockets that will remain empty, your time and traffic that’s been wasted.
Don’t let the pictures of BMW’s fool you. Affiliate programs make them richer than you. Content is king.
For those wanting to dip there toes into the water (and you can make a lot of money from affiliate advertising if you get it right) here are a few tips for the novice/confused/poor adult website affiliate:
Use more than one program at a time.
Affiliate advertising programs make fraud easy so the wise person has to assume some fraud is taking place. The only measure you have is being able to compare the performance of programs relative to each other so it’s something you have to do. If you put all your eggs in one basket it’s impossible to know if you’re being screwed. However attractive the deal ($150 per sign up May! IT’S MADNESS!) don’t give them everything you have.
Check who’s doing the billing.
When you join a program you’ll be able to see statistics for your traffic and earnings. Often these pages will be part of an off-the-shelf system run by a major billing company. This is a good thing. Big billing companies have nothing to gain from participating in fraud on behalf of a website. If the program’s being administered by the people who stand to profit from it the risks are far higher - elections are decided by those who count the votes.
Check the supplemental materials.
The primary ways to promote websites is via free content (i.e. photosets and videoclips) and advertising banners. Check to see what’s offered by the programs your in and how often material is updated. Maintaining an affiliate program is a lot easier than maintaining a website, if it’s not being done efficiently you can assume the websites being promoted suck at least as hard as the system you’re accessing. Anything that smacks of poor professionalism will cost you money.
Grade their website(s).
You’re going to send people to check out a website that’ll only pay you if people are compelled to become customers. You can get a strong sense of how likely this is by looking at the website in question yourself. Does it look good? Is it easy to navigate? Would you pay for it? If you’re not excited enough to open your wallet - why would other people be? You can only get people to their store, at that point your income depends on their ability to present their product.
Know the system.
All affiliate programs work the same way. In return for sending a company a customer they pay you a kickback. Your slice can be a flat fee, a percentage of the purchase or a percentage of all a customer’s purchases from that point forward. Other programs promise to pay ‘per click’ but this is still a percentage of purchase as they’ll only pay anything is a set percentage of your ‘clicks’ become customers.
You can get screwed in two ways. Firstly they can claim that you don’t generate any sales at all and pay you nothing. This is pretty stupid and unlikely to happen. They assume you’re measuring them against their competitors and if they were to burn you that hard, you’d stop sending people their way and they’d lose out. Far more likely is that they’ll ’skim’ your traffic, paying you for fewer sales than you in fact generate. Fraud of that type’s almost impossible to detect but, if you always run a number of programs simultaneously and constantly ditch your poorest performers, you’ll at least know that the people treating you worst aren’t unduly rewarded. There are honest, profitable, programs out there, they just take time to find. Honesty’s one of the reasons programs run by billing companies (who would be insane to ’skim’) are easier to trust than others.
I hope that’s useful primer material. If there’s interest I might share some data regarding affiliate programs for adult sites that I know work well from experience. If that sounds useful let me know. Otherwise good luck and email me about any great programs you think I might not know about.
