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 5 Myths of Affiliate Marketing - for Merchants
Can you believe everything you hear about affiliate marketing? Here are 5 common myths that we hear about affiliate or performance marketing from a merchant or retailer viewpoint.
- It is risk free advertising because I only pay when sales are made. This would be true if everyone behaved ethically. In practice, you pay when sales are tracked, which can be from affiliates who generate new sales for you, or line-of-fire affiliates who claim commission for sales from customers who were already headed your way. Your statistics don't differentiate between the two but can help you identify them if you know what to look for.
- If I join another network, I'll get another set of affiliates, so get twice as many sales. Affiliates join multiple networks so each open network has basically the same set of affiliates. The exceptions are new networks that haven't been taken up by established affiliates, networks who are shunned by affiliates for some reason or other, and closed networks which only accept certain affiliates. So you'll get the same amount of sales and issues with the added problem of double tracking.
- Networks will recruit and police affiliates for me. Networks will send out newsletters and occasionally contact major affiliates direct to ask them to promote your site - usually at a price. However, affiliates are under no obligation to do so, and will pick and choose the programs that suit them. You have more chance approaching affiliates direct and asking if they are willing to work with you. Networks rarely police affiliates - you have to assess and police affiliates yourself.
- I can let my affiliate program run on auto-pilot. If you set and forget, you might suddenly find that you've paid a lot for nothing, that good affiliates have changed to promoting a competitor, or that your competitors have gained information from affiliates that you have not.
- The more affiliates the better.Only a small percentage of affiliates produce sales, and an even smaller percentage produce significant sales. Take away the line-of-fire affiliates and you have even fewer productive affiliates. Claims that lots of affiliates linking to you will help your ranking are unproven.
Affiliate and performance marketing are good ideas, but they need the same scrutiny and management as any other form of marketing.
Posted by Gayle at September 5, 2008 2:39 PM
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