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Originally Posted by Barefootsies
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Thoughts?
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I think it is a knee jerk reaction by companies who were 1. miss managing their reps to start with and 2. do not know what else to do to get traffic.
Sales across the board have been down, not just from affiliates. In house traffic, organic traffic, type in traffic, sales from all sorts of traffic is down for several reasons, the biggest being the credit card crunch.
The old affiliate reps were paid to help and get new affiliates to send traffic. It is an easy job to do when the affiliates come to you and you just help them with a few questions or get them some promo materials. Now that sales are a whole lot harder to come by, it is a lot harder for affiliate reps to produce, to go out and get new affiliates, who in turn send in new traffic and sales.
Program owners had the money in the past to blow on reps who probably weren't producing new affiliates on their own, just helping the affiliates who came to them. Now the rep who doesn't generate new affiliates / sales is a cost that gets chopped when budgets get cut. Program owners should have developed reps and trained them to get new affiliates / sales early on, or hired go getters, not just pay them to ask "can I help you with anything" once the people already signed up on their own.
They should hire better reps, not do away with the position. If they go to "brokers" now for in house traffic, that is just a knee jerk reaction that is likely not to do well for them either. I wouldn't abandon affiliates, just entice them more and find the ones that are still producing and get them to give you a try.
Going B2B only is just a short term fix. if even a fix at all. If no one is generating new sales and just recycling what they have with other businesses that isn't going to last long at all.
While it is good to develop your own traffic, that is only going to get you so far unless you have an unlimited budget and you can buy/develop huge volume sites to use as your own traffic source. <--- which is the route I would go before throwing "XXXXX" at a traffic broker and hoping he can make you a profit. You need affiliates. You just need someone better to go out and actually get them, instead of just servicing accounts, and you need to become more competitive on what you can offer to get new affiliates. If you are offering the same deal as everyone else then that is going to make the reps job that much harder to bring you new affiliates / sales.