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My dilemma of being a mainstream affiliate
I started on the web as a pay site and adult toy affiliate in late 1999. As time has passed I now do almost zero on pay sites and have maintained some adult toy sales (which seem to take the least amount of work).
In 2005 I did a huge push into mainstream, by being an affiliate and doing SEO and marketing for others.
I have been busy with the SEO and as my traffic grew in some mainstream niches, my income from has kept dropping from affiliate programs that were perfect matches for my niches and as this was happening I made more and more revenue from a smaller and smaller pool of customers.
I knew this could be an issue in the future so I looked for an alternate affiliate program to add into my revenue stream mix.
I found the best program I could ever imagine as it was geared to exactly what a wanted.
Commissions from my white label store was represented as:
?5% on allowable net pricing for all items purchased as a direct lead from your website?
?Average Commission is $15 per sale?
I signed up gleefully and had to wait 6 weeks for approval and another 3 weeks for the white label to be built. Communication during the process was terrible.
When the store was built I deployed some links throughout my sites in that niche. A few days later into logged into the site and I didn?t see any sales, nor are there any places to see traffic stats at all. Spent 3 weeks trying to contact my rep to be told ?why would you want that? We don?t do that. no one has ever asked for that".
I also asked at that first contact in February to get permission to use artwork to promote the services and it took almost a dozen tries to finally get permission to use photos from my white label last Friday.
I supplied statcounter java code and asked if it, Google Analytics or any traffic counter could be installed on my white label was told no.
Looking at the first $3,000 in sales I am averaging about 2% per sale and never broke $5 in commissions on a single sale. So much for the $15 average.
There are phone numbers on every page of the white label and if you call them if you try to say what site you are on they don't what to knwo and credit the sale to the sponsor not the white label.
Even though the program is a perfect match in products and services, I think all the signs show me to run from this program, if not make a competing program on my own. To make my own program will take skill sets I would have to outsource and to do it right could cost me $70k or more (without promotion) and take a year to get off the ground.
Meeting with the sales manager and my rep tomorrow morning in person as I am desperate to make this work and promote the hell out of this (which I have not done yet).
What are your thoughts?
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