Interesting question, and also highly relevant.
I'm currently in touch with, or have been in touch with appx. 120-130 affiliate programs. Here's some of my experiences on how some of them make a huge difference in the great pond and get my attention.
Basically, making a difference to me is - by making my daily/weekly routines quick, easy and less time consuming.
What I like about an affiliate program:
1) If they immidiately follow up on new reseller signup with a personal welcome note. A personal approach saying hey mate, we value you and we're always there for ya. And by cutting all the usual arrogant "we're the best" sales crap that so many spew out.
2) Keep your reseller information SHORT, keep your newsletters SHORT, relevant and specific - webmasters don't have time to read maybe 100 newsletters each week. Make that difference and get your message out.
3) Send out a weekly list of new hosted galleries - the links should contain ready-to use reseller codes and they should be ready to just cut and paste - voila! It works, I'll bet ya.
4) Make sure that your hosted content/galleries comply with the commonly used gallery scripts and trade scripts. Some of the big guys in the industry made standards that do not work with those, it makes submitting and reselling their content a LOT more time consuming and, in some cases, impossible for some webmasters. Be sure that you don't cripple your possibilities from the start. I have signed up with maybe 30 affiliate programs just to find that their content management is either hopelessly put together, or maybe their URL's or gallery structure simply don't cmply with major TGP's.
Make some research and testing before you launch anything.
5) Ask some professional gallery submitters what they need. Listen to them and make their wishes, learn from their habits, they know the industry.
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What's on the bottom line of these few suggestions to make life easier for your resellers?
It takes time and personal relations to make a success, and it takes good programming to make a successful affiliate site.
It's not really breaking news, is it?
Even if you have the hottest, exellent original content, time is still money. If you make it hard/difficult to resell your content, you will obviously loose money. So many reseller sites really suck in functionality, and just a few are working like an angel. Those are often the simplest sites.... Make life easy for you and your resellers.
My humble suggestion: Keep it personal. Keep it simple, simple, simple. And keep it short - your reseller information.
Test your site's efficiency as seen from your resellers point of view. You will probably get amazed over a lot of advanced features invented by your programmers are never used, and the most simple features are still needed. Basically, fewer clicks used means more success.
The worst example I can remember is a gallery generating routine that took amazing 25 clicks just to generate one useful hosted gallery. Then you had to start all over on the next gallery... Hopeless waste of time, I dropped the program immidiately and probably so would you too.
Just my 2
