What Is The Downside of Accepting Affiliates?
 

I know the general idea of offering an affiliate program is to find partners to increase traffic and sales, but what is the downside, other than having to produce promo content and share profit?

There are often posts warning of bad or scam affiliates to watch out for. What can bad affiliates do that cause you trouble, other than waste your time asking for lots of special content without converting sales for your program?

I know this is all newbie stuff, but I'm on the verge of offering a CCBill program, so I'm just curious.

Thanks in advance!

you give affs at least 50% of the sale and you're still left holding the bill for bw, content, creatives.

Affiliates can increase your membership ten fold, you would have to do most of the work shooting content and producing galleries anyway. And as CCbill or Epoch pay them weekly they take care of a lot of the work. There are a few scam artists but in the main we like to work with affiliates, they give us lots of new ideas that help our business and promotions.:thumbsup

saturation...

:2 cents:

Time consumption.

Affiliate fraud. Google it for lots of examples.

fraud and competitor espionage

Ah screw the fraud problems. Mostly easy to spot and they do not try to hit ccbill revshare type programs that often.

The bigger downsides are that they require shitloads of time and resources. Then you will find out 8 out of 10 of them will be entirely useless and use up 80%+ of all your time and resources. They also will be the ones who will be demanding new tools and everything else all of the time, not to mention they will be the first to flame you on the boards when they sent 300 hits over the course of a month and did not get a sign up.

They also seem to know when you are sleeping, away, or anything else that does not involve sitting at your computer waiting for their ICQ message to light up your screen. If you do not answer within a few minutes, well you suck and so does your crappy ass unprofessional program.

Great post

overall they fucking suck

want to know what I do with my program? I keep track of my highest earning affiliates and see exactly what he does and how he does it, then I emulate it and make sure I am making higher than him....if I can't personally emulate what he does I pay someone to figure it out for me and do it

any program that has an affiliate bringing in more than their in house traffic is, is doing something seriously wrong

It´s so true :Oh crap

Right off the top... don't just accept any affiliates... don't give them access to promo content or anything until you hand review their sites. This is where 99% of programs fuck themselves where affiliates are concerned. You will spend less time reviewing applications than supporting affiliates with no traffic.

Secondly, why would you accept affiliates from a country that can't buy memberships? This one always baffles me. It's like an invitation to cheat.

Is there a middle-ground? In other words, is it okay to set up a basic affiliate program, that doesn't cost too much of your time or resources, but still allows your site to be listed on many of the largest promotional sites (ie Review Sites, Freeones, etc.). These type of sites do not grant you any exposure without a program, so it seems quite important.

On the flipside, I can see how the whole program can get bad-mouthed fast, by unsatisfied affiliates, and maybe even your competition. My program will not have many galleries to start with, but like most websites, the promo content will build over time as well.

I've also heard about fake affiliates who never really promote your sites - they just want free content and access. For this reason I am planning to offer whatever promo tools and links publicly, rather than offer an affiliate sign-up. This way if you were not serious anyway, you don't have to log-in to access the affiliate content ayway.

Any thoughts, management offers, or additional advice?

Thanks again, in advance!

i joined most affiliate programs to jackoff before i started promoting the shit

aff's are almost evil :)

If you want to go the middle ground route, set it up as a closed program. Invite in who you want to, using the non-saturation factor as a selling point to get them to promote you. Set all your stuff to manual approve, do not advertise the program signup link, and don't approve anyone that you haven't invited.

Thank you Selena - very thoughtful advice!

time consumption! Hahah

Never a clue.

Yea, just set up the aff proggie and actually speak to people before you invite them to signup and start promoting you. Some kind of promotional material is good to have though but not a must.

On the other hand if you really want exposure though you should go the full route and get FHG'S, RSS feed's and so on and try to get as many affiliates as possible. You can always hire someone to take care of the affiliate marketing and tools when you get bigger.

Both way's have It's pros and cons and you can be successful with either.

Thank you all for your comments, suggestions, and opinions!

A number of good points in this thread.. people really should concentrate on building a traffic network in a niche they actually enjoy (and hopefully a semi-unsaturated one) that way in the future should they decide to actually try their luck with paysites can send their own traffic at them for a while to get the most profit with their own unsaturated content.. what is so difficult about this? I know of a few people doing this and it's working out.