Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

A big thanks to Affiliate Future for their Performance Booster event at Park Hall in Chorley on Friday afternoon. We ended up driving up and getting stuck in traffic (partly due to a pretty bad downpour of rain on the M6) and didn’t get there till 4pm – this meant that I missed the rides at the Theme Park (!) but managed to have a quick do on the dodgems and was not purposely aiming at Lee McCoy & Mary…. honestly.

The evening event did not disappoint – the product showcases in the dining hall gave a fantastic insight into some of the merchants on Affiliate Future and certainly gave some fuel to thought for new promotions on some of my sites. The fashion show by TightsPlease was certainly interesting and a few of the blokes seemed to be enjoying it and taking a few photos! The sit down three course meal made a nice change and after aiming to win both the Poker and Wii Tennis tournament I did manage to come away with a few prizes to take home (So thanks to Firebox for the Helicopters, The Hut for the DVD & Football Manager game and of course to Virginia Hayward for the £140 Christmas Hamper.

It was great to see some many friends from the industry and to meet some more fantastic people and truly was a great event for both business and personal pleasure.

Another benefit that I came away with was a better understanding of affiliate marketing for my wife who is now sitting down to concentrate on her freebie site again and hoping that as a fun time mum she’s able to make a bit of extra income to spend on shoes and clothes!

A final thanks to the organisers, however after producing such a great event there are many high expectations for the next one!

Working for an agency that offers affiliate management I tend to be having quite a few programs come in. Rather than have a special deal with any particular network we look at each campaign on a case-by-case basis and try and decide where we feel our client will get the best exposure.

One of the things that really grates me in this industry is how different the setup fees and monthly fees can be, lets look at an example..

I have a program which has a budget set aside for commission of around £10k per month – it’s a recruitment company who are doing some really cool things online once their site is re-development and re-branded next month.   As part of this campaign we are looking to build a widget that will integrate with the network tracking.  The client, as well as spending hundreds of thousands of pounds online in their initial three month re-launch is also spending just as much (or even more) offline.

I find a network where we can integrate our widget fairly easily, start talking to the business development guy about costs and am informed that their setup fee is a rather hefty £5,000 – this is probably the second largest in the industry.

Interestingly this same network refused to take on a program I was working with just over a year ago which turned out to be a huge success, they later said that they realised they were wrong to reject it at the time but their fee structure means they are likely to make the same mistake again

Have networks really forgotten what they are there for?  Personally (perhaps incorrectly?) I have always seen a network as a facilitator, something that is there to offer a robust / trusted tracking solution and handle the payment to a large affiliate base.  So why are these fee’s so high?

On another scale, we’ve launched a number of campaigns on another network recently that have all gone really well where the setup fee is just £500 – a much more realistic amount considering they are getting paid rather well with their override.

Obviously there are different levels of service offered by networks but it always tends to stager me that the costing structure can be so different.