This posting is more aimed at the content producers who utilize affiliate marketers, and while I believe that most readers of my blog are either affiliate marketers hoping to improve their personal systems or newly aspiring affiliate marketers hoping to make a little extra cash online part-time, I think this should still be of interest to you because eventually most affiliate marketers will try their hand at content producing. It’s a natural evolution once you learn how to market other’s products and begin to understand that the bigger money is in content production and having lots of affiliates do the marketing for you.
A good content producer (often called publishers by the various affiliate networks) does more than just create (hopefully good) content, but also has the marketing chops to create great sales copy that will convert and the awareness to provide their affiliates with useful materials, such as media (graphics/videos/audio) files, example articles/reviews/eMail list mailing copy with good form and use of trigger phrases, quality keywords to target in either PPC campaigns or for SEO and so on.
A smart content producer realizes that the easier they make it for affiliates to promote and pre-sell their product the more qualified traffic those affiliates will send to their sales page and the more conversions they’ll ultimately generate.
So, how does a publisher completely blow it?
First, by not making the type of materials I’ve mentioned above readily available to affiliates. It may seem to some that creating the promotional materials should fall on the affiliates’ shoulders, but the bottom line is nobody should know the product or target audience as well as the content producer does, so it only stands to reason that the publisher should be able to provide higher quality promotional materials for a specific product than most affiliates will be able to create.
I promote a lot of products across a lot of markets, I’m by no means an expert on all of these products or markets. Sure I have an understanding of them, as well as an understanding of marketing techniques that work, but I don’t have that special insight into the product or minds of the target customers that the content producer should have, so most of the time I won’t even touch an affiliate product unless the publisher provides some materials for marketers.
Regardless of how good the potential profits may seem, simply because I can put 2 or maybe even 3 marketing campaigns together for products where the publishers provided material as a launching point in the same time it would take me to put a single campaign together for a product where I’m starting from scratch because of the additional research time, along with added trial and error testing I’ll have to do with it.
The second way–and this just happened to me over the weekend and is what prompted this posting–that a publisher can instantly blow it with affiliates is by not paying attention to details on their sales pages.
I’m not talking about spelling or grammar, those should be a given and not need mentioned here, but on Saturday I found a new product on the market with an affiliate program that really interested me. It’s in a niche that I do know a lot about, so even though this publisher breaks the first rule by not offering any promotional materials or help for affiliates I was still interested since I know the niche so well.
However, what I don’t know is the product. I have a vague idea about it because I know the niche, but I don’t know any specifics so I used the “Contact” eMail address from the main sales page to ask the publisher a few specific questions on the product so that I could create the best marketing copy possible.
I wasn’t asking for a review copy (often publishers offer these on their own if you ask specific questions as an affiliate, but I never request them), and I wasn’t asking the publisher to reveal the “real meat” of their product to me for free either. I just wanted to know a few specific things about the approach the product takes in helping people from this niche.
And… the eMail I sent off bounced back as undeliverable. That’s right, the content producer put an eMail address on their sales page that isn’t valid. It wasn’t a typo, the domain was properly spelled and the account was the basic “info” for an address of info[AT]domain.com — but apparently there’s no actual eMail account setup for that address.
So now it’s not only a publisher who doesn’t offer supporting materials to affiliates, but also one who misses incorrect /inaccurate key details.
There’s no way I can trust the product(s) of this publisher now, even if it’s just an honest mistake the damage is done and my impression of this content producer is that they likely create shoddy products.
That impression may be wrong, but I’m a busy person with no time for researching publishers to see if my gut feelings on them are wrong or not, so they’ve lost any chance of me promoting their product(s) now or in the future in an instant.
And I’m not the busiest or hardest working affiliate marketer out there. The marketers who are making the really big bucks have less spare time than I do for wasting with publishers. I imagine most of them gave up on the product from the lack of supporting materials alone, but I’m sure none of them would go the extra mile to dig past a bad eMail address either.
This content producer has surely blown it. As a publisher or an affiliate marketer there’s plenty to learn from this posting, I hope it helps you do better.
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