Affliates Reminiscent of Used Car Salesmen
Used car salesmen are basically viewed as the scum of the earth, so a comparison to them wouldn’t be very welcoming. It is amazing to look through affiliates websites and that is the only comparison I can come up with. Affiliates who offer obvious, shameful affiliate links, banners and text. It reflects poorly on the merchant, and while the affiliate may not care, it looks bad for the affiliate program. Affiliates should take time, effort and care when they represent someone’s company.
While there may not be any uniform or standard model of behavior for affiliates and etiquette, but that doesn’t mean affiliates should disrespect a company that is offering them the chance to earn money. Forms of disrespect can span from disregarding an affiliate manager’s requests to poor representation of the company image. Affiliates, treat the Internet and the companies you promote like you would if you were in a real store and you aren’t anonymous.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Hi Brian.
I am sure I have been guilty of what you have written in this post…. But no, I do not want to be treated as a used car sales man. I am relatively new to affiliate marketing and I am sure one of the purposes you write this blog is to attract new affiliates. Your post definitely points out the problem. Can you offer an example of what kind of websites you would like to see promoting your company’s products? I am sure some of your affiliates would not mind to gain a link or two from your blog.
Here is a very simple site, but one of our strongest affiliates:
http://www.websquare.com/sites/out.php?id=471
His site is easy to navigate and read, and despite what many other affiliates may say, his inclusion of our customer service # and email helps build consumer confidence. Also, our customer service team does not take phone orders unless ordering a specific product not found on the Internet, so affiliates do not lose sales this way. Hope this is useful Vlad!
Thanks Brian. I hope that person makes some good commissions and sends you real targeted traffic. The only problem to that approach that I see is that his website is so big, your brand does not really stand out. I have been trying to build websites like that but I found to be more successful if I dedicate entire website to a particular merchant or even to a particular product. It maybe just me but I prefer that way. Thanks for sharing.