This a BIG rant against all sponsors that still have the "You build it and they will come" mindset. It's a big wall of text, but if you run an affiliate program you better read it because I'm not the only person that feels the same.
I am the kind of affiliate that tends to offer his sponsors to host their tours on my own servers because I can funnel more than 250k uniques/day to a tour page.
If one of your affiliate/sales managers is called Lisa, then FUCKING GIVE HER AN EMAIL ACCOUNT UNDER YOUR DOMAIN AND DONT MAKE HER USE A GMAIL ACCOUNT! (this is completely unrelated to the rest, it's just a sponsor I'm testing and I hate writing mails to anything that is not their domain for biz discussions)
Will discuss the following:
1 ) Introduce yourself and your products properly
2 ) Affiliate managers
3 ) Stupid terms and conditions
4 ) White label sites
5 ) Under radar shaving and facts denial
Introduce yourself and your products properly
Sending a mail with "Hey dude contact me" or saying just "Hi" on ICQ usually gets ignored and sometimes goes to the blacklist if this behavior continues (if you do it again).
Please, take the time to introduce yourself properly. A proper introductions would be something like:
Hello, my name is XXX and I work for company YYY that runs ZZZ sites. I would like to discuss about how could we do some business together for mutual profit
As for introducing your product, be fast, easy to understand and make sure it takes less than 30 seconds to explain what is your product about. Sending me 90 pages pdf brochure or sending me to an URL that has more than 15 lines of text means I will not even bother to look at that crap.
"Look at our site
www.example.com to see what we have to offer" means that I will probably not even lose my time looking at what you have. You are contacting me to do business, so do your work and sell your business opportunity to me. Something along the lines:
Our product XXX is better than the competition (other sponsors) because YYY. I think we could make more money together because our product has ZZZ feature that others don't have.
Whatever you or your product takes more than 5 lines to be introduced = failure. If it takes me more than 20 seconds to understand exactly how I could make more money with your program than with my current sponsor you have lost the biz opportunity.
Affiliate Managers madness
When you hire an affiliate manager or some similar position remember that this person represents your company and whatever he says on boards or ICQ gives the same good or bad business image as if the company leader said it himself.
When your affiliate manager jumps into dramma threads like any other board whore there is a very big chance that your program will lose some current and/or future business just because of that. In fact, I assume any person with BIG banner of your program into their sig to be a representative of your program, so take care with whose sigs do you buy.
Make sure your affiliate manager can do what he promises. If an affiliate manager promises something and then he is unable to do it, then you have lost my business forever.
I have dumped completely $15k per pay period (about $1k per day) sponsors because their affiliate manager posted some idiotic comment that I didn't like or just said something I didn't like.
Having someone just spam me on ICQ "We have lots of FHGs and here is the affiliate link <enter NATS code here>" means that I wont even bother to look at your program unless I have requested to be spammed with FHGs.
If I am already promoting your program then make sure that the sales/affiliate manager will contact me ONLY if I'm burning your servers with traffic and you want me to stop it. If I need <whatever it is>, I will contact my affiliate manager only once asking about it. If I get no reply then your program is scheduled to be changed at the first opportunity (this means about two days as much).
Stupid terms and conditions
Unlike other people, I read program terms and conditions... well, my inhouse lawyer does that for me when it comes time to push serious promotion.
When you make your program terms and conditions at least make sure you read them after copy/pasting them. My english is not perfect, but reading terms and conditions with blatant grammar and spell errors makes me stop reading and ditching the entire program.
Also make sure you don't copy/paste other program terms and conditions, and if you do it, at least replace their program and company name with yours.
In the "We don't accept affiliates from XYZ countries" part make sure you don't include all EU countries. If you put my country (Spain), then there is absolutely no way I will signup and promote your program.
In the trademark part make sure there is nothing that may offend my intelligence as affiliate. Something like "If your domain name looks like our paysite domain name you must handle it to us and pay us for the damages you have caused to our trademark" means only 3 logic actions on my side:
1 ) I will immediately build a paysite that is the same niche as yours. If you use non exclusive or semi exclusive content I will buy the same content as yours.
2 ) I will try to takeover your keywords on any SE, and trust me, I can do it.
3 ) Wait for you to sue me and then make YOU pay me damages because ALL my domains are trademark registered in Spain before I put whatever money making site on them. In fact I could sue you for the same thing you will try to sue me.
If I have some domain that looks like yours the obvious choice is to redirect it to your site and make money with it, but if I see some stupidity like this one in your terms you are doomed.
I have had several program owners and affiliate managers contact me and say "We can change the rules for your particular case". That's not ok unless you send me a notary signed hardcopy of the terms with the needed changes. And usually I just don't even bother with all that bureucratic hassle.
White label sites
If I ask you for a white label site, make sure it's completely turnkey and go under MY domain. subdomain.yourdomain.com IS NOT a white label at all.
I want to have a config file with 5 or 6 lines where I have to put my white label site name, white label site domain and as much a description or hook text/slogan. After uploading this file, some simple css and my logo to the server or just configuring it somewhere, and it should be ready for production state after a total of 10 minutes invested on my side.
Handling me a FTP login where I see about 150 smarty templates is ok, but if I have to edit them all before going production I will just drop your white label site offering. In fact, I don't want to edit a single smarty file before going production.
Under radar shaving and facts denial
If I send you big traffic amounts (50k uniques or more par day) don't get tempted to put the shaving filter on. I will notice it. In order to send you such quantity of traffic, my traffic management system is way better than yours and I can determine relatively easy if you are not counting 2% or even less of my traffic.
As for shaving sales... I always open at least two accounts per sonsor with different companies and have only one of them send the big traffic hunk while the others send the same traffic but much less, just as control mechanism. If the test accounts sales don't drop but the main account sales drop overnight, then all the traffic will drop overnight too.
It takes me 5 minutes to redirect all the traffic that goes to you to another place, even before removing your banners from my ads server.
If you see that the traffic has dissapeared don't contact me asking what has happened, you already should know why I stopped promoting you.
Some days ago I got a sponsor contacting me with "Why did you stop sending traffic to us?" and I replied "Why did you stop counting my sales properly?"... Their reply was "Sorry, that should have not happened" --> WTF???
Most sponsors will deny shaving, but the truth is that when they see big traffic accounts or big sales numbers into a single account they tend to shave a small percentage thinking it will slip unnoticed under the radar.
I don't fucking care if you shave all your other affiliates, but if you try to shave me, you are fighting an already lost battle... so better don't even try.
Rant over