My dilemma of being a mainstream affiliate
 

I started on the web as a pay site and adult toy affiliate in late 1999. As time has passed I now do almost zero on pay sites and have maintained some adult toy sales (which seem to take the least amount of work).

In 2005 I did a huge push into mainstream, by being an affiliate and doing SEO and marketing for others.

I have been busy with the SEO and as my traffic grew in some mainstream niches, my income from has kept dropping from affiliate programs that were perfect matches for my niches and as this was happening I made more and more revenue from a smaller and smaller pool of customers.

I knew this could be an issue in the future so I looked for an alternate affiliate program to add into my revenue stream mix.

I found the best program I could ever imagine as it was geared to exactly what a wanted.
Commissions from my white label store was represented as:

?5% on allowable net pricing for all items purchased as a direct lead from your website?
?Average Commission is $15 per sale?

I signed up gleefully and had to wait 6 weeks for approval and another 3 weeks for the white label to be built. Communication during the process was terrible.

When the store was built I deployed some links throughout my sites in that niche. A few days later into logged into the site and I didn?t see any sales, nor are there any places to see traffic stats at all. Spent 3 weeks trying to contact my rep to be told ?why would you want that? We don?t do that. no one has ever asked for that".

I also asked at that first contact in February to get permission to use artwork to promote the services and it took almost a dozen tries to finally get permission to use photos from my white label last Friday.

I supplied statcounter java code and asked if it, Google Analytics or any traffic counter could be installed on my white label was told no.

Looking at the first $3,000 in sales I am averaging about 2% per sale and never broke $5 in commissions on a single sale. So much for the $15 average.

There are phone numbers on every page of the white label and if you call them if you try to say what site you are on they don't what to knwo and credit the sale to the sponsor not the white label.

Even though the program is a perfect match in products and services, I think all the signs show me to run from this program, if not make a competing program on my own. To make my own program will take skill sets I would have to outsource and to do it right could cost me $70k or more (without promotion) and take a year to get off the ground.

Meeting with the sales manager and my rep tomorrow morning in person as I am desperate to make this work and promote the hell out of this (which I have not done yet).

What are your thoughts?

I was working with mainstream programs and most of them have no clue about managing affiliate program.

There was one professional program with everything I needed but when I met them live I found that they are adult webmasters lol

Anyway if you have faith and you like to fight go for it, it is a good idea to have something that you can show your mom :)

i'd say that you won't get any usable advice without telling whatcha selling

brassballz-at-techie.com i'll be catching the holiday season again this year :thumbsup:thumbsup let's brainstorm

I'm looking for guys who can supply particular mainstream products to me for Japanese market. Think mid to high end 20-30 somethings. PM me.

The product or the service should not make a difference.

The question is I guess is should I spend more effort with the people I am working with or try to do it on my own, or just walk away and work where i have much more tangible benefits?

...another option is to team up with a very knowledge person familiar with all sorts of APIs and developing aps.

I know the market extremely well and am a social media powerhouse in my arena for example a twitter account where I follow 32 people (many of which are actually me also) and I have more than 18k followers. 98,909 twitter in the niche.

I'm glad you brought that up. As an affiliate marketer, a good one, the product really should not matter too much. These guys sound like ignorant pains in the asses. Do you really foresee it getting any better?

Break your ties. Move into a different market and find a company that you can build a real relationship with.

I'd agree with this - but also ask you how much time/effort is it taking you to make that $3k (based on the 2%....$5 per sale you mentioned). If it's very little time and effort involved, why not just let it ride (for now) while exploring other program options.

Either way, I can understand and sympathize with your frustrations - being promised one thing and only receiving 1/3rd of it for your efforts.

The kicker is I spent 7 years being so imbedded in the market building up my presence and selling advertising on my sites is not what it was and there is no competition that does what they do. I am in so deep at this point I am afraid to walk away, but logic tells me unless I can become their competition at great time and risk, the market is just not lucrative enough anymore.

My sit down tomorrow with them will tell me lots.

I don't know what is your definition for mainstream, but if it is some penis pills crap, etc. similar hoax, don't expect too much. Shady business makes shady company.

Thank good I make other money off the same sites. What kills me is the potential is so huge.

By my estimation at 5% I was expecting it to bring on a min of $50K - $60k a year. Would have been a great additional stream. Lots of work, but worth it. It would also be something I could scale out onto other networks of sites I have as well.

No this is VERY family friendly mainstream. I would say 85% of my customers are very Christian and many are hard core southern Baptists.

(You may now understand why I am not posting specifics here)