Question: Brand Recognition
 

What are your personal thoughts on having your program be part of your site, versus having a seperate site for the program.

Let's say we have our affiliate program called AffProg.com

It was 99% for one of our sites, but did have 2 other non-related sites it was also the program for.

Now we are trying to decide, if it would simply be better to integrate it as affiliates.oursite.com instead of keeping it seperate. Instead of trying to build recognition for 2 names, we build it for one.

What do you think? Combine them, or leave it seperate? We have no plans to add new products/sites to the system, except other subdomain sites of our main one (ie. men.oursite.com, women.oursite.com, etc...)

Thanks =)

its all in your preference, personally i would keep them together

I would keep them together, unless you want to build a separate program for all your sites, and make webmasters sign up for all of them. The plus on having a separete program is that webmaster that would not have seen your other sites will see them this way and start promoting it if it's good, that way you can have 4 big sites instead of 1 big site and 3 small ones. Does that make sence?

Edit: for brand recognision you can put the names from your sites on the front page or something like that. I'm a junior at this, just thinking with ya ;)

Same!:2 cents: depending!

I would keep them seperate

Lets say your main site is called oralsex.com. The affiliate program is named SexCash.com .

Now lets say sometime down the line, I wanted to add a couple more sites. One called WhipMe. Another called BallonFun, and another called EroticWriting . Now these 3 sites are obviously different from Oralsex.com

Introduce them as part of the SexCash Network. This will give you the freedom of adding whatever sites to the network you want in whatever niches.

The idea is to get your affiliates promoting SexCash and the sites within the network. You want to brand SexCash.com . Not having people who are trying to promote WhipMe logging into affiliates.oralsex.com or promoting OralSex.com The 2 domains just don't really go together.


Now the only other way would be if your main site name was something like ViewPorn. Then you could have a subdomain like affiliates.viewporn.com . Because the main name is generic enough that you aren't limiting yourself to a specific niche. This way, you can get away with branding ViewPorn while still having an affiliate program attached.

Thanks for the comments everyone =)

What we've just decided is to have affiliates.site.com load the site, but also leave it seperate as program.com (simple vhost functionality)

We promote it to people as Our Site's affiliate program, and all URLs shall be affiliates.oursite.com, but it will in a way be kept seperate still for future use and for current people who might know it.