Anyone Start a Mainstream Affiliate Program?
 

And was it different than your experience in adult marketing? I find myself being drawn more and more towards mainstream and I'm curious to see what sort of affiliate programs (if any) you have started on the mainstream front.
WG

Does pharma count? I ran a pharmacy affiliate program in 2004 with pretty bad results :1orglaugh

www.cj.com is the best place for a start.

Sure, I'm more or less interested in seeing the difference between that and adult.
WG

I'm interested more in people who started an affiliate program, not using one.
WG

Well what kind of differences? I feel ours was ahead of the game in terms of linking and promo options, and higher payouts, yet finding new webmasters was next to impossible since we didn't want to deal with mailers.

Finding webmasters I think is one of the toughest things for mainstream, its not like gfy or a convention. And its not like throwing up links on tgp's. I just wanted to get opinions from others who have gone this route to see what the toughest part was...
WG

Toughest part: Webmasters. I have a mainstream program going right now and I will tell you this: "mainstream" webmasters are fucking idiots. None of them know how to do a damn thing. I thought most GFYers were idiots. That's nothing until someone asks you how to link something on their MS frontpage bannerfarm.

Depending on the product, acquiring new WMs was a lot like the adult glory days, you could find some good prospects on forums. I'm sure you know the big ones already. If not just icq me and I'll send em over.

:thumbsup

This was our problem, the webmasters who did sign up were morons, and the experienced webmasters didn't want to divert from "what worked"... Outside of adult there's no such thing as $100 pps promo days, sigwhores, drama threads, and all the other zany ways we're used to doing "business" :1orglaugh

Bro, sell 4 bottles of Zanax, and on the 5th bonus to the customer you get 70% PPS for life!

SRSLY

Brad get on ICQ, I've got tons of energy and serious business to discuss with whoever will listen.

Bah, only because you're 7 hours ahead in Fantasyland and its bright and early in "I get to go to the beach all the time in the sun and drink cerveza" world.

In the real world some of us have to get up at 10 for work and need our beauty sleep. :1orglaugh

2am here :( But the jacuzzi is hot and I have half a bottle of wine to kill :error

If Pay Per Click programs counts, then I was doing that for about 4 years (till now).

Get your offer(s)/products pushed by established affiliate networks, you can do an under-the-table deal with the most profitable traffic pushers later on.

I am almost ready to launch my new mainstream project and soon after will follow the affiliate program to back that up.

Quite excited about it actually.

:winkwink::thumbsup

I dunno whether your sorting out traffic to porn or Car dealerships, referrals to real estate, plumbing supplies, or even selling rocks.

Its the same thing pretty much.

However the traditional affiliates programs pay outs etc in mainstream does not really exhist like it does in adult. Well maybe small game stuff may do well with affilites programs but setting up arrangements with sellers and buyers in the mainstream market is the way to go, just make sure they are big ticket item's for commissions and direct referral's.

I will give an example. I got 4 huge commissions over 9K total on just referring home owner's to solar installation company that resulted in 4 installations. There are ways to do these things but they involve pretty close relationships to insure a proper commission is settled.

Big ticket items are the key, I wouldnt mess around with selling t-shirts or silly merchandise.

That does seem to be the way to go, not to mention you can screen your traffic to specific countries using the aggregators. Although their fees do seem rather high, it does seem like the best way to take it to the big time.
WG

That is a great commission but it also must have been really hard to qualify that traffic and I bet its for something local, not a national level sales level right?
WG

I know a few people who are pretty successful with Clickbank products, they don't have affiliate program per se but it's kinda similar because they've people pushing their courses/etc.

And I want to get into mainstream more seriously this year, this current project is driving me bananas, the conversions dropped again across the board.

Let me know when its ready ;)
WG

Yeah, ebooks is one of those products that can yield high profits similiar to adult. Your noticing more drops againt too huh?
WG

This is the winner as far as I can tell.

It was Semi local, meaning I qualified the traffic in just Northern California.

I never really been the sort to think global, goin local is just as much detail!

I smoke mainstream crack rocks.

I am off that chronic adult shit.

Toughest part: affiliates sending fraudulent sales.

This is worse than the adult side?
WG

yes 5678

I set aside revenueshare.com to create a mainstream afil company like cj but now I am thinking it would be better as an adult revenueshare resource etc.

Oh I will Charles, I will.

:winkwink::thumbsup

A friend of mine went from adult to mainstream affiliate programs. He was selling insurance, loans, etc. He sold it, will work with them for 2 years then he plans on spending his days sitting on a lake dock :)

He said it was MUCH easier to deal with than adult - and the money was a lot better. Joe Blow doesn't do a charge back on health insurance like he does on porn.

I've also dealt with mainstream dating programs who are spending a fortune on nothing more than branding. I have to admit, I love those branding dollars :)
WG

I sell my own various ebooks & high ticket physical products via drop shipping. While I don't have an affiliate program if I was I would link it up though clickbank or another service like that.

And yes the majority of mainstream webmasters are total planks & they make the adult sig whore fuck, look good. :)

-N

most mainstream affiliates won't push anything unless it's thru a reputable company like CJ, linkshare, etc. Which is why most mainstream companies use them.

Based on your username, that's probably not too far off.
WG

hardly an expert in this filed, but curious, what kind of program do you want to start?

selling some kind of hard goods? or offering some services?

also, i noticed that you became very succesfull in adult while concentrating on the 'getting traffic' part, instead of running your own program (many chose to start their own programs because they want to reach the 'next level' even if that next level makes them less money) and I wonder why don't you want to do the same in mainstream?

why the need for your own program?

on the other hand, if you have a really good idea & businessplan, then I assume getting affiliates wouldn't be that hard

as discussed in Vegas, Mr WiredGuy.....
PsychicRevenue.com

btw, I thoroughly enjoyed the meal and conversation! ;-)
See you in Phx???

helped my buddy AC with his
http://incentivedollars.com/

incentivisable email leads

lol, you weren't kidding about your post count. Great having dinner with you and yup, see you in phx.
WG

Any info on the program itself? Its just a signup form ;)
WG

You were in Vegas??!! I swear. Now I'm going to have to add Austin to Panama in order to see the family :winkwink:

(I also owe you some banking info - I'm a slacker :helpme )

o wow lol he didnt go into much detail there eh?

free ipod give away, stuff like that.

surfer drops a valid email address in, you make a dollar.

get your free iphone here!
get your free dell laptop here!

that kinda stuff.

cant belive he didnt add more lol. also, incentives are perfectly fine, as you could have guessed.

meaning you can tell the traffic, you have to go here and do this for me to give you X.

get what im saying?

Perfectly... I think I've done the circuit of all the mainstream aff programs for this too though, although I have to say the incentivized route I've never seen on the email lead gen's.
WG

honestly, ive thrown this on my adult consoles and its doing great. just extra money really.

if youd like to give this a whirl, i can get AC to getcha set up.

If you think there has been a drop off in adult sales I believe the ebook drop off has been much worse. So many ebook websites do such a piss poor job protecting their member's areas that I am seeing tons of sites now dedicated strictly to sharing ebooks, not to mention most warez forums now have ebook sections.

Several years ago I partnered with someone and wrote a fairly popular sports betting money management ebook and the sales were excellent, not to mention some fairly decent income from the affiliate links in the ebook and eBay sales. We used Clickbank for the affiliate program. I spoke to my old partner again recently and he said that the ebook market is in the shitter due to all of the sharing sites...

Incentive programs always find great ways to shave 80% of the submits. "oh that email exists already" is a good one. They search the entire db of ipod, xbox and ps3 dbs and say if the email is in ANY of them they shave it.

Fuckin gay, I stopped doing zip and email submits.

If you stick to the lesser known ones (but through aggregators) with fresh lists, you can still make quite a bit. I got a few zip submits still doing $1.50 and doing well on them.
WG

It took about 10 emails to explain to my biggest mainstream affiliate that he does not need to send me a monthly invoice to get his share...

I make a bunch of money off free xbox/ipod/ps3, ebooks, and credit debt leads. If you are going the ebook route. Use PayDotCom or ClickBank and have others do the majority of the selling for you.

mainstream rocks. As someone has already mentioned, Its much easier getting affiliates through one of the established affiliate networks than trying to run your own affiliate program. fake email/info submits and carders are probably the biggest issue.