Ask HN: Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing?

37 pointspjharrin22 comments

Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing?

Yes I use affiliate marketing at my day time job. Nearly 40% of our sales come from affiliates. I am also readying to setup the same for my startup. I am planning to offer 50% of our sales because we don't have any operating costs, but in most cases the payout is around 30%. Note that to make your AM successful you will need to constantaly come up with new offers, incentives, banner ads etc... and communicate with your top earners. Make them happy.

Yep, high affiliate payout is smart. Some affiliate marketers are really cheap. Who wants to push a $20 product for a 10% commission? Not me, but kick it up to 50% and now we can have a conversation.

Does it work with SaaS model?

I don't see why not. You just have to spend a bit more time recruiting the proper affiliates.

We tried. COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. Biggest waste of time in Fog Creek history. All that time would have been better spent adding features to make our products better to get more customers.

"We tried. COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME." does not apply to everyone. Most likely you weren't doing it right, and didn't try long enough to make it work.

Define "make it work". It worked in that we sent out checks every month and we got referrals, but it turns out the number of referrals were miniscule compared to the time we were spending on the program. In addition, once we stopped it we continued to get the same referrals. People tell other people about our products because they like them, not because they are going to get a dollar from the sale.

(50% of the affiliates only had one sale... to themselves).

By "make it work," I mean accomplishing your original goals. Those goals were probably something like "acquire hundreds of new customers per month that Fog Creek otherwise would not have access to."

The easiest way to make it work is contact someone that has some working experience with being a software affiliate, or is a part of an affiliate network. In the same way that successful start ups need to understand what users want, successful affiliate programs need to understand what affiliates want. For instance, the majority of 1 sale affiliates could have been prevented by having a payout limit of $X, where $X = (cost savings from 1 sale) * N, where N > 3. That way, they need to at least convince 2 other buddies to purchase FogBugz. Also, you were probably attracting the wrong type of affiliates. Finally, you need to have a good idea of what each unique visitor is worth, what each lead is worth, what each sale is worth so you know the best price you can give to your affiliates.

It can definitely increase your reach/customer base, but it does take effort to make it work.

Do you have a theory why it didn't work for you?

Before you look into integrating affiliate programs into your sales process, I would suggest hiring a copywriter than can fully explain your product. When I went to www.copilot.com it was not readily obvious to me what your program can do for me.

The key to successfully using affiliate programs for sales is to always test and refine (your creatives, ad copy, and landing pages).

One possible benefit might be if you have well done banners and ads for the affiliate channels, it will get your logo and brand out on many websites. Maybe not always desirable ones but for the most part it could increase awareness in marketing as well as sales.

There's a lot to learn about affiliate marketing at http://wickedfire.com. There are tons of affiliates to converse with and also several affiliate network CEO's who post there. It's not uncommon for many affiliates here to make more than $2,000 a day from AM, so it'd be valuable to pick their brains.

I've been an affiliate, and am getting ready to launch our own in-house affiliate program (using iDevAffiliate) to promote our own products and services.

Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat in more detail.

I'm looking for a few quality affiliates who can take my product in front of the right people. Couldn't find an email --> zaki (at) timesvr.com

I have... Commission Junction, LinkShare, Share-a-sale. They work well - but it's very important to create a good offer, 30-45% is good.

Also, good banners are important.

Each network has a different reach & size. Shareasale is small and Linkshare is extra large while Commission Junction is right in the middle - but has the highest quality members (in my opinion).

All in all - Affiliate Programs are only as effective as you make them, I suggest you spend money on landing page optimization, retargeting & click tracking in conjunction with Affiliate Marketing.

Your best bet would be to partner with an existing affiliate network who already have thousands of affiliates ready to promote your product. This is a better approach because if you create an in-house affiliate program, you are going to have to market that too.

Message me (AIM: ofchowdhury) and I can point you in the right direction.

Hi, i'm pretty interested in running our service on an affiliate network. Don't use AIM though. Would appreciate a chat over email --> zaki (at) timesvr.com

Some of you guys commenting here should make a few detailed blog posts about this topic. You sound like you know a lot about it.

For my own question. Any thoughts if I could make any money with affiliate marketing on this site: www.justoneclubcard.com

It only gets about 100 unique vistors per day but I figure it's pretty specific.

I've done it but its really hit or miss. You need to be constantly updating your offers, trying new niches, and pushing hard to keep a good relationship with you affiliate manager. Their are times when you will feel scummy but your wallet will be fat.

Not for my startup, but I've managed affiliate programs for clients, and am an affiliate of several products myself.

Yes.

Hey, don't downmod me, downmod the OP. He's the one who posted up a closed question that can be answered with a 2 to 3 letters... :-)

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