Your opinion and help please?

[Halfdeck]

Looks like I posted over my old post

[digifan]

Originally Posted by MadMax

I just went over there to give that thread a read. I've got to say, I was a bit shocked and certainly disgusted that a program owner would trash her affiliates like that in public. If she's affiliates are such bloodsuckers, why bother to have the affiliate program. Oh, wait...affiliates DO send sales she wouldn't possibly have gotten otherwise. 50% of something is still WAY better than 100% of nothing.

That was written in 2003 and the program owner is not Abby, she is "only" the heart an soul of it as far as I know... she is the chief of the stuff, she is shooting content, she is updating the site every day and yes sometimes when desperate or tired she is making bitter remarks like this.

If you have the time to read her long post, you can see her strategy:
"We don't get money for the traffic we refer elsewhere. I hate the idea of that - I'd rather customers just vote with their wallets, and that the people who created the content get as much of the money as possible for it. This means slower growth for us, but in the long run, a more solid customer base... unless the customers have no idea what's going on (kinda hence this thread).

A "normal" affiliate program works where each customer an Affilliate sends me, the affiliate gets 50% of the initial join fee, AND of each rebill. I'm a real hard-arse about this, and offer 50% for the initial join fee, and nothing on rebills. This means, most affiliates will go to other sites which offer them better rates, and not bother to promote my site.

This also means that to make decent money, most sites, who rely on affiliates heavily (between 60 and 100% of their traffic will come from aff sales) - charge DOUBLE what they would if they were doing their own marketing. That is, they make the CUSTOMER pay the affiliate, not themselves.

We charge $17.50 for a monthly sub - half of that is $8.75, and for a huge majority of aff's, that's just not worth the trouble. Why not send the same customers to a site like teenflood.com, who charge $30 a month, and make $15 a pop? So, teenflood get $15 for every sale, and that's what they have based their profit/loss sheet on. NOT the $30 list price, but the $15 they make.

We started off with no affs when we set our prices, and in the last nine months, we have added a few, and our prices have stayed the same. That means we make less money than we could, but we make enough to pay the bills, and have abit left over. AND we treat our customers by being cheaper than most of the competition.

We have a good site that "converts" well - converts idle browsers to actual payers, and some astute aff's recognise this. They make more money from me - even without rebills - than they do from other sites, cos they just don't convert as well as us.

Around half to a third of all our joins are from affiliates, which means, it's a big chunk of the gross income. In a way, I feel like using affiliates is selling out - affiliates have ONE goal: to make as much money as they can. That's different to my goal, which is to make the site as good as it can be, cos I love the genre. If I can make money while doing it, great, but it's not a driving force.

My main problem with the affs, is that I work my arse off 80, 90 hours a week to make the site as best as I possibly can. The staff I employ work hard as well, and they care about the site too. Yet I have to give away HALF of my gross to some lazy (six to ten hours a week's work) guys who make a few web pages with MY images, and post them on the net!?

Hardly seems fair...

But to look at it from their side, they know the places and ways to post these pages of my images for the most amount of sales - that honestly does takes time and experience. And, some - they argue most - of their joins would never have found my site, and incrementally, it does not cost me much to add a member to the site... so it's income I'd be otherwise missing out on.

I don't pay out rebills, so it's in my interests to keep people a member for a long as possible (in that, it's more money for me). Obviously, I try to do that, but few people stay more than three months. When they rejoin, it's cos they saw a new image in on a page of images one of my affiliates made, so the aff gets the join again.

It does not matter if people join for the shortest or longest sub plan - the affs get 50% of the join fee (not a flat $ amount).

Changing billing company did not affect aff sales at all - it just lowered our overhead, and kept our prices lower than they would be, had we stayed with CCBill."

Back in 2003, I might add. By now they are a 6 yr old great site and start paying rebills.

[digifan]

Thank God that they decided not to stay with ccbill only... the ccbill sites stopped working for me long ago.

[Ms Naughty]

OK, I think I'm confused about some of the discussion in this thread... but if there's deleted posts it's not surprising LOL

Another quote from that Abby Winters thread (page 2):
"No, we get nothing in return (well, apart from a customer!), but the point is, affiliates work hard to make sales for my site, and I don't want their sales to drop due to users deleting cookies at my behest. They'd be pissed off, and probably black ban us, or something."

[digifan]

And I may sound confusing too sometimes, I meant the conversion ratio of ccbill sites is getting worse and worse.
But my site is down and we wanted to install and set up scripts with a busy webmaster friend and launch it... I uploaded the pdf there too. I am getting a dns error when trying to access www.hotgirlthumbs.com