Advice on building our affiliate program

[DRC]

Hi

I hope I'm posting this in the proper place.

I'm working to build the affiliate program of a new sponsor: DomRealCash.

We create all of our contents and are focused on the BDSM / FemDom niches. We have a single active web site (DominatrixReality.com) and a second one in the work that should go live in Feb, 2009.

I have build a a simple but, I hope, interesting package of banners, FHG and zip contents for our affiliates.

As many "new" program, our big chalenge is to get it off the ground so I'm looking for ideas and suggestions on how to recruit webmasters for our affiliate program.

Thanks

[Greenguy]

Well, you've done one of my tips - buy advertising on message boards

I don't get out much, but you might want to find bdsm/femdom message boards - both surfer & webmaster (if the latter exists) and buy ads on them as well.

Also, with any board, it's always good to post a lot & be helpful with your posts. If someone asks a question that you can answer, then post. If there's a topic that you can contribute to, then post. I know I've signed up to promote many programs based on their reps being helpful on the boards. But be cautious! There's a fine line between being helpful & being spammy.

You can also trade links with webmaster resource sites - just hunt around for any place that lists affiliate programs & get them your info.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by Greenie

If there's a topic that you can contribute to, then post. I know I've signed up to promote many programs based on their reps being helpful on the boards. But be cautious! There's a fine line between being helpful & being spammy.

That's the key, to interact with the community selflessly. In other words, offering advice when it would appear to be a complete waste of your time doing so. A lot of reps/owners swoop into a thread when there's an opportunity to whore their program. That may be an effective way to get their signature clicked, but it's very short term and an ineffective as a way of branding a program. Reps who become part of a community not only find affiliates, but those affiliates, and other community members who never signed up, will continually suggest the program to others in the future as a means of camaraderie, way beyond the life of any thread.

Of course, as a rep, you're often busy with the daily tasks of keeping a program afloat. As long as you can squeeze in a few moments a day to hit a thread or two, people will remember you. But if you stop in for 5 minutes and bump 2 weeks of expired 'good morning' threads, you'll piss them right off.

[tickler]

A couple of quick tips:

- Spell check everything on your site. REFERAL s/b REFERRAL

- Not a lot of places will use FHG linked through ccBill. It inflates hits to look like it takes maybe 1:30,000 to make a sale.

- Also traffic leaks on the FHGs are not liked. Drop the webmaster link.

- Check the "Announcements" forum here to see how other people are promoting their sites.

- Also watch the "I'm Looking For" forum for people that are actually looking for something in your niche(and others). Some of the more specific requests can give you ideals for other promo items that you might want to make available for WMs.

[DRC]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

- Yes, sorry about the spelling. None of us are very good in english but we just found a proff-reader how will review our work.

- Our dev guy is still working on the script that will allow affiliates to use URLs that do not need ccbill redirect. We where aware of this problem (one of us being a tgp operators) but we figured that ccbill redirect was still a lot better than no FHG at all.

- Noted about the webmaster link on the FHG. I should have know better.

Again thanks for the comments and suggestion.

Feel free to hit me with any others that may come to mind.

It's amazing the number of things that have to be done and fine tuned to get a program off the ground.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by DRC

- Our dev guy is still working on the script that will allow affiliates to use URLs that do not need ccbill redirect. We where aware of this problem (one of us being a tgp operators) but we figured that ccbill redirect was still a lot better than no FHG at all.

Oddly enough, it's a really simple process. In fact, you'll probably be surprised how easy it is to pass the CCBill affiliate code through a gallery. I don't have time to tell you at the moment (I have to force my son to go to his Xmas assembly), but if someone doesn't pop in here, I'll let you know how to do it when I get back.

[Useless]

DRC, if you'd like this form and the simple instructions on how to get your .htm/.html/.php galleries to carry a CCBill ID, let me know and I'll PM you the info.

http://www.maladaptedmedia.com/test/affiliate.php

I noticed that your current hosted gallery list is on a .nsf page, whatever that is. The results from that sample form are produced by PHP, but I assume your server has PHP.

[Mr Spock]

What is the issue with CCbill and FHG links?

[Maya]

I could really use that info UW, been looking for that myself

[Ms Naughty]

With regards to boards, it's helpful to sign up to Boardtracker and similar sites to keep track of when your relevant keywords turn up on a board. Too often the alert is a bit too late, but it's worth doing anyway.

Just a comment on your tour - I reckon you need a heap more text describing each little episode. And if you can hire a designer to "zzhoozsh" the graphics up a bit I think that would help.

[DRC]

Thanks for the samples UW.

So, to recap the technique:

1- Pass the ccbill affiliate ID as a cgi variable to a gallerie page ( using the ? marquer in the URL ). The gallerie page must have the capabality of generating code on the fly. ( PHP, Perl etc )

2- Get the page to generate the display page with site links using the ccbill main site referral URL


As you mention in a previous post it is quite simple.
I will talk to our web dev guy to explain the technique to him. (or I may do it myself since he is really bussy those days)

Thanks again.

BTW: ".nsf" is for IBM-Lotus databases format

[DRC]

UW

Yes I'm going to take you up on your offer.

Seems that I will be the one doing it so, yes, if you could send me a sample of the code.

I assume it is PHP. This is fine since many parts of the site are already build in PHP.

Thanks again.

[Useless]

DRC and Maya - you each have a PM with a download link.

DRC - yeah, the form, which doesn't need to be used by the way, is very basic PHP. The user submits his/her ID, the script embedded in the form page fetches that ID from the new URL formed when the submit button is pressed.

Like I said, if you'd rather not tamper with your current FHG list by trying to add the form, you don't have to. As long as you do the minor editing to each gallery and add a couple of lines to your .htaccess file (I tell you about that in the readme file) your galleries will carry the affiliate ID.

[DRC]

Many thanks UW

I was not aware that you could get a html page to resolve some PHP code. That's really great! Did I mentioned that my coding days are way pass. (I'm old enough to remember when livescript was the flavor of the week and cobol programming was considered a wise career choice)

Anyway, I will do the changes to the galleries files, create/modify the FHG list page and change the .htaccess .

I will let you know when it is done.

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." Winston Churchill

[Maya]

Thanks UW, it looks just as easy as I suspected, I just wasn't able to make it work when I tried on my own

[DRC]

I'm done with the FHG.

A few notes that may be usefull to others:

Following the instruction from UW to the letters did not work on my server. The problem seem to come from the edition of the .htaccess file.

When I added the lines in the .htaccess file it kind of mess up the files type and the browsers (IE, Firefox & Chrome) where all trying to download the index.htm page insteand of displaying it.

I'm sure it is something related to the server setup but instead of starting on the great Help-Desk hunt at my provider I decided to copy the content of the index(s) files into new index.php files and bingo it worked like a charm. It takes about 5 more second per galleries but since we are such a young program we don't have that many galleries yet.

But the code provided by UW is working great in the galleries files.

My next little improvement projet will be to create the form that can generate all those links for the affiliates.

Thanks again UW. You really made my day.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by DRC

When I added the lines in the .htaccess file it kind of mess up the files type and the browsers (IE, Firefox & Chrome) where all trying to download the index.htm page insteand of displaying it.

I've heard of that happening in similar situations, but I can't recall the reason.

Originally Posted by DRC

Thanks again UW. You really made my day.

You're welcome, and I'm happy to hear that it's working. I put that little bit of code together from things I've learned on this board and from building hosted free sites with GG, so it makes sense to share the results whenever possible. I'm eventually going to create a PHP/mySQL backend to make adding hosted galleries an easier process, but I haven't really had reason to work on that just yet. The whole idea was to have a generic linking framework that wouldn't be effected when/if I finally build a user-friendly interface to automate the process or create additional features.

By the way, I'm not a coder. I'm just a guy with limited focus and lots of duct tape.

[Telly]

My advice is to focus on getting your own promotions going and let the affiliate stuff follow. Work the search engines, submit your own galleries, and setup blogs targeted towards your own niche market and work the link trades; try to get as many cleans sales as possible because that's where a good deal of your revenue stream will come from. Post promo content and photos on the correct forums for your niche and start to network with people you meet on the boards.

When affiliates start to see a site or program that's beginning to take off they tend to jump on board much easier than you trying to coax them. Be sure to keep your promo content up to date and watch for traffic leaks. Look into sweet things like morphing feeds which allow affiliates to create blog posts with minimal effort and test their traffic's receptiveness of your content; the easier it is to promote the better.

easy to promote > actually promote > actually convert > actively promote

Best of luck to you and I hope to see DomRealCash hit 99+ rebills in the future !

[DRC]

Thanks for your comments Kelly

Our in-house promo is getting off the ground nicely and the sales are starting to pile up.

December is probably not the best month to lauch a new program but we are please with the result so far.

As for the promo tools, we have new galleries (pic and video) every week and we are working on some RSS feeds for bloggers.

Any other ideas are welcome.

Thanks again for the comments.

[Telly]

Originally Posted by DRC

Thanks for your comments Kelly

Our in-house promo is getting off the ground nicely and the sales are starting to pile up.

December is probably not the best month to lauch a new program but we are please with the result so far.

As for the promo tools, we have new galleries (pic and video) every week and we are working on some RSS feeds for bloggers.

Any other ideas are welcome.

Thanks again for the comments.

No prob. Btw its Telly. |king|

[Goldie]

In general:
1. be fair with webmasters
2. make payments as if you are a swiss bank
3. explain everything simply
4. try to find your own picularity to develop it and make it the visit card of your's
5. as many payment methods and ad. material as possible
6. never forget about grammer and style
7. be as open as posible - info rules this world!