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Partner at MB Interactive LLP
06 October 2004 20:03pm
Hi All
We run a few e-commerce sites as a bit of s sideline but are looking at increasing the sales and ultimately their profitability considerably. We flirted with Affiliate Marketing a year or so ago through a small third party provider and basically had a bad experience.
We are now looking at it again but this time are considering one of the bigger boys (such as Affiliate Window or TradeDoubler) where set-up costs are £1000 - £3500 and monthly fees are around a couple of hundred pounds. If we go for it we'll put in far more effort at our end than we did last time round.
I have seen a lot of testimonial blurb from the providers with comments from other merchants such as 'we increased revenues' and 'we got more exposure' - nice, but what we are looking for is some reassurance that overall we will be more profitable if we do go for Affiliate Marketing with a big company than if we don't.
Has anybody got any advice for us? Can small websites really make enough extra margin after paying the commission and override to more than cover the set-up and ongoing costs to the provider?
For reference, our sites we are looking at for Affiliate Marketing are www.picnicshop.co.uk and www.gamesonboard.co.uk
Many thanks in advance
Mark
MD at Textor Webmasters Ltd
07 October 2004 09:14am
Like you my experience with affiliate marketing is all bad. A previous post made the point that most affiliate sites make money from the fact that they are better at SEO than the host site.
My 10c worth is that if I had £3.5k to spend I would probably spend it on figuring out why every page on both sites (except the picnic home page) has a zero page rank. In the case of the picnic site I think it is down to the session code at the end of every URL in the extended path. This would confuse google no end.
Use a cookie to save the session code and live with less than perfect instrumentation and you could see a leap in traffic because people searching for 'picnic backpacks' might find your site via organic results which are free and much more effective than the sponsoored links you have.