I know your time is valuable so I’ll get right to the point.

Product owners and affiliates for the last couple years have lived a happy co-dependent existence. In the beginning, affiliates had limited choices. Today, it’s an ocean of opportunity.

The reason I’m writing you today is because I feel the industry needs a wake up call.

Here are the problems…

1. Affiliate marketers are becoming less dependent on product owners
2. Affiliates have more choices then ever before
3. Affiliates have evolved with the times but product owners have not
4. Product owners are relying too heavily on affiliates

Affiliates Don’t Need You Anymore

In the old days, an affiliate could simply link to a product owner and that was enough.

Then over time, more and more affiliate marketers were created by the product owners — so many new affiliates that, in order to start making sales, you had to offer some sort of bonus or incentive that no one else was offering.

Now in 2009, you need to go even further than just bonuses, because almost everyone’s doing bonuses at this point.

To compete with the massive amounts of affiliates, you now have to capture leads from your traffic, offer a bonus, and then point the prospect to the product owner.

Don’t forget that more and more people everyday are learning that they can sign up as an affiliate themselves and buy through their own links.

Affiliates are now generating their own leads, creating their own offers, and then sending the customer to someone else. How long before the affiliate thinks: “If I’m generating the lead and creating the offer, then why am I sending the customer to someone else?”

Basically, to compete in today’s world of affiliate marketing, an affiliate has to do all the same things a product owner normally does.

Most affiliates become affiliates to avoid the responsibilities of a product owner. You must alleviate some of the work your affiliates are having to do or risk losing them or worse gaining them as a competitor!

There’s a Network On Every Corner

Back in the day, Amazon, Clickbank, Linkshare, and a handful of others were the only affiliate networks on the scene. Now you’ve got over 32 “major” affiliate networks, not to mention all the small or start-up networks.

It gets worse, too, because new networks are constantly springing up and these networks are offering much more then the typical product owner.

Inside any one of the 10+ affiliate networks that I’m a part of, I’ve got all kinds of affiliate tools and a dedicated affiliate manager.

The average product launcher just scrapes by with a basic affiliate promotion kit. Banners, emails, keywords, and some links are not enough anymore.

Today, affiliates need brandable videos, landing pages, reports, e-courses, interviews, and articles… The Internet in 2009 is a content beast — your affiliates need content!

If your eyes are opening and you’re seeing the problems, then you should check out what the adult industry is doing for their affiliates.

The adult industry offers their affiliates free hosting, dedicated managers, a plethora of brandable landing pages, even whole membership sites that the affiliate can promote the product owner with.

Independents can beat the big networks by offering more customization, unique tools, and personal touch. If they don’t, then they’ll lose their affiliates. Which actually leads me into the third problem I see happening…

Affiliates evolved and optimized their methods for their product-owning partners. However, the product owners are still offering the same resources they offered 4, 5, and 6 years ago. Not only that, but it seems product owners have gotten greedier and lazier.

Product Owners Should Be Responsible For Conversions

In this last part, I’m going to speak for myself, and if anyone is feeling the same thing they can let me know in the comments.

The other parts I’ve already spoken with many other affiliates so I was comfortable speaking for the majority. This next part could possibly just be a weird fluke I experienced and could be totally alone in it.

But I doubt it!

Here goes…

Lately, I have been making some showings in the top 10s of different joint-venture leaderboards, which sounds great. However, for most of them my conversions have been almost totally dependent on my offering a bonus.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “you make more sales by offering a bonus to your subscribers who buy through you?” No!

What I’m saying is, if I don’t offer a bonus, then I don’t make sales. I know because I tried it on the last JV leaderboard I got on. I was in the top 10 for leads, and then when it came time for sales, I never offered a bonus.

Sure enough, I got an egg in my sales column as my reward for that test.

In the product launch right before that, I offered a great bonus and came in top five in sales, making several thousand in commissions plus winning a 52″ flat screen TV.

Here’s my problem though…

I could have just emailed my list, charged for my bonus, made the several grand myself, and not shared my customers with the product owner.

If the product owner’s sales funnel requires that the affiliate offers a bonus in order to make sales…

… Then what does the affiliate need the product owner for?

(Read that again.)

I understand there is a “game” to be played, but this is not the ideal situation for affiliates. And as a product owner you want to take care of your affiliates as best you can. For example, I’ll never promote for that guy again.

In my eyes, he charged too much money for his product and the price seemed largely based on knowing his affiliates would offer a much bigger bonus to compensate for it.

Meanwhile, the affiliate is only getting 50% of revenue. Yet the affiliate is motivating the crowd, generating the leads, creating the hot offer, and generating the sale…

… While the product own just created the product!

Creating the product is a big piece of the pie, but what I’m saying over and over again, here, is that, if I have to offer such a great bonus in order for your product to make sales, I might as well just sell my bonus!

More and more of the top affiliates are getting fed up with this.

Lazy launch days are numbered because affiliates are getting sick and tired of the product owners not evolving their methods to keep the affiliates hard work secure.

Here’s a quick solutions list so you can easily identify what you need to be doing to make sure your affiliates are happy.

What You Must Do To Keep Affiliates Happy

1. You must offer something unique to your affiliates or risk losing them to the networks.
2. You must provide every resource an affiliate would need to make the sale, including a variety of different bonuses.
3. The more you update your affiliates tools (e.g., emails, videos, reports, landing pages, etc), then the more they will go out and promote those new tools.
4. As your affiliates’ job requirements evolve, so should yours as the product owner to make sure the affiliate has what’s needed and is doing what’s required.
5. Protect your affiliates’ commissions during launches, and make their job as easy as you can — you are the CREATOR, they are the PROMOTER.
6. Never steal from your affiliates by denying commissions on backend sales, especially during the launch.

I’m not saying I’m the perfect product owner, either, since I’m missing a few of these elements in my affiliate program myself. Although, you can bet I won’t be letting much time go by before I start making sure I have them all.

Thanks for listening to my rant. And please post your comments and tell me what you think of this situation. I’d love to hear them!

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Stop being so lazy with affiliate marketing!

An affiliate program is where you can link to someone else’s offer with your special ID and get paid commission every sale you make. This process “seems” really hands-off and easy because there’s no product creation or customer support involved… just send traffic to a proven offer!

Here’s the problem.

Most marketers are lazy and don’t realize that affiliate marketing has its own disadvantages. It’s tougher to build a list using affiliate marketing, tough to convert and split test, and you have to devote most of your effort to pre-selling and marketing that affiliate product.

What the heck do you need to know about affiliate marketing in order to pull in decent results?

If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, setup a squeeze page that gets people on a mailing list first and redirects to the affiliate offer. Send traffic to that page using forum posts and articles.

Even if they don’t buy right away, you can keep broadcasting to that list every day with reminders about benefits for that offer… things they might have missed or even things you thought about the vendor didn’t.

For example, once I promoted an affiliate offer about how to create iPhone apps and I wrote a quick follow-up asking people… what if you thought of eBay or AdWords before anyone else? What if you registered even one or two English-word domain names like Business.com or About.com before anyone else? What would those be worth today?

What’s great about this is the product originator practically wrote your e-mails for you. You can copy huge chunks of the sales letters and add them as e-mail follow-ups… then add a call-to-action at the end of the e-mail so people can click your affiliate link to get back to the page.

Even if they don’t buy that offer, you can eventually hit them with a different but related affiliate offer as well.