This morning I quit a program I had yet to promote. It was a program that I thought I could do good things with (I do love my niche marketing), but I asked a couple of questions and they plain dropped the ball…
Following is the email conversation. Each entry below is an individual email, starting with one sent from my account at Shareasale.com. Maybe you can see where things started to go off track.
eat: Hello,
We are new to your program and I had a couple questions before we start
promoting.
1. Do you have plans to add product specific links and/or a data feed?
2. Would you be open to the idea of adding a PPC policy that prohibits
affiliates bidding on your trademarks and domain name?
Many thanks!
diecastmodelswholesale.com: We already have a data feed, you can find it inside your CJ.com account.
eat: We are enrolled in your program on Shareasale.com.
diecastmodelswholesale.com: We do not have feed there.
eat: Yes, I asked if you plan on adding one. I also asked if you will be adding a
PPC policy.
diecastmodelswholesale.com: We are not. Thank you
eat: Thank you for helping me make a decision on whether or not to promote your
company. I have gone ahead and quit your program.
Hint: Crappy affiliate relations costs business. Hire a professional.
1 user commented in " Hire an Affiliate Relations Professional "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackIt’s annoying when vendors just try out an affiliate center but then don’t actually support it.
I selected a product at Shareasale, tried it, wrote my review about it, put lots of hand-coded links to it all over my site — sold one copy, and then…
I visit Shareasale and discover the vendor has let the account run dry and is not active there.
Turned out they had moved to RegNow.
This is all very well: they can leave Shareasale if they want to. There’s no law that says they have to stay with it if it’s not worthwhile.
But where does that leave us affiliates? In my case it left me with about 80 dead links on my site. Took me about 10 hours to fix them. If I had not already written about the software and sold one copy I would have just deleted all the links.
I’m still nervous: since vendor evidently does not communicate with affiliates, I’ll never know whether they move their pages, release a new version of their software, move to another affiliate center…
The main lesson I learnt from this: If you are going to sprinkle somebody’s links all over your site make sure it’s automated, i.e. php or a script.
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