New Improved Search Engine College Affiliate Program Launched

Finally, after months of searching for the perfect Affiliate software that did everything we wanted it to, we have launched the brand spanking new Search Engine College Affiliate Program.

We finally chose JROX Affiliate Manager software (JAM) for the job after hearing good things about it and reading reviews on Tucows etc. We've spent the past two weeks integrating it into our site, testing, tweaking and testing some more and it's finally ready!

Why JAM? Well mainly because it's a super powerful affiliate program that includes follow up marketing tools and because it integrates with both PayPal and our 3rd party payment gateway 2Checkout. The features of JAM are pretty impressive, as are their groovy 3d Flash-based graphs and charts displaying affiliate referrals and commissions.

So what's on offer in our affiliate program? For starters, Search Engine College affiliates earn up to $179 per conversion. That's right! You earn 15% commission from every course registration that results from your referral and you get a $2 bonus just for signing up.

You don't need to be a student at SEC to become an affiliate. Becoming an affiliate is FREE. All you need to do is promote our search engine marketing courses on your site and watch the dollars roll in! No excuses - you can sign up here.

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Q and A: Should I use an affiliate program instead of PPC to generate sales?

Dear Kalena...

I am fed up spending hundreds ($350!!!) per week in Google/Yahoo PPC for only 2 sales per week, week after week. My Adwords are getting more expensive, it is ridiculous.

My task for this week is to develop an affiliate program. I have installed software to manage the affiliates and I will contact as many relevant blogs and websites I can to offer them $100 per sales. Which strategy do you reckon? Using an affiliate network? Which one? is $100 (25%) ok? Do I have to give a bonus at the registration ($10 ok?). Do you have some advice to attract affiliates? What can I write in the letter I will email to them that will motivate them to register? If you already have received some interesting letters asking you to be affiliate, would it be possible to forward them to me?

Damien

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Damien

That's a lot of questions for a single cup of coffee! Here are my suggestions:

a) Try bidding on less-competitive keywords/phrases in your PPC campaigns. Research and focus on the laser-targeted 2, 3 and even 4 word phrases. These are cheaper and generally convert better.

b) Review all your ads and your keyword matching options to see if you can improve their quality score and performance. Your ad headings and copy should be laser-focused on the keywords you are bidding on.

c) Are you sending all PPC visitors to a single destination URL? Try developing targeted landing pages for each keyword theme or product and send ad clickers to these instead. Landing pages should include your keyword phrase in the heading and copy of the page and lead visitors directly to your conversion goal without any competing navigation or distractions.

Regarding your affiliate program:

a) I don't use an affiliate network as such, so I can't recommend any in particular. We have just upgraded to JROX Affiliate Manager software for our Search Engine College affiliate program and it seems to be extremely powerful and effective so far. It does involve a lot of setting up and customization, but it pretty much runs itself after that.

b) Regarding your affiliate commission - you could either have a percentage of sales (somewhere between 5 and 25% is common) or a flat fee per sale. Depending on the affiliate program you use, you could even set it up as a pay per click commission where affiliates receive a small fee for every visitor they send your way. Whatever makes the most sense for your product and market.

c) It's up to you whether you you offer a sign-up bonus. It's not that common. We offer a $2 bonus just to get people started, but again, it depends on your market.

d) Regarding attracting new affiliates, you really need to convince them they will make money by promoting your product/service. Ideally, you should have a product that sells well online and is of high quality. Make sure you have a lot of marketing tools for affiliates to choose from (banners, links, buttons etc.) and a very detailed list of features and benefits they can refer to in their own marketing efforts.

In your pitch email, you should give potential affiliates a dollar figure they will make from selling just one of your products so they can get an idea of the potential income they could expect. I personally wouldn't cold-call to find affiliates, unless the product is unbelievably tailored to their site content. Instead you should create banners and promotional pages about your affiliate program and try to attract people to them. A PPC campaign to attract affiliates or leads generally converts better than one to attract sales.

Once you've got some affiliates in place, make sure you give them a very easy way of tracking referrals and commissions and keep in regular contact with them with ideas for how to promote your product/service.

Good luck!

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Become a Search Engine College Affiliate

We launched our affiliate program for Search Engine College this week.

If you've got a web site related to search and you'd like to earn extra bucks simply by having a text link or image on it, then why not sign up to become a Search Engine College affiliate and earn up to $179 per conversion? That's right! You earn 15% commission from every course registration that results from your referral and we will pay you an instant bonus of $2 just for signing up!

Sign Up Here

CafePress Launches Contextual Advertising Program

CafePress has launched TopicAds today - a type of contextual advertising program where web site publishers can have ads promoting their CafePress inventory (or someone elses) shown on their websites. How it works is that publishers specify keywords related to their content and TopicAds serves up ads relating to relevant products from their CafePress store inventory.

CafePress shopkeepers must sign up for the affiliate program separately to take part. The good news is that these ads are not considered competitive by Google and so it is fine to display them in conjunction with any AdSense units. The bad news is that publishers must rely on product sales as income from the ads, rather than click commissions. Backscratch goes to JenSense for this one.