How to determine in five minutes that you are opening a stillborn affiliate program? Very often, a couple of minutes of communication with a future businessman is enough to understand that his project is already dead, at the stage of conception. Given that I have a platform for affiliate networks, I have been communicating with this audience very often over the past several thousand days. The eye is trained, the conclusions are made, and today I will share them here.
If you intend to open an affiliate program and recognize yourself in the paragraphs from this article, I have bad news. It’s too late to write a will – there will be nothing to bequeath. But there is also a bright side. You can still fix things. For example, to abandon the crazy idea of opening an affiliate network. Or, in extreme cases, reconsider your priorities and proceed to work with new conclusions, avoiding the typical mistakes of novice “affiliate owners”.
How do I determine that your future affiliate network is waiting for a hole instead of taking off, and it’s good if it’s not debt?
Trigger 1. Focus on design
Every third, discussing with me their future brainchild, devotes half or more of the time to the design and appearance of the affiliate program. Moments like this make me want to scream. Realize you don’t have infinite resources. And it’s not even about money. Time and attention are your tightest limits. You cannot do an unlimited number of tasks. So it’s vital to prioritize!
And the right approach is born from the question: “What do the affs need to come and flood me with a ton of traffic?”.
Can’t answer this question yourself? Ask your friends. Or here’s a list for you:
- Rare offers.
- Large pool of offers.
- High commissions.
- Minimum slices.
- Low hold time.
- Useful support and affiliate managers. By the way, wrote in a post about building this department.
- Stable technical part.
And there, somewhere in the 239th place, there will be a design. Everything is absolutely parallel to what your affiliate network will look like, unless of course this is a complete squalor. And no, AlterCPA is not like that.
Trigger 2. I want everything on a turnkey
Guys often come with something like this: “We need to do everything on a turnkey basis. Money is not the problem”. This speaks of the owner’s unwillingness to dive deep into the creation and operation of a business. At the start, this is critical. When the business model is already working, stable, profitable and scalable, it is permissible to relax, drop out of the operating system and enjoy life. Or create a new business.
But at the start, and especially during creation, without the deepest dive of the owner, 90% will fail. You can explain in different ways why this happens, but the pattern works stably on a large volume of closed projects, the fate of which I watched with my own eyes.
Usually these are people with a large amount of investor money who want to do everything for them and receive their 30-70% profit. Which most likely won’t happen. Or even more primitive. They want to simply saw up investor gold and fly to the seas to enjoy a successful adventure.
Trigger 3. Let’s talk over the phone
A person writes and immediately asks to appoint a call to discuss everything there. It would seem that there is such a thing? But statistics say that they almost always fail. Why? I think this is due to the fact that a person is not able to express his thoughts in text and this property is reflected in different areas of work, which leads to the closure of the affiliate program in a matter of months. So far, not a single project has taken off, which began with a telephone conversation.
Trigger 4. We have 900 verticals
At the start, there should be only one vertical. If you have a large team, there are people with great experience in several niches, you have the necessary contacts to get enough offers and resources to build a heavy infrastructure from the start – you can try. This sometimes shoots if the team is really good. But even the authors of such successful cases later note that they were in a hurry, overheated and almost overstrained themselves. It would be better to start from one vertical and increase the scope of activities along the way.
What can we say when the team is just good or generally weak. Then the chances are zero. Absolute.
Trigger 5. Why do we need a media buyer in the network?
An affiliate program without an media buyer in the state has a much lower chance of success compared to competitors who have their own media buying dept.
- Firstly, this is a test of offers on traffic, which you are sure of. A certain starting point from which you can then analyze the traffic of partners and look for anomalies.
- Secondly, it is a way to gain primary trust from advertisers by sending them your quality traffic. As a result, you can get a lot of goodies: from fast payouts to high caps.
- Thirdly, this is an arbitrage view within the company. He will not let you do bad things and help you do well.
- And, fourthly, the media buyer (or your own team) can and should communicate with affiliate managers in order to convey tips and advice, which they, in turn, give to the aff. As a result, the aff works better and more, and also likes you for the help you need.
Instead of conclusion
Did you recognize yourself? If so, I strongly advise you to draw conclusions and change while there is still time. If you contacted me, I would try to dissuade you from buying a license. Others will not act so noble.