Conversion Rates a Must for New Affiliate Program Launch??

[Laubster]

Per the 4 Hour Work Week model I recently launched an information based product and set up affiliate programs on Clickbank and e-Junkie. I have a deep search engine marketing background but knew nothing about affiliate marketing prior to getting into this.

My question is: Do I have to prove my conversion rates before any truly productive affiliates will take my product seriously?? Or, more importantly: Could it hurt me at all to have a program without being able to prove my conversion rate yet? I am already engaged in landing page testing and looking at highly targeted media buys so that I can offer affiliates a proven conversion rate, but I'm wondering if I should potentially hold back before truly launching my program (I've listed the program on Clickbank but haven't announced it on any directories or done any serious affiliate recruitment yet).

Thanks!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Laubster,

Welcome. I moved your post from the newbie affiliate forum to the merchant/affiliate manager forum since this is a merchant question.

I understand your question but think you may be asking the WRONG question
or looking at it the wrong way.

One question is will affiliates join without a proven conversion rate?
But here are the bigger issues I would look at.

1) No matter how great you think your product, price, marketing, cart, ets is the only TRUE way to know if it will convert is to get it in front of LOTS of targeted traffic to see if they buy.

2) It's not fair to have affiliates do the conversion rate testing for you. They work for free and only get paid IF you've done your home work.

3) If you go to all the trouble to recruit and AFTERWARDS find out you have a conversion problem, you could lose all the affiliates you worked so hard to get AND possibly hurt your rep.

4) Test via PPC is my best advice. You can get the most targeted traffic and measure results more easily if you CONTROL everything. You know how to market your offer better than anyone else right now and as soon as you get conversion data you can tweak and optimized

5) Conversion testing via affiliates is a REALLY BAD way to test and could lose you precious time and money. If all your marketing is affiliate based it's going to skew your numbers and make it hard to identify the prob if conversions are weak. Is the problem the type of affiliates? The way they are marketing? Do some of them have some funky get paid to click site that's driving TONS of bogus traffic that won't convert?

The above issues and more are many times unknowns that you can't control or won't even know about.

OR is it your site? your marketing? your price point? your cart? These are things ONLY you can control. (so affiliates should not be penalized if you didn't do it right.) But AS IMPORTANTLY, if affiliates are in the mix it will muddy the waters making it hard to know what the conversion problem really is. Make sense?

Test 1st, then add affiliates. My 2 cents.

 

[Laubster]

Great advice, thank you. I figured that was the case but have NEVER done affiliate marketing (neither as an affiliate or merchant) so I wasn't sure. PPC is already in place!