Affiliate Programs: Still Kicking
This is the moment to confess a secret passion for affiliate programs. It began almost ten years ago when I set up and managed an affiliate program for one of my first community-driven graphics sites. At the time BeFree (later acquired by Commission Junction) was the state of the art in affiliate system management. It performed admirably, allowing me to construct a large network of affiliates that contributed significantly to the traffic and sales performance of the site. Of course, this was in the pre-Google AdWord era, so sites had fewer options to monetize their traffic. In fact, you might think that Google has pretty much killed off the affiliate concept. But that's far from being the case.
I was thinking of this recently while putting together the monthly newsletter for the Jupiterimages affiliate program, trolling in the Commission Junction admin back end for promising affiliates to profile. The program has grown over the years to the point where it now provides a broad range of royalty-free content sites, from Clipart.com and Animation Factory, through Photos.com, AbleStock.com and PhotoObjects.com, with RoyaltyFreeMusic.com just about to be hooked up.
I always enjoy visiting affiliate sites to check out their marketing tactics, which vary wildly. Some just stick up a tiny button, never change it and hope for the best. Others provide lots of descriptive text, which they then promptly forget about. Such text is great in principle but can be counterproductive when it trumpets the Photos.com collection providing subscribers with access to 90,000 images—when it's now grown to more than 310,000. Simpler is to use one of the many banners available to affiliates, since we host those and update them when necessary. And if something special is required we can usually provide it, such as the Photos.com banners recently requested by a German site.
What we're increasingly seeing is sites combining per-per-click with affiliate banners and in some cases just going the graphical route. I don't think Google has anything to worry about, but with the saturation of text ads it's getting difficult to find a site or blog without them. Ubiquity is usually desirable but in this case it can cause such marketing messages to become banal. Honestly, how often do you actually read such text ads on third-party sites, let alone click on them? Text ads perform well on Google itself but are known to be less effective when displayed on other sites—they simply fade into the background.
The result is that for us, anyway, some sites seem to have gotten the affiliate bug again. Many of these have design or graphics as their focus, so our products are a good fit for their visitors. And beyond our own banner offerings, affiliates are free to use our thumbnail images to create a marketing message that integrates perfectly with their site. These efforts can pay off, when you factor in that a commission on a single sale can be over $100. It doesn't take too many of those to beat a month of Google nickles per click. So if you manage such a site or blog, don't exclude graphics-related affiliate programs such as the one provided by Jupiterimages.
And if you do join, drop me a line—I'm always on the lookout for new sites to profile.
Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com
Leave a comment