1. Carders buys my software
2. They gets 20% commision fee
3. Refund is issued but those 20% stays in carder’s pocket

Yes, affiliate marketing doesn’t work for everybody – especially if you sell B2B software (which is harder to sell with affiliate marketing – I think this is Joel’s case) or if product is not well known.

But affiliate marketing works for some. Think that you would have to bring all your potential buyers to your site: let’s say 1 million potential customers. Do you think that your site will be able to appear in all the searches of your potential customers? The answer should be: no…

Because they might be French and search for information on their local portals. A French affiliate could sell better than you could do in France. Or simply because people search for something that is long tail and your site doesn’t have it. Affiliates can help you with that as well.

Affiliates (the ones that sell of course) are really very good web marketing experts – they experiment, test and measure until they find the best way to sell your products, while the primary risk is theirs: if they don’t make the sale, they don’t get paid. Affiliates can make the sales where you can’t.

So let the affiliates bring you that extra boost of sales that you wouldn’t normally get. The trick is not to rely on the big mass of affiliates that don’t do anything for the sale but to find and work with niche affiliates – the ones that target a market where your sales could do better.

Unfortunately, hard data on affiliate sales is hard to come by. All I have is plenty of anecdotal evidence that most small software companies could find better things to do with their time. If you listen to Mike Dulin’s sharewareradio.com podcast, pretty much every interview he asks about affiliates and the response is almost always negative.

I did approach a major chain of department stores some time back. It quickly became obvious that they wanted to royally screw me. That was retail, rather than affiliate sales though.

The point of this? Not finding something is not particularly good evidence of its non existence.

Joel not finding any good affiliates for his product, doesn’t prove that there could never be any. Especially if he was not really fishing at all, or fishing in the wrong waters (wrong affiliate program), or not using the right bait (not paying enough commission).

Ask yourself this – if a leading wedding company – let’s say for example a major chain of department story with their online wedding lists – wanted to be your affiliate, would you want them as an affiliate?

Thanks for this post; I asked about Avangate’s affiliate program on the BoS forum the other day, but it looks like no-one had anything they wanted to say about it.

We’re running a promotion with Bits du Jour sometime soon, and will probably use the Avangate program as a way of simplifying the book-keeping for that, but beyond that… almost everything I read agrees with your post: avoid affiliate programs.

On the other hand, one thought based on Brian’s comment above is that one could only offer affiliate status to selected people – say, the people who run opinion-forming blogs in your market, or to carefully-selected partners with complementary products. Presumably you (or some of your other readers) have tried that…? Or is that the “these people would link to you anyway” case?

Cheers,

Giles