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Recruiting good affiliates will be essential to our success, and we’d love to reward steady producers. What’s a VIP commission and is that something you manage through your affiliate network?

The technical definition for a VIP commission is that it’s a necessary evil. Basically, it’s a level of commission above the public offer to affiliates that is paid to the top performers.

This can take the form of a set increase by percentage or dollar amount, or it can come in tiers.

The topic of the VIP commission is a stumbling block for many affiliate programs. The reason is that they simply do not know it exists.

So they set about to project the costs of an affiliate program strictly on commission payouts at the base commission.

The result is that either you will have difficulty recruiting the big players (if you do not offer VIP commissions) or you will have thinner margins (if you didn’t bake the VIP commissions into your original numbers.

As far as expectations from affiliates, last year I asked over 140 affiliates, “Have you successfully requested an increase in commission from an affiliate manager?”

The result was that 40% said yes, they have gotten a raise in commission from an affiliate manager.

And now that the other 60% know it’s possible, you can count on them to start asking, too.
If you’d like a copy of the AffStat 2005 Special Report, which covers a variety of data points from my affiliate surveys, as well as candid opinions and suggestions from affiliates on how to improve affiliate programs, you can get a free copy when you opt-in to the Affiliate Summit Real Deal newsletter at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/questions.shtml.

Every day, there are stories in the headlines that can be related to a product or service that has an affiliate program. Sometimes the connections are more obvious than others.

For instance, on April 27, 2005, the Associated Press ran a story about how President Bush had just signed legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and foul language in movie DVDs.

The purpose of the bill is to give legal protection to a filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs.

Hollywood studios and directors had sued to stop the manufacture and distribution of such electronic devices for DVD players. According to the movies’ creators, changing the content, even when it is considered offensive, would violate their copyrights.

This legislation, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, creates an exemption in copyright laws to make sure companies selling filtering technology won’t get sued out of existence.

Anyhow, the technology in question with this article is called ClearPlay, and they have an affiliate program on Kolimbo.

Folks that criticized bill have argued it was aimed at helping ClearPlay, whose technology is used in some DVD players. ClearPlay sells filters for hundreds of movies that can be added to such DVD players for $4.95 each month. Hollywood executives maintain that ClearPlay should pay them licensing fees for altering their creative efforts.

Whatever side you are on with this issue, it’s been in lots of papers and gotten lots of attention. If only you mentioned the ClearPlay affiliate link in a newsletter or blog to capitalize on the news, you could have made some sales.

Keep an eye on what’s in the headlines and figure out a way to tie it into earning commissions.

This past Monday, I joined Ryan Erwin (Oakley) and Carolyn Tang (CheapTickets, Orbitz) for an affiliate marketing panel at Ad:Tech. The panel, expertly moderated by Peter Figueredo (NETexponent), was billed as an overview of “best practices in establishing, growing, optimizing, and policing affiliate programs.”

It was a good discussion, as Ryan, Carolyn, and myself provided our divergent rationales for doing what we do with the programs we manage.

According to Jeff Molander’s second hand reporting of the event, “The same-old debates and issues seem to be discussed… (and he) didn’t miss much.”

Certainly, there are some cornerstone issues, such as recruiting methods, inhouse vs. outsourced management, etc that were covered, but there was a lot of meat in the talks.

Not only were fresh Jupiter and AffStat data points used to frame the issues, but the topics were approached from widely varying angles. Personally, I think the session was rather instructive, and the large crowd that stayed beyond the end time seemed to concur.

Brad Waller wrote a pretty comprehensive recap on the panel for the official Ad:Tech Blog.

Brad touched on our debates of affiliate program size (boutique vs. behemoth), ppc trademark bidding, and more. All items that companies in attendance are facing - the sorts of contempory issues that haven’t found solutions at most companies.

At the conclusion of the session, as the woman from Ad:Tech was waving frantically for us to wind it up, we all gave our two cents on the future of affiliate marketing.

I mentioned how I thought RSS would play a prominant role in the future - where affiliates would leverage the technology to serve up contextually relevant ads.

Lo and behold, CNET reported the next day, “This week, Google spawned a version of AdSense that allows publishers to send a text or banner advertisement alongside syndicated content using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Atom, Google’s adopted format.”

It reminds me of my undergrad days at the University of Maryland at College Park, when Sergey Brin used to borrow my notes. Just kidding, fellow Terp.

Adware purveyor WhenU raised $20 million in private equity through ABS Capital Partners, according to Red Herring. The firm said it would use the moneys to flesh out its marketing and distribution efforts, an effort it already had underway as part of its effort to distinguish itself from spyware companies.

The $20 million may be short of its initial funding ambitions. A little less than a year ago, WhenU publicly sought financing of about $50 million, most of which would have gone as a payout to company founders, with $20 million going to fund operations.

WhenU has been aggressively moving more toward the mainstream of advertising since it hired former About.com CEO Bill Day in September. These efforts have been noticed prominently since.

Complete article at http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2005/04/27/adware_firm_whenu_wins_funding/

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Wilson Internet Rocklin, CA

Editor: I’ve long encouraged merchants to have affiliate links point to their domains to raise PageRank for the site. But the situation isn’t so clear these days. Here is an excerpt from my Report on Affiliate Management Software 2005. You’ll see the complexity - some of this is quite technical. But it is vitally important for merchants using affiliate programs to understand it. More detail is found in the Report itself.

In the last several years merchants have become savvy about search engine optimization (SEO). A site’s rank in the search engines — for a small company site, at least — can be significantly elevated by obtaining more incoming links to the website. An affiliate program is an effective way to do this — but only if the affiliate links themselves actually point to your domain.

Article continued at http://www.wilsonweb.com/art/ads/affiliate_links.htm

The premier affiliate marketing conference is launching a new affiliate marketing newsletter that will feature news, top offers and resources.

We (Missy Ward and me) are bringing together writers that work on the front lines of affiliate marketing to give an insiders view of what’s going on.

No blurring of the lines between advertisers and editorial - this newsletter is for affiliate marketers and by affiliate marketers.

It’s called the Affiliate Summit Real Deal. If you subscribe this month, you will get a free copy of the AffStat 2005 Special Report.

This report features data collected from affiliates for the AffStat 2004 Report, as well as candid opinions of affiliates on a variety of issues from 2004 and 2005.

Subscribe to the newsletter at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/questions.shtml

Merchants in KowaBunga! Technologies’ Kolimbo network are receiving a note this week to help in their anti-spyware efforts.

According to the announcement, KowaBunga! has been working with some of their merchants and third parties to help identify spyware within different programs.

One of their merchants, DishPronto.com, has taken the lead in this effort, and they want to encourage the the MYAP powered affiliate programs to consider following that lead.

Essentially, they have added language to their affiliate agreement that not only warns potential spyware affiliates not to join, but offers honest affiliates a bounty — up to the amount of commissions due a spyware affiliate — for evidence that a spyware affiliate is in their program.

Here’s the sample language they are providing for use in affiliate agreements:

SPYWARE AND OTHER PARASITES: Any affiliate suspected of a relationship, formal or informal, with any provider of spyware or parasitic software (as judged by any interference with the operation by design of MERCHANT and/or its partner sites) is subject to punitive actions by MERCHANT, without notice, including but not limited to: suspension of affiliate account; termination of affiliate account; withholding of payments to affiliate; and public notification of affiliate’s suspected malfeasance. MERCHANT encourages affiliates to report suspicions of such relationships; and, should substantial proof, as judged by MERCHANT, be provided, MERCHANT reserves the right to assign a value equal to unpaid monies earned by the offending affiliate (or a part thereof) to the reporting affiliate as a bounty.

KowaBunga! is encouraging all of their merchants to consider trying this method by amending their own affiliate agreements.

If they add the appropriate language to their agreement, the program will be listed as “Anti-Spyware” in the Kolimbo network, meaning affiliates will immediately know their stance on this issue.

Hopefully, affiliates will put their marketing where their mouths are and support the clean programs.

Contact KowaBunga! for more details.