Fashion Brand (16)
I have a fast fashion women's shoe brand that I'm trying to build an affiliate program that would be attractive to affiliates. We can be very aggressive in the payout for the people that help us get started and help build out the program. Please reply with suggestions or DM if you are interested.
The company is growing quickly and we are also looking to hire digital marketing experts, media buyers, email marketing experts, etc so please contact us.
Instead of asking people to PM, you should just say what the offer is and how much you are paying. If you want to attract affiliates, you need to think like an affiliate.
Exactly as cmdeal said : you want the affiliates, so do the extra step needed to reach out to them. Don't expect the affiliates to reach out to you, they don't know anything about you or your products and why they should promote them. You need to sell yourself.
The products are women's shoes. I'm asking what will be attractive to affiliates. Like my posts says I'm looking for suggestions on what it will take for someone to be interested.
You are very vague. Why would any experienced affiliate spend time on your offer when you think you shouldn't give details?
I think it's fair that if you need the people, you have to go the extra mile. You are expecting everyone else to do so, not gonna happen usually.
I've done the same a bunch of times, never got any business going with that sort of phrasing and attitude. :P
I've read alot of posts and it seems like alot of people are trying to find a good program or offer that they can make money off of. I'm not experienced enough to come up with something that will be attractive enough or I would've already done that and made the offer. What I am asking for is someone to say this is what it will take for me to be interested. I'm saying that I can be very flexible even sacrificing short term profits which would be to the affiliates benefit for them helping me set this up. I am not looking for a generic offer that I can copy from someone else and hope that people are interested. I want to work with an affiliate to customize an offer.
Step 2. Network 24/7 during the event days.
Step 3. Test out a few potential partnerships.
Step 4. ????
Step5. Profit.
I think it's a better setting than the forum and the initiative must still come from you. What is unclear in what you can offer? You are basically saying that you have a product but don't know how to sell it. Many people are in this situation but nobody will help you only after that statement. It's better to make a bad offer than to make no offer at all in my limited experience
At least you get significant feedback. For example, it would be better to say you have $10k budget at $1CPL... Even if that is totally off for your actual offer.
Another pro for AWA is that you can talk many many many details and perhaps do a JV for this
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
Step 2. Network 24/7 during the event days.
Step 3. Test out a few potential partnerships.
Step 4. ????
Step5. Profit.
I think it's a better setting than the forum and the initiative must still come from you. What is unclear in what you can offer? You are basically saying that you have a product but don't know how to sell it. Many people are in this situation but nobody will help you only after that statement. It's better to make a bad offer than to make no offer at all in my limited experience
At least you get significant feedback. For example, it would be better to say you have $10k budget at $1CPL... Even if that is totally off for your actual offer.
Another pro for AWA is that you can talk many many many details and perhaps do a JV for this
OP, I know you are new to the forum, and the comments to your post may seem harsh at first, but everyone is trying to be helpful.
If you want to attract affiliates and superaffiliates, you first need to sell to them.
Why should they take the risk and cost to promote your offer?
There are gazillions of shoe manufacturers in the world.
What makes your product or offer any different or better?
Why should an affiliate spend money on advertising to promote your shoes when they could be using the same money on a offer for much higher margin products who can offer to pay out $250 per conversion, for example.
If you want affiliates, you need to sell to them. And to sell to anyone, you need to understand them.
Follow manu's advice, go to Affiliate World Asia and meet some people in the industry. You will come away with a much better idea of what to do and how to work with affiliates.
Thank you for the feedback. I don't think the posts are harsh I think its just some confusion on what I'm asking for. We have good product that we have been able to sell to major retailers and brick and mortar stores very well, we are trying to build our online business. We are a VC backed company so we have a big enough budget. We are trying to figure out what would be attractive. Maybe $10 per order or maybe 30% of sales but not sure if that is enough to get people interested thats why I said I can be flexible and aggressive in a deal. We are not asking anyone to spend any money or take any risks until they feel comfortable with our agreement.
Why don't you post some photos of your product, and then folks can give you much better advice.
In the affiliate marketing model, the affiliate takes on all the media buying risk and cost. Most larger affiliates will be spending about $5-$10 million a year of their own money on buying ads. So affiliates will rationally gravitate to those offers that either have high payouts or will convert well or ideally both.
Just adding my thoughts here in an effort to help as its very clear your are looking to learn how to develop your affiliate program and what would attract affiliates.
The tips suggested by the other members are worth listening to.
What would be helpful for us, is if we knew more about you, who your company is, what your goals and focus market is? If I am to guess based on your username, you are associated with guiltysoles.com - creative name and trendy.
It appears you already have an affiliate program in place, perhaps still in its infancy. The majority of the audience on this forum is heavily split into two halves.. one group are eager to learn and are not making much money.. and the others are much more experienced and typically approach this as a full scale business model.
Assuming that website is yours, the affiliate program offers a 10% commission on the sale of your products such as womens shoes, etc. I'm not entirely confident that our audience is the best location to recruit they type of affiliates you seek but perhaps so. We are typically seeking high payout or high volume offers that have large scale potential. Small commissions on shoes and similar products are not very enticing, atleast to me.
Attending marketing tradeshows would be a good starting point to further evolve your affiliate program but let me also suggest another option.
There's a large startup that has huge funding and works specifically in the fashion industry. They essentially broker relationships between brands and thousands of fashion bloggers, stylist, etc.
Check them out, I think that may be a good option for you to explore: www.rewardstyle.com
Andrew
mrpayne, thank for. you summarized it very accurately. Yes the site is guiltysoles.com and yes we've hired someone that help us setup an affiliate program through pepperjam to attract mostly fashion bloggers. It was there recommendation to do 10% which I know is not very attractive to expert affiliate marketers that are on this site and that's why I'm willing to offer more.
We've been to some conferences and will be attending more but wanted to see if we could learn from the site and what is why I posted.
Also, we've already been in contact with rewardstyle but they run purely on a CPM model and don't really do anything to help optimize for conversions.
Hey there,
I guess you are relatively new to this. It probably will be easier if you come to a conference like Affiliate World Asia and speak to people first hand and in much greater detail.
But in the meantime, let me give you a brief crash course:
There are "mommy bloggers," people with large Facebook or other social following, people with niche website for SEO, and people who pursue paid traffic for a living. STM caters primarily to this latter group. This group by far generates massive amounts of revenue and is responsible for similarly massive amounts of spend. The top 10 affiliates on STM have probably generated over $100 million on affiliate commissions alone.
2. Paid traffic marketers are like mercenaries.
They go where the money is. Most affiliates will draw the line somewhere on products or service they will not promote, but there are also affiliates who will prmote anything. Indeed, if I am being honest, some of the largest affiliates have promoted products or service that they probably would not want their families knowing about.
3. Paid traffic marketers are looking for scale x high conversion rates x high commission
It is difficult to find products or services that fit all three, but these are the critieria that they will try to maximise. This is why many affiliates tend to gravitate to "pay per install, "pay per lead"" offers or "continuity products". In a paid per install or pay per lead offers, the consumer does not need to take out their credit card and punch in a whole bunch of numbers. In continuity products, the affiliate gets paid a very high commission, because the product being sold is like a monthly subscription so even if the company does not make money on the first sale, it is expected to do so after subsequent months.
Right now, your product seem to rate so so on scalability, low on conversion, and ??? on payout. Given your existing business model, there may not be much you can do about the scalability and conversion rate, so the real lever you can play with is your payout. But unless your VCs are willing to support a negative profit land grab, your payout will be limited by the amount of margin you make on your product.
Assuming you run your own factories, I assume your costs per SKU for one of your $29.99 shoes is about $4-5 if manufactured abroad. Adding in an extra $5 or so for overhead and average shipping costs of about $3 per SKU will leave you with about $15 or so to play with, or about 50% of the retail price of your product.
Just by virtue of an example, if you offer affiliates 50% of the retail basket of a purchase for 1 year, you will definitely get a lot of affiliate interest and you would easily double your sales. This may or may not be the right business decision for you however.
As I mentioned in #2, affiliates are like mercenaries, and they don't really care about anything except for how much money they will make. So unless you manage your affiliate programme very carefully, you can potentially harm your brand, reputation, set yourself up for fraudulent affiliate commissions, and end up "double paying" for purchases that would have happened anyways without affiliate intervention (e.g. via cookie stuffing, brand bidding, and the like) This is a very sophisticated crowd, and it is not kid's play, so you really need to know what you are doing, or you can lose millions of dollars very quickly.
Just to get started you probably should read some of Ben Edelman's papers and presentations. And before you really set up your affiliate programme and target large volume affiliates, you probably should get some advice on setting it up properly from someone who knows what they are doing.
http://www.benedelman.org/news/050712-1.html
http://www.benedelman.org/news/022712-1.html
http://www.benedelman.org/news/022712-1.html
http://www.benedelman.org/affiliates/
cmdeal thank-you for that huge knowledge bomb!
I have only just started to gather information on
how to start an affiliate program for the company I'm working for...
Is there a well known platform for setting up an affiliate marketing program?
that works well with the types of tracking necessary to optimize a campaign properly
and could possibly prevent this scenario--
"set yourself up for fraudulent affiliate commissions, and end up "double paying" for purchases that would have happened anyways without affiliate intervention (e.g. via cookie stuffing, brand bidding, and the like) "
This thread is slowly turning into a very good one. Great feedback! I guess starting a vague topic isn't that bad ;-), at least it triggers some big boys to crawl out of their attics! 
Originally Posted by clickspark
Both are billed based on the traffic amount you route through them, with some fixed monthly payment.
Some networks also use in-house coded solutions, but for a starting network, it's a better idea to pick one of the two I mentioned.
More info on their sites :
http://getcake.com/
http://www.hasoffers.com/
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