Oops, I’ll Take That Back
The longer you practice affiliate marketing, the more recommendations you would have made. The thing is, time has a way of changing things, even the best stuff.
- You could have ‘fallen out of love’ with a product
- Found something even better
- The product’s seller did something bad and you decide not to support them anymore
- The sellers did not do something and you feel you can’t recommend people to them because of that
- The sellers close the affiliate program
- And hundreds of other reasons
It is a good idea to schedule in an affiliate program audit every so often. This way you can weed out the bad programs or the ones you just don’t want to support anymore. You can tell people why if the reason is a compelling one that your readers should know about (and create more content from that).
Would people still buy from you after that? I believe that is a resounding yes. I think people are looking for honest feedback. They understand that sometimes things go wrong or we have a change of views that cause us to ‘flip flop’. That’s life. Surely you have changed your mind on a variety of things over the years. As long as you are genuine and transparent about it, they would probably place more weight to your recommendations in future.
But how do you ‘take back’ all those affiliate links? Ah! Good question. That is one reason why you should use redirected links so you can ‘save’ that traffic. I’ll show you how to do an affiliate redirect on this blog next week.
Meanwhile… when will you schedule your affiliate program audit?
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Did kind of an audit this summer.
Findings? Too many to list here, but here are a few:
a) merchant changed layout of his site and included lots of adsense. My sales dropped and I dropped the merchant. I found a new merchant that performs even better than the old one.
b) Recognized that an affiliate program didn’t produce anymore – checked the stats page of the merchant and received only errors from their DB. Numerous inquiries per email and fax were not answered -> switched to an other merchant – sales picking up again.
c) found a leak in a branded affiliate site. Contacted the merchant and problem was solved within two hours.
Conclusion: I will track the affiliate programs I promote more agressively and do a full audit every 6 month.
Congrats Santa! Isn’t it amazing how much money we could lose? I’m glad you found those out and are profiting from your recommendations once more.
Hy lynette,
just had an other encounter.
A merchants offer that was supplementing one of my sites very good, has stopped his participation in an affiliate network. The network announced this to the affiliates with about 2 weeks notice and also sent reminders to remove the links. Good communication to prevent you sending traffic to a non monetizing link.
Lesson learned from this:
#1) have an email address that receives all the mails from your different affiliate networks and constantly monitor this.
#2) have an alternative merchant as fall back position or alternate two offers, so that when one removes his offer, you are left with an other.
@Santa, excellent tips. Those affiliate emails definitely need to be monitored. Not only for bad news like this but man, some affiliate programs are active, give you tons of things to promote and talk up. I just opened my affiliate email today and there were more freebies to promote. Very sweet. Thank you for sharing.