“Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission” – Fred Allen
I’ve been spending a lot of time poring over advertising figures recently, something I abhor – a process of realizing that you’re being fucked, either deliberately or by incompetence, that there will be no orgasm and if there is – it’s merely evidence of fiduciary rape.
Affiliate programs aren’t bad, but they are risky. Websites using them place responsibility for their marketing with affiliates (that’s you and me) in return for a promise of shared wealth when sales are made. They have nothing to lose as they’ll only every pay you a portion of what they’ll make from each customer. You have everything to lose – if for some reason you can’t make sales it’s your pockets that will remain empty, your time and traffic that’s been wasted.
Don’t let the pictures of BMW’s and Hummers fool you (why they think I want a Hummer that’s not delivered by a Natasha from the Ukraine is beyond me). Affiliate programs make them richer than you. Content is king.
For those wanting to dip there toes into the water (and you can make a lot of money from affiliate advertising if you get it right) here are a few tips for the novice/confused/poor adult website affiliate:
Use more than one program at a time.
Affiliate advertising programs make fraud easy so the wise person has to assume some fraud is taking place. The only measure you have is being able to compare the performance of programs relative to each other so it’s something you have to do. If you put all your eggs in one basket it’s impossible to know if you’re being screwed. However attractive the deal ($150 per sign up May! IT’S MADNESS!) don’t give them everything you have.
Check who’s doing the billing.
When you join a program you’ll be able to see statistics for your traffic and earnings. Often these pages will be part of an off-the-shelf system run by a major billing company. This is a good thing. Big billing companies have nothing to gain from participating in fraud on behalf of a website. If the program’s being administered by the people who stand to profit from it the risks are far higher – elections are decided by those who count the votes.
Check the supplemental materials.
The primary ways to promote websites is via free content (i.e. photosets and videoclips) and advertising banners. Check to see what’s offered by the programs your in and how often material is updated. Maintaining an affiliate program is a lot easier than maintaining a website, if it’s not being done efficiently you can assume the websites being promoted suck at least as hard as the system you’re accessing. Anything that smacks of poor professionalism will cost you money.
Grade their website(s).
You’re going to send people to check out a website that’ll only pay you if people are compelled to become customers. You can get a strong sense of how likely this is by looking at the website in question yourself. Does it look good? Is it easy to navigate? Would you pay for it? If you’re not excited enough to open your wallet – why would other people be? You can only get people to their store, at that point your income depends on their ability to present their product.
Know the system.
All affiliate programs work the same way. In return for sending a company a customer they pay you a kickback. Your slice can be a flat fee, a percentage of the purchase or a percentage of all a customer’s purchases from that point forward. Other programs promise to pay ‘per click’ but this is still a percentage of purchase as they’ll only pay anything is a set percentage of your ‘clicks’ become customers.
You can get screwed in two ways. Firstly they can claim that you don’t generate any sales at all and pay you nothing. This is pretty stupid and unlikely to happen. They assume you’re measuring them against their competitors and if they were to burn you that hard, you’d stop sending people their way and they’d lose out. Far more likely is that they’ll ’skim’ your traffic, paying you for fewer sales than you in fact generate. Fraud of that type’s almost impossible to detect but, if you always run a number of programs simultaneously and constantly ditch your poorest performers, you’ll at least know that the people treating you worst aren’t unduly rewarded. There are honest, profitable, programs out there, they just take time to find. Honesty’s one of the reasons programs run by billing companies (who would be insane to ’skim’) are easier to trust than others.
I hope that’s useful primer material. If there’s interest I might share some data regarding affiliate programs for adult sites that I know work well from experience. If that sounds useful let me know. Otherwise good luck and email me about any great programs you think I might not know about (I want that hummer).
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Thank you VERY much for posting this. I’ve been checking out affiliate programs over the weekend to use with my new site and I was totally lost. This helped me out a bit. =)
One of the most difficult things I found when researching affiliate programs was the restriction against adult sites. I really wanted to use Google, since all the forums praise it and just about every mainstream blog I read uses it. Unfortunately, I was not deemed acceptible to run their ads. (I should have a T-shirt printed up that reads “Too hot for Google”) Ditto for Yahoo and one or two other big ones I found. Oh sure, there are a million site-specific programs out there, but I really liked the idea of the contextual ads. I’m probably just one of the many that have been dazzled by the latest craze, though. In any case, I eventually stumbled on AdBrite, which offers contextual ads and allows adult sites. I’ve been getting decent click-throughs, but it’s nothing to get excited about yet.
Maybe narrowing down my advertising to some banners for a handful of specific trusted sites is the best way to go, after all. I’ve found that my most successful campaign has been from ads directly placed for good old Adult Friend Finder, as opposed to the nameless contextual ads AdBrite is serving. AFF offers excellent marketing tools and better compensation. My earnings on AFF have been about 6 times those of AdBrite.
“If there’s interest I might share some data regarding affiliate programs for adult sites that I know work well from experience. If that sounds useful let me know.”
I’d like to meet the person who’d say no. Not publicly, now, that I can see. But call me very interested.
Mia – glad to be of help.
Miss Knees – Contextual ads (Yahoo!, Google, Adbrite etc…) tend to pay very poorly and Google are the worst – not even declaring their revenue split. Adult sites are discriminated against but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The difference with Adbrite is that they allow people to buy ads directly on your site too – I should blog on this…
Sabrina – Okay. I’ll blog on that too.
Sam–
In another life (or so it seems) I was the creator and owner of a small game website (www.pocket-monkey.com) — I have since sold the majority share and maintain the status of rockstar emeritus. I ended up choosing google ads for a couple of reasons.
For us they gave the ads that were most in context
They allowed sites with small user bases (Pocket-Monkey is currently at 1000 users and growing slowly, for the time period I am talking about less than 500)
The ads were non obnoxious
They paid us the most
Let me elaborate on the latter. I tried a number of ad affilates (including AdBrite, well then known as GarageAds). We would get very few ads in context, and a lot of “you ad here” which doesn’t inspire confidence.
Why was this the case? Because the site was very low on content and very high on function. The whole purpose was to allow people to connect with one another and play a variety of turn based games. Google’s engine did the best job of finding ads that were relevent.
Now did they make a lot of money? No, not at all. I cannot speak to the companies current financials, but they covered about 20% of the operating budget (and remember this is with a stable population of less than 500). When you are paying it all out of pocket that was a nice thing.
I agree with your basic conculsions. There were things not to like about Google’s system. As you mention they don’t declare the split, and they put you under a hefty gag order. They especially aren’t right for sex related sites. But sometimes they are the right option. Like so many things YMMV
you know, you should do a blog about adult affiliations and this kind of things..
I’m a newbie myself, and I’ve joined many programs that are pretty unuseful. I must say that – like many other babeloggers – I don’t want to be big. For me It’s just an hobby, I don’t want to work with adult sites fulltime.
1. Most of them don’t give any content (sometimes just banners – and I hate them)
2. Many gives content only to the good guys, the ones that makes sells (but how I’m supposed to make sells if you are giving me shit to promote you?
)
3. Most of the sites don’t make it clear what content you’ll have before the subscription
So, before finishing this long and boring comment, the three systems that I love :
1. Met-Art
2. Femjoy
3. Twistys
Jock – I’ll tell you my take on Adbrite today. Kudos on making money though – most don’t.
Banana – You’re certainly right about content working for webmasters. There’s a chicken and egg problem and many sites don’t realise that giving stuff away is really the key to the kingdom.
The problem with recommending sponsors is what works for me may not work for you, and vice versa. I’ve had webmasters sign up for some of my best programs only to see crappy results. You have to pick sponsors that work for your specific content and traffic. E.g., if you run a natural and hairy site don’t sign up for a bunch of glamour sponsors.
There are so many wrinkles to the process that I’m hesitant to set out rules, but I will say this: if you run the same generic Czech hottie galleries everyone else does you’re going to be sorely disappointed by the results. Think creatively. Break some rules. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Put yourself in the shoes of the jaded wanker who’s seen just about everything. Then, with luck and perseverance, you might get to cash some sizable checks.
banana — If you want better content simply contact the sponsor’s affiliate rep and explain your situation. They are usually very happy to help you make money for them.