Help the affiliates help you!
I recently did a research on what software vendors are doing in order to sell through affiliates. I looked on over 400 websites that sell software. After putting all the data together, the first thing that stands out is that most of the vendors haven’t implemented the minimum requirements in order to affiliate efficiently.
Most surely they would like to sell more through affiliates, but this isn’t going to “just” happen. Either they don’t have as many affiliates as they would like or they don’t help their current ones sell more.
Here are the key findings of my personal research:
- most of the vendors (55%) have an affiliate sign up page;
- just a couple of them (5%) are using a special email for affiliate matters;
- very few software vendors (5.5%) help their affiliates with marketing materials (e.g. banners, other web graphics);
- more than half of all software vendors don’t have any PAD files or they don’t update them with the affiliate section.
Vendors must understand they have to help their affiliates sell more through simple, yet effective ways. After all, it’s the vendors’ interest to get more revenue from affiliates, isn’t it?
Tags: affiliate network, Affiliates, affiliates marketing, Avangate, Software Business
December 31st, 2008 at 1:32 am
Hi Cristi,
I’m a new software author to Avangate and I’ll be plugging into the affiliate network in January. Your article or something else, could be even more helpful if it also itemized the different graphic sizes/aspect ratios and such that the affiliates ‘prefer’. Also, I expect the software author will discover more and more effective messaging content over time. Having an easy means to alert affiliates or propagate such improvements seems an apt implementation goal too.
May 27th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
[...] time ago I wrote a post in which I advised software vendors to help the affiliates help them. Things changed for the better in these few months that have passed and I’m really [...]