Avon is a multi-million dollar personal care company. Part of the reason they reached such powerful stature is because of their unique sales method. Other personal care product manufacturers required a vendor to have a brick and mortar store and to purchase units up front. Avon recruited housewives to walk around their neighborhoods with sample cases and brochures and sell to their friends and neighbors. This silent force took Avon to the top with productivity and sheer numbers. They have thousands and thousands of non-salaried salespersons and have no need to spend one dime on television advertising.
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"Pleasing your members is hard, but you have to have some members to impress today's adult webmaster/affiliate." |
The whole concept of affiliate marketing is kind of like Avon for the Internet. One adult company can have thousands of webmasters promoting their products on a commission-only basis. This arrangement is a win/win for the sponsor and the affiliate. The sponsor gets an unlimited sales force they only have to pay when that force is productive. The affiliate can offer products they don't have to buy first and can work at their discretion.
For the paysite owner, it's important to know when to start an affiliate program. The theory behind paying webmasters to sell your program sounds good on paper, but its application is another matter. Just because you have the chance to lure webmasters your way doesn't mean they'll come to you or stay with you.
This whole sponsor/affiliate thing is old in cyber years. Flying the banner of paysites to make money is the established norm. An adult webmaster can sign up for a per-membership commission program, try it out for a couple of weeks and dump it if it's not making them money.
If a few checks are late from your program or your statistics server gets a virus, you can expect word will be spread amongst current and future affiliates. Remember if you open an affiliate program, you suddenly become an employer. You have customers from your paysite members and your webmasters are your contract laborers.
Each one of these elements is an awesome responsibility by itself. If you've never dealt with memberships and shopping carts and customer service and chargebacks, it would be unwise to add an affiliate program to the mix. To start a webmaster affiliate program is a good idea, but not for everyone.
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Commerce is serious business to everyone involved. If a once great product has lost quality, a vendor will look for an alternative product. If you have a paysite that's not getting decent traffic and sign-ups, an adult webmaster will find this out.
Some will go as far as to sign up for your three-day trials or even buy full memberships to research the quality of your product. They will ask you how many members you have and how many are repeat members. They will study the traffic going to and from your site through their tracking software and if you are a fledgling paysite, they may not want to take a chance with you. Your customers are more interested in whether your site is operational and has the content they paid for. Pleasing your members is hard, but you have to have some members to impress today's adult webmaster/affiliate.
An arrangement with adult webmasters to pay them a percentage for promoting your paysite is also costly. You will need special servers or a third-party tracking service just to keep up with your affiliate's referrer codes. You'll have a whole new set of tax laws to abide by because you'll be paying contract employees. You'll need to spend on advertising so adult webmasters can find you. You'll probably even create a BBS and small webmaster's area to help your affiliates. You will have to pay the bandwidth costs of the traffic your cyber sales force sends to your tour. You'll have to eat the fees and penalties from chargebacks and cheaters. You'll find hidden costs in as many corners as you would with a paysite alone.
The sponsor/affiliate concept is not new. Avon did it. Fuller Brush, Amway, Mary Kay and Tupperware do it to this day. If you have a good product, satisfied customers and a steady success record, you should definitely expand your reach. If you are just opening a paysite, you have a lot on your plate. Before you start dividing your money pie, you better make sure it's fully cooked.