What do you do, when something you are doing goes tits up or encounters a change in procedure? Specially if you are running a forum, or membership site?
Do you notify your members and/or affiliates?
It is a growing problem these days, and I wonder if many who run membership sites, who operate industry forums, even consider the ramifications, when they make wholesale changes to their program, without telling people.
Take a simple matter, like how you send out weekly updates to your affiliates. When you switch representatives, or take it over yourself, do you follow the same procedure, or do you alter it, and forget to tell the affiliates who receive those updates?
Lately I have noticed some big sponsors who are doing just that. They make changes in how their updates are handled, and forget to notify their affiliates, or at least, ignore many of them.
To begin with, let’s talk about affiliate communication.
How often do you check to insure your affiliate contact email is accurate and working?
If not, how do you communicate to them, that they need to update their records, so you can pay them, or do you simply keep the money and figure, tough shit for them?
If you do that, do you truly expect it to not get around? Don’t you realize, that just as you need members, to keep on making money, you need the affiliates to keep on pushing your site, because they will bring you a ton of new members. Piss them off, and word not only gets out to other webmasters, but odds are it will make the rounds among the consumers too.
Affiliate Marketing isn’t easy at the best of times, and I would say that many affiliates ask for way too much, but that is me. Still, when you send out weekly emails, you should keep to that schedule, not make it hit and miss.
Plus, you should keep the format, or at least notify ALL AFFILIATES of your changes, such as not having your promotional pictures in a folder, so it doesn’t get unzipped improperly.
It is rather sad, & funny too, at how here we are, living in the “information age” and yet communication between sponsors & affiliates & customers is at a low end of the priority scale. How you communicate to those you rely on, is even more important now, given the economic climate we are in. And yet, we seem to ignore that important facit of doing business, of marketing our products.
Feb 28th by Malcontent