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Dear Affiliate Manager,
It is coming up on the Holiday Seasons and the start of a New Year, and I thought it would be a good idea to start off on a good note in 2005. So, I have listed a few suggestions from several webmasters I hope you will see as a positive step to improving your fine program.
1 – Paying affiliates on time is important. We value timely payments just as much as you value receiving your pay on time.
2 – Responding to emails and phone messages could mean the difference between a sale, or even prime placement. You never know where your next whale is coming from.
3 – Telling one affiliate one thing, while telling another something different is a ticket to disaster. We talk to each other.
4 – Detailed stats that show which hits, downloads and deposits are coming from where, improve targeting of advertising campaigns. Not everyone will take advantage, but for those who do, it is a very helpful tool to have available.
5 – Programs that use certain form of “coercion” to “against” affiliates will see fewer webmasters taking them up on their offers: e.g. Extremely high minimums for payments, requiring a minimum number of new players each month before payments are made on existing players. These tactics are offensive, and narrow your exposure, when the idea is to increase the number of affiliates advertising for you.
6 – If an affiliate program promotes more than one casino, combines the negatives from one casino with the profit from another, and then carries over negatives, do you wonder why more webmasters don’t carry your casinos? Guess? Why bother sending depositing players somewhere that is basically throwing money down a hole, when you can send the player to a place where they will have the same games, get paid just as quickly, have as good a customer service, or better, and the webmaster makes money as well?
Webmasters have initial expenses to advertise your product, with no guarantee of return on that initial investment. That’s the name of the game. But making it harder to stay in business, where your product gets less exposure, hurts affiliate programs, the casinos they represent, and the webmaster as well.
Since the major search engines are now banning gambling advertising, I’m sure you know how difficult it is now to get targeted traffic. For this reason, webmasters are having to work a lot harder to send hits to you. Hits are more expensive, as well.
Don’t be surprised if webmasters narrow the number of casinos they advertise, to the ones they feel will make the most return on the money invested in advertising, and time spent gaining traffic.
Those that convert the best, will get the traffic. Those casinos that don’t seem to convert, for whatever reason, or whose results are hard to measure in dollars, will be moved to back pages, or be removed altogether.
This is an unfortunate part of any business. The products that don’t show a profit, don’t get prime placement, in your local retailer, or on the internet.
Paying on time, and making lower minimum payments, $100, for instance, gives the impression an affiliate program is working with affiliates, rather than making it harder on them to promote your product.
Hey, believe it or not, there are affiliate programs who, right now, have $500 minimum payments, advertise for more than 2 casinos, combine them the profits from one with the losses from another, and carry over negatives!! And then email webmasters asking why they can’t get front page spots!!?? Or any spot at all!! Others are always explaining why webmasters’ payments are always late! They were out sick, or there was an earthquake, or the dog ate the checks.
My Mom used to tell me that
“with a closed fist, nothing can get out…but nothing can get in either”.
4 – Detailed stats that show which hits, downloads and deposits are coming from where, improve targeting of advertising campaigns. Not everyone will take advantage, but for those who do, it is a very helpful tool to have available
That would be a great thing to see…. referrer stats CAN, and should be available… it would benefit the program as well as the affiliate. If you can see what works, you can expand on it!
Thank you, Professor.
There are many, if not most, affiliate programs who are excellent, and work very hard at working with affiliates, and are responsive as well. Those programs are to be commended for the excellent work they do. And are rewarded for their efforts.
I hope this post will be taken in the light it was intended, for programs who need to work on upgrading their programs.
For all those Affiliate Managers who have gone the extra mile to work with affiliates, to make money for everyone, I say, keep up the good work.
Happy Holidays to All!! :xmas:
I agree. Great post.
I would add one thing that she covers but I’d like to make sure the aff managers understand that
quote:
. Those casinos that don’t seem to convert, for whatever reason, or whose results are hard to measure in dollars, will be moved to back pages, or be removed altogether. unquote:this also means the casinos that always seem to mystifyingly have winners month in and month out. Those that have unlogical or unreasonable chargebacks, bonus handouts, and whatever else might be used as a reason for a bad bottom line. Because in the end, that’s what we look at.
I wish that were true with some of the sponsors. as Amature points out, hits are getting harder to come by, and I’ll add to that: especially quality hits.
so just because our traffic hits # might fall off, it doesn’t mean necessarily that we’ve lost all avenues for gaining traffic. In my case I’m having to filter much of my traffic before it reaches the sponsor and that means less hits sent but I’m still seeing about the same number of real players at the end of the month.
But for some reason I’m not seeing as good of income. It could be because I’ve just run into some rough seas but I felt it merited mention because what is going to happen is if things keep up in the same fashion is I’ll have little choice but to cut out those programs which are under-performing. So if for some reason your aff program’s bottom line payout is effected by hits sent rather than income earned I would re-think my structure to reflect what counts most; and that is income brought in, and not hits sent.
I would imagine there are many affs who get smaller numbers of traffic but it comes from the search engines which is the best traffic need I mention? So I think it would be a big mistake to do anything but pay on the income brought in and not on the quantity of hits sent.
I know that it could be a temptation because you see those big numbers and think what could be? To want to reward affs that are sending those bigger numbers moreso than you would reward an aff who is sending small quantity but fair quality traffic but it is a mistake.
Those bigger numbers are nothing more until they prove themselves at the bottom line.
Fantastic post Amateur. Nice work.
Hello to all,
I hope they read it over and over.
4 – Detailed stats that show which hits, downloads and deposits are coming from where, improve targeting of advertising campaigns. Not everyone will take advantage, but for those who do, it is a very helpful tool to have available
I find this one very important and very neglected. And stats in general are paramount.
In addition, the more comprehensive the statistics, the better your affiliates can perform.
Statistics are the only tools we have to measure our success with various campaigns with.
Congrats to Fortune, who went from lousy stats to some of the best in the industry. Playtech stats are generally nice, Focal Click and Vegas Partner as well as Vegas Affiliates and Income Access are nice.
Rtg stats are lousy, but by far not the worst. I hear RTG is working on better stats at this time.
Stats that show nothing but profits made are practically useless.
It would be nice , too, if all stats let you know details about players. Nothing personal, general things. Until recently I was promoting a casino – not really heavily – that regularly yielded nice activity, albeit a small income. I thought it must appeal to small players only as this went on for over a year. Like 70 deposits and 30 withdrawals a month, like that. Turns out this activity is 80% from a mini whale who likes to deposit constantly, small amounts, and withdraw a lot too. If I had known that, I would likely have launched a campaign more targeted to whales. As is, I just let it all be because there was little point going after such small players. The casino lost a chance at a campaign for all that time.
I can’t stress the importance of good, extensive statistics enough – to both programs and affiliates.
Very good post.
One thing I would ad is –
If you pay under a name different from your program name or your casino’s names, ie. Acme Inc., then please let us know what name’s to expect payment’s under! I think I’ve yet to ever get a pro-active email telling me what name to expect Neteller payments under, even when the name had absolutely no connection to the program in question.
I’d also ad further to Amateur’s point on not using coercive measures such as requiring signups to pay on old players already sent – In addition to being a violation of the original deal, these are not good for the trust of webmasters. If you are asking us to work for years for you to build up player bases, spend small fortunes on getting you traffic, we absolutely need to have 100% trust in you that we will get what are due in return.
Imposing new terms like this that violate our original agreements is thus an absolutely bad idea!
Great Post Amateur! Happy Holidays to you and your family.
:cheers: :cheers: :cheers:
Very nice post, Amateur. I enjoyed reading it
With any luck, affiliate managers representing programs with dubious practices will read it, also!
:guitar:Yes
Great Post Amateur!
I like it when the pot is stirred
BradDon’t stop reading yet! I’ve just been reminded of something that should be brought to the attention of the sponsors.
I just got off the phone with somebody from a sportsbook I bet at: or more likely, didn’t bet at; but that somehow got my phone number 😡
and then took it upon themselves to call and interrupt my dinner to tell me of all the advantages of betting with their service.
How do you suppose the ending to that little scenario came out?
So while I’m all for the casino calling and trying to get a player back and playing; don’t do it during hours that you know are likely going to be intrusive to someone’s regiment. Meaning don’t call when you know they might be asleep, eating, or during a day of worship.
I can’t speak for the world, but I feel pretty safe in saying that US citizens will not respond kindly to this sort of interruption.
The place that called me will now never get my business. I’m a grown person and I think I know when I want to gamble; and when I don’t. But that said; I wouldn’t hold it against a place for calling and making me an offer “I can’t refuse” but unless its guaranteed to make me rich, younger, or thinner: you’d better not call me when I’m eating or sleeping.
I realize its hard to know when these times are; but in my opinion you’re better off not calling at all if you can’t make the small effort to find out when a time is not going to be bothersome.
…. and oh ya, what everybody else said! :laughing:
ps, can anybody tell me what happened to the “quote”. I tried to use it earlier and couldn’t find it.
thanks.
The
Quote
is up there – it now looks like a piece of paper with writing on it and is at the end of the selection of fonts and bold and links etc, on the very right of it.
I rarely pick up the phone. I have a very private number only a handful of people have, that I always pick up, but the other one I only pick up when I feel like talking to someone.
After spending some 20 years with a phone on each ear I avoid the things like the plague.
Also, I can multitask on the computer through most everything – but not through a phonecall.
Trying to call me on the phone is pretty useless unless one tells my by email before hand that a call is coming.
Quote:Trying to call me on the phone is pretty useless unless one tells my by email before hand that a call is coming.Exactly, since the phone here is not hooked up until then
