New South-African Affiliate Network

[divanbower]

I have a question for all South-African affiliates...

How great is the need for a fresh new affiliate network, with more campaign diversity, quicker payouts, that works with the affiliates to grow them and some of course brand new technology that the South-African online community has never been given to make use of in the past??

Sounds good? Let me know your thoughts.

All the best,
Divan

[Dave A]

Competition is always good

Fresh and new always scares me though. I regret I probably wouldn't be an early adopter myself.

[adrianh]

There was a time when KubusKultuur was fresh and new - remember the vrot milk story...

[Norri]

I think it would take a LOT of hard work and a LOT of marketing spend to get the right offers on there. That will attract the affiliates and, from there, you should be golden. But, of course, attracting the right offers requires having a network of affiliates to promote them. It's a catch-22.

I for one would love to promote good music- and guitar-related offers on guitarforum.co.za but the local shops (Marshall Music, Bothners, etc) just aren't using affiliate networks. The traffic is there, us affiliates are just waiting for the offers!

(Same goes for PuppiesForSale.co.za - I'm ranked #1 for a wad of related keywords, get 1000s of visitors a day but, with nothing decent to promote, I'm left figuring out my own ways to make money from the site.)

What I'm saying is: If you build it, and let me know about it, I will come. There are others like me out there who have tried TrafficSynergy, OfferForge, ClickBank, etc, who would also be interested.

PS: Facebook would probably be a good way to reach us.

[divanbower]

Hi Norri,

Thank you for your reply. This is exactly what I want to hear and I value your input greatly.

A lot of business are yet to be educated to a degree of real understanding how powerful affiliate marketing is, especially if worked on a pay per performance basis and that is exactly what we are going to do. The obstacles in the South-African market are no different to those of any other developing market that I have stepped into in the past and you are right that if it is not approached correctly A LOT of marketing spend would be needed.

Saying this, our team is rather well connected with merchants, brands and financial institutes which opens up the game for us in terms of having a network with diverse, branded and niche specific offers to promote.

You as well as the other SA affiliates to which I have been lucky enough to speak to feel pretty much the same and facing the same issues. I would be very interested in knowing what you are currently doing with your visitors and how you are planning on turning those visits in to hard currency, do you capture any of the data from these visitors i.e. collecting email addresses for a news letter or special offers?

The good news I do have for you is... It's built.

You also mentioned that a good way to reach SA affiliates would be facebook... if you would be so kind please send me URL's for these pages as I would love to connect with more and more SA affiliates and marketeers.

Best regards,
Divan

[Norri]

Hi Divan,

Having a network like the one you describe will help a lot, I'm sure. As long as it's not all insurance - I will be happy :P That's one of my pet peeves with most affiliate offers in SA: it's all for insurance.

I'm currently selling advertising on www.guitarforum.co.za on a once-off basis. You pay in advance, your ad runs for a set time. I'll soon be moving to a sponsorship basis as the current model is unsustainable and requires a lot of effort from my partner and me to market it.

As for www.puppiesforsale.co.za, I currently don't have any monetisation strategy but have tried a bunch, including building newsletters, etc. I'm moving that to a subscription based thing as well.

The trouble I've found with both sites is banner-blindness. Unless the affiliate offers are tightly matched to what's displayed on the page, they're irrelevant and get "turned off" in people's minds quickly. So that's an interesting hurdle to overcome. Something like AdSense's matching would help here but, for that to work, you'd need quite an intelligent system AND a wide range of offers in many micro-niches.

Example: If someone is looking at beagle puppies, an ad for a beagle-specific book or training DVD (they do exist) would convert a lot better than a generic training book or DVD (or accessory).

Example 2: A forum thread about custom-built stratocasters would do well to advertise a supplier of custom parts or a book on the topic of hot-rodding a guitar. That sort of matching, I believe, is the key to success. AdSense would be perfect except that there are just not enough SA advertisers to make that work yet.

Hope this helps.

[Dave A]

That's one of my pet peeves with most affiliate offers in SA: it's all for insurance.

My pet peeve with SA affiliate offers is they do not offer anything close to what a conversion is worth. If your marketing budget is 10% of turnover, don't offer 0.5% of a sale as the affiliate payout for a conversion

The trouble I've found with both sites is banner-blindness. Unless the affiliate offers are tightly matched to what's displayed on the page, they're irrelevant and get "turned off" in people's minds quickly. So that's an interesting hurdle to overcome. Something like AdSense's matching would help here but, for that to work, you'd need quite an intelligent system AND a wide range of offers in many micro-niches.

Maybe you should try Skimlinks or Viglink.

[Norri]

Good point Dave, the low payouts can be pretty sad.

As for the link thingies, my members will KEEL me :P That and they're mostly for non-SA offers anyway ;(

I do appreciate the suggestions, though, thank you

[Dave A]

As for the link thingies, my members will KEEL me :P That and they're mostly for non-SA offers anyway ;(

Much the same reason I don't use them on TFSA
I would have thought it would be more tolerable on a music related site, though - in this age of music downloads.

What I do like about the two programs is the automated content matching, which you rightly point out is critical.

Matching content to affiliate banner ads is why I had gone to so much trouble setting up DFP to identify specific pages a few years ago. But after much experimenting I couldn't find a single affiliate product that paid out enough to warrant all the extra work that goes with maintaining an affiliate program manually. In fact I didn't find one that produced a better eCPM than Adsense full stop

[divanbower]

Dave, from what I have seen in regards to SA affiliate offers you are very very right... payouts are actually scandalous and this is something that will have to change, this will happen, the industry and medium is growing, it will start taking on to international practices and business owners and merchants will start realizing the power of online pay per performance advertising.

Norri, there is an abundance of insurance offers indeed to which I can believe is rather frustrating especially when you are trying to concentrate on a music niche. What is your current relationship with the puppy advertiser who make use of your website as a "trading platform" on www.puppiesforsale.co.za?

[Norri]

Divan, there's no relationship. Different folk register for free to advertise their puppies. Mostly breeders. Sometimes they spam the crap out of it by posting 5 of the same ad but I see today that even OLX has that issue.

I will be starting to charge for advertising on the site soon which I'm sure will help fix that.

Dave, I did have a more in-depth look at those 2 options and they might actually help monetise the site a bit. Some of the guys buy from Amazon and eBay because they can't get the stuff locally and, of course, they post links about those sites, so ja this could be an option for a few extra bob here and there. Maybe even some money to be made from iTunes, let's see.

Will note this in www.asana.com (great tool btw!) and try it soon. Thanks again

[Citizen X]

Again, very interesting and informative thread. Thank you guys!

[harounkola]

I'm new to this forum, and affiliate marketing in general, but I think a new affiliate platform for South Africa will be a great addition to our online landscape!

[divanbower]

So I posted this a number of months ago, with tons of work done and more to be done on the project, I am very interested in getting more information on what sort of affiliate offers South-African affiliates are looking for.


I would also like to gain more spread, if you may know of any other South-African affiliate communities please be sure to let me know.

For direct contact, please be sure to contact me. I would love to make the connection and perhaps we may have opportunity in doing business in the future.

Regards,
Divan

[jansieblom]

I joined TFSA looking to connect with affiliates. I recently got fired (for lack of a better word) by a popular South African online store, leaving me to focus on Amazon. I can't find anything good in South Africa around my niche.

I was considering approaching suppliers directly and cutting some sort of deal, but how do you track that?