Every Brand Needs an Affiliate Program for Reputation Management
Even if you don’t make huge profits from offering an affiliate program you should still have one. Here’s why:
Believe it or not, there are sites out there that make money selling other people’s products. And Believe it or not, some of these are comparison shopping websites. The people who own these sites are more likely to advise their readers to choose the product that they get a commission on instead of your product.
Even if yours is clearly superior.
When comparing two products, they may even go as far as to bash your product or use verbiage in such a way as to make your product seem inferior because they want the visitor to choose the other one. It comes down to simple economics: they don’t get paid if the user buys your product, but they get paid if the user buys your competitor’s product. …so you can’t really blame them for being a little biased.
There is nothing you can do about this other than start your own affiliate program and give these people a reason to promote ‘your’ product over the others. After all, it is their website and they have the right to leave off certain features when comparing two products. And it isn’t slander for them to say they prefer one over the other. In-fact, the review can appear to be very even-handed, while still leaning toward the product or brand that the webmaster wants you to buy. Here is an example:
Lana’s Eggwhites VS Eggwhites International
The above is a brand comparison between the two main distributors of liquid egg whites as a dietary protein supplement. Both products get four-stars, but notice that only one of them gets the “editor’s pick”. Also notice that the editor has tried one of them and not the other. Which one did the editor try and recommend? Why, the one with the affiliate program, of course! In-fact, First Page Fitness even has a landing page to capture searches on liquid eggwhites. And which brand of egg whites do you think we’re promoting as “the best” on that page? I’ll give you a hint - one has an affiliate program, and the other doesn’t.
Want more examples?
If you did a Google search for water filter reviews, or air filter comparisons you would find no shortage of websites promoting one product over the rest.
The danger isn’t necessarily that you lose that particular sale. The danger is that by NOT having an affiliate program you are motivating thousands of affiliate webmasters out there to give your product a poor review so their readers will instead choose to buy a different product - one that DOES have an affiliate program.
That is why I suggest to all brands that they have an affiliate program for reputation management.
Want more information about starting an affiliate program? Click here.
this is an excellent quality article, a potent signal worthy paying attention to in a sea of “me too” affiliate marketing info posts.
Comment by Brett Borders — July 10, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
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Pingback by Friday Favorites 6/13/07 - Stuntdubl - SEO Consultant — July 13, 2007 @ 10:17 am
Thanks for an interesting take on this. I found your post through Stuntdubl’s. It’s great to get new and interesting ideas on this area. I write about reputation monitoring and management on our company blog but this is an angle I hadn’t come across / thought of before.
Thanks!
Comment by Will Critchlow — July 14, 2007 @ 3:07 am
You raise a good point there. Affiliate programs are a double-edged sword though: The catch is that the people promoting your product could do so in unsavoury ways. Maybe they’re just annoying folks with blinking popups, but maybe they’re also using spyware and such. It’s a tricky issue.
One way to solve the problem is tight affiliate management. Aaron Wall’s got some good material on it but I can’t seem to find it at the moment. If they’re screwing it up, don’t let them hurt your brand, boot them from your program.
The other problem is in terms of the organic SERPs. If they’re ranking on your brand/product terms, you’ve got a problem. I wrote a guest-post at Brand-Curve oriented to helping people own the SERPs for their names, which could help.
Beyond that, you still need to deal with non-brand keywords on the organic side (they won’t bid on your brand terms if they’re not making money anymore, unless they reaaally hate you) and AdWords.
AdWords is beyond your control, but if they get really dirty, the legal team can perhaps send a C&D letter.
For the organic side of stuff, you can work with your better-behaved affiliates to top the SERPs and push their junk down. Provide them some unique content you don’t have on your domain for instance. Let them write something for yours with author links back… Plenty of ways to go about it.
Comment by Search Engine Reputation Management — November 28, 2007 @ 10:35 am