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Valentine’s Day Affiliate Programs By Affiliate Network

Top Affiliate — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:54:16 +0000

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner and is one of the highest grossing holidays for online sales. Back in 2009 consumers planned to spend an average of $102.50 on Valentine’s Day gifts and merchandise, versus $122.08 per person in 2008 according to the National Retail Federation’s 2009 Valentine’s Day Consumer Intentions and Actions survey. Although times were tight the total Valentine’s Day spending in 2009 exceeded $14.7 billion. That is a huge pot of money!

Regardless of the economic climate people will always spend their hard earned dollars on traditional Valentine’s Day gifts which include:

jewelry
flowers
greeting cards
and candy

Furthermore, the above survey indicated the majority of people (90.8 percent) spent the most on their spouse ($67.22), with other family members such as children getting about one fifth of their budget ($20.95). Consumers also spent on friends ($4.74), children’s classmates/teachers ($3.59), coworkers ($1.94), and yes…even pets ($2.17).

So how do the numbers look this year for us affiliate marketers? Well this past holiday season, online sales jumped 18 percent from Nov. 27 to Dec. 24, according to SpendingPulse.

“People were more comfortable doing last-minute shopping online, especially with the bad weather,” Kamalesh Rao, director of economic research for SpendingPulse, said in a telephone interview yesterday. A snowstorm on the East Coast the weekend before Christmas closed some malls early on Dec. 19 and kept shoppers at home….Jewelry sales rose 5.6 percent for November and December, while luxury retail excluding jewelry gained 0.8 percent.”

This is comforting news to online retailers and affiliates. So here’s a list of some Valentines Day affiliate programs you may want to promote via pay per click campaigns and niche website marketing. I broke them down by affiliate networks and the Pepperjam Network programs were compiled by my network manager Gina Nardone.

A good network manager will/should work directly with you in order to custom tailor selected affiliate programs to suit your marketing needs and preferences. They’ll also often dig up affiliate programs that you’ve overlooked or find programs that are not heavily saturated with other affiliate marketers. This close relationship with your network manger offers you the best opportunity to carve out a nice market share in that specific niche. These in my opinion are just a few areas both Pepperjam Network and ShareASale have always excelled at.

So here’s some programs you may want to consider promoting:

Valentines Day Affiliate Programs on Pepperjam Network:

Flowers

Jewelry, Clothing & Pampering Gifts

Cookies, Chocolates, Wines & More

Valentines Day Affiliate Programs on ShareASale:

Flowers

Jewelry, Clothing & Pampering Gifts

Cookies, Chocolates, Wines & More

Valentines Day Affiliate Programs on Linkshare:

Flowers

Jewelry, Clothing & Pampering Gifts

Cookies, Chocolates, Wines & More

Valentines Day Affiliate Programs on Commission Junction:

Flowers

Jewelry, Clothing & Pampering Gifts

Cookies, Chocolates, Wines & More

This is obviously not an all inclusive list. While each affiliate network has a wide range of products suited for a solid Valentine’s Day marketing campaign, I really like the premier clientele on LinkShare to include: 1-800-Flowers/Baskets, Vermont Teddy Bear, Mondera, Bare Necessities Chocolate.com and Wine.com.

However, these are just some Valentine’s Day affiliate programs you may want to take a look at promoting via ppc marketing campaigns or whatever marketing campaign you’re developing. Be sure to contact your affiliate or network managers and inquire what’s hot and new this season.

Incidentally, don’t stress out if you haven’t set up your Valentine’s Day campaigns already. Valentine’s Day is predominantly what I call a perishable holiday. Perishable in that the majority of products bought and sold during the holiday are flowers, candies and other consumable items. This means the majority of sales occur approximately one week before the holiday.

Best of luck to you as you create/develop your Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns. I hope this brief Valentine’s Day affiliate program list helps speed up your time to market. Aloha!

Top Five Biggest Affiliate Program Mistakes

Top Affiliate — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:42:05 +0000

The below article by Michael Wong, owner of Mikes Marketing Tools, offers some excellent advice for old and new hat affiliate program managers. Take a look and see if your affiliate program may be breaking one of these 5 cardinal rules. In my opinion Mikes number one mistake, “Competing With Your Affiliates”, is probably the biggest problem I see with many affiliate programs today. Enjoy!

Affiliate Managers: Your Top Five Biggest Affiliate Program Mistakes

In this article I will show affiliate managers the mistakes they should avoid if they want to build a successful affiliate program.

I felt compelled to write this article after seeing the same mistakes made by most of the hundreds of affiliate programs I have joined since I started promoting them in 1997. I have made a nice living from affiliate programs over the years, so I know a thing or two about them. I would dearly love to make more money with affiliate programs, but affiliate managers don’t make it easy for us affiliates. So hopefully this article will do a bit for the cause.

Here are my top five biggest affiliate program mistakes that I find today:

1. Competing With Your Affiliates.

This is by far the worst mistake made by companies that offer affiliate programs. I often see companies for products I am trying to promote compete with me in the search engine rankings and pay per click advertising programs.

Why companies invest money and resources in competing with their affiliates is beyond me. By competing with me, you’re trying to put me out of business. Have marketing directors ever thought of it in that way? Because if you succeed, you will no longer have an affiliate network to speak of.

The money would be better spent on supporting your affiliate network by creating a better product, providing more referral statistics, higher commission payouts, faster support, and more, fresh promotional creatives.

So if you’re an affiliate manager reading this article, tell your affiliate director at your next meeting to STOP competing with your affiliates, and support them instead!

2. Not Providing Your Affiliates With Useful, Real-Time Statistics.

All marketers rely on statistics to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Yet most affiliate programs only provide their affiliates with basic statistics such as number of visitors sent, number of sales, and commission earned. These statistics aren’t much help to affiliates who want to measure the effectiveness of a particular pay per click campaign.

Affiliate managers – please consider providing these useful statistics so that I can market your products effectively:

Archive of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly statistics and by date range.
Commission earned, broken down by product or service, and how the customer was referred to the site.
Daily email update of all affiliate statistics.
Instant email notification of a new affiliate.
Instant email notification of a new free trial sign up.
Instant email notification of a new sale and all relevant statistics. I love getting new sales notification emails!
Number of free trial downloads or subscriptions.
Number of returns and all relevant statistics.
Affiliate links with trackable IDs, so that affiliates can tell exactly which site, or ad campaign is sending the referrals and sales.
Unique clicks – which refers to the unique number of visitors referred – in addition to raw clicks – which refers to the total number of click throughs.
A list of top performing affiliate statistics, so that affiliates can compare how they’re doing and which areas they can improve on.
Include the most important statistics at the top of the email and subject line. There’s nothing worse than having to scroll down to see what the referral purchased or how much commission I have made.

The following only apply if the affiliate program offers more than one level of commissions.

Commission earned as a result of referrals sent by 2nd-tier affiliates.
Commission earned, broken down by commission level.
Number of 2nd-tier affiliates referred.

I’ve been promoting products and services via affiliate programs since 1997 and I have yet to come across an affiliate program that provides anything close to these statistics.

3. Not Compensating Your Affiliates Fairly For Their Hard Work.

The #1 incentive for any affiliate is cold hard cash. Money sells! So tell your marketing director to fire the search engine optimization firm and advertising department, and redirect the resources to paying your affiliates a higher commission rate.

Another thing I hate is seeing my commissions go down the drain because someone I had referred signs up to the affiliate program and purchases the product via their affiliate link. It almost feels like I’m being robbed blind! I highly recommend affiliate managers deter this practice by making it harder for affiliates to pocket the commission from their own purchases, at least the initial one.

4. Not Providing Enough Fresh Promotional Creatives.

Most affiliate managers seem to give their promotional creatives little thought. All they offer is a handful of 468×60 banners, buttons and text links. What happens is that affiliates end up using the same ads on hundreds, even thousands of web sites.

Affiliate managers – what about these promotional creatives?

Articles and tips with embedded affiliate links
Classified ads
Customer testimonials
Direct email ads
Email signatures
Newsletter ads
pay per click ads
Pop-up/under ads
Product photographs
Product reviews
Product screenshots
Rich-media ads
Skyscrapers
Staff interviews

Listen up! Different ads perform better on different sites. And ads generally have a life span of a carton of milk. So offer your affiliates a greater variety of ads, more often.

5. Not Providing Fast, Quality Support For Your Affiliates.

This is the 21st century. Don’t make your affiliates wait longer for an email reply than it takes to send a letter by snail-mail post.

Don’t outsource your affiliate support work. If you have to, then at least train your support staff so that they understand the ins and outs of your products and affiliate program. I’m often dumbfounded by affiliate support staff who can’t give me answers to simple questions.

Well there you have it – my five biggest complaints about affiliate programs today. I hope affiliate managers take note and take strides to better support their affiliates, because if you don’t, affiliates will find other ways to make money on their site.

Affiliate marketers – if you agree with what I’ve said, send this article to your affiliate program managers!

About The Author: Michael Wong is the editor of GoDefy.com – the world’s first online marketing comparison shopping search engine and Mike’s Marketing Tools. Michael is also the author of the leading Search Engine Optimization Guide and numerous marketing tips.

Publishing Rights: You may republish this article in your web site, newsletter, or ebook, on the condition that you agree to leave the article, author’s signature and photograph, and all links completely intact. Full instructions on how to copy and upload my photo to your server.