Today’s Point Of View – To Be Attuned or Not Attuned .. That Is The Question
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
Okay, the Ghost of Christmas Future has vanished for the moment, hence why we created the Buyagift landing page for you. No don’t worry, time permitting we might have another one for you shortly, hopefully, so he must have rubbed off on me a bit … bah humbug!
Anyway, you may have noticed how the networks section of a affiliates4u forum has become swamped with their posting of promotions by both networks, agencies & merchants, which is all well & good, and encouraging they are actually posting & it’s warmly received.
However, I am beginning to wonder if each network should have two sections, one with them & their merchants posting promotions & the another dealing with affiliate concerns & discussions, though the politically correct will argue it’s not a support forum, and yes if a fairly general problem contact the network first, if not resolved then look for the support of the forum.
As mentioned before it concerns me that important issues & discussions for an affiliates, no matter how few or many are affected or simple dialogue about the network or merchants gravitate towards lower pages and are perhaps not get attended to or read by other affiliate parties which may actually be affected.
On a side note, there seem to be a number of excellent incentives run by merchants over the festive period, it would be an idea to aggregate these together, so that the merchant is rewarded for their generosity with an increase in incremental sales.
I would also like to see a directory of merchant & agency contacts, with emails and/or telephone numbers, now some networks allow publishing of these on program page, a couple are still prehistoric, but a central resource would be more convenient & beneficial. Currently we simply harvest these from emails, transfer to a spreadsheet and when the need arises we have it available to contact them.
To expand this further, perhaps develop an affiliate directory where affiliates can post their websites into the appropriate category to allow merchants to easily find more affiliates within their vertical sector, niche, product offering, field, etc.
An obvious problem would be affiliates being reluctant to post their websites … whether this be pride, modesty or fear of being sites being copied or plagiarised. On the bigger plus side it would be a good way to showcase, & maybe, like a matchmaking system, allow new relationships to be forged & flourish. Also via a matchmaking tool, some might be apprehensive about publishing their contact details, this could be overcome with a straight forward mutually agreeing permission based solution, where a party allows one or each other to view their contact details. Obviously this can be elaborated in more detail, but surely there are merchants who would like to encourage more of the right kind of affiliates onboard, especially the appropriate content sites, which may get overlooked in favour of .. wait for it .. closed groups on ppc .. or if you’re a real pretentious wally “strategic group” or better still “strategic paid search management group”
On a further point, apart from search functionality to assist in finding historical threads, I don’t know how feasibly practical it would be, but maybe one way of mapping threads pertaining to individual merchants by the form of a directory, so that forum members have the opportunity to see previous postings about that merchant, thus being better informed to acquire their own inference.
Finally, some idiot(s) mistakenly tag affiliate concerns & postings as a rant, simply because it either affects them or their company or they don’t agree with it, these are the ones who cry to mummy in a grandiloquent manner because they are simply wrong. They don’t like anything untoward, even though true, being on a public forum because they claim it tarnishes the name of industry or that a moderator shouldn’t voice concerns or negative aspects within the industry.
Perhaps they can’t differentiate between when somebody rants and when someone is factual, I guess these doughnuts are probably not attuned to the mindset of the affiliates.
Who, if anyone, is being pertinacious? It depends on your interpretation.
Answers on a postcard.
