A Tale of Two Affiliates...

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 26th, 2010

Copyright 2006 Richard Grady

I launched a new website this week and one aspect of the launch has prompted me to write this article. The aspect of affiliates....

My new site, Simplywholesale, has an affiliate program and quite a few people have signed up as new affiliates already and the way in which a couple of people have been earning money this week is what I am going to write about today.

To my mind, there are three main types of affiliate. Firstly (and unfortunately this is the largest group by far), there are those who sign up as an affiliate and then do nothing. These people are obviously never going to earn any money themselves or indeed, earn the website owner anything.

The second and third types of affiliate are very different but both are very valuable to any online business so let's look at them a bit more closely....

Let's look firstly at what I am going to call the 'Big Hit Affiliate'. The Big Hit Affiliate will usually have a large newsletter mailing list which they have accumulated over a period of months or even years. If a Big Hit Affiliate takes an interest in your website then you ought to prepare yourself for some serious traffic!

A Big Hit Affiliate can earn you hundreds even thousands of dollars/pounds in a very short space of time (I mean hours not days/weeks) and of course, as an affiliate, they will also be earning for themselves at the same time.

SimplyWholesale was fortunate enough to receive the attentions of a couple of Big Hit Affiliates this week and the traffic and sales that they can generate are quite astounding. One of the affiliates was able to send over 2000 unique visitors to the site in just a couple of hours generating the affiliate sales commission of several hundred pounds/dollars (for sending one email!).

As a website owner, it is great when a Big Hitter sends a promotional email to their list as traffic and sales can go through the roof in a very short space of time. Of course it calms down very quickly too and usually within a week the sales will have come to a complete stop. One of those ' very nice while it lasted' events.

This leads me to the other type of affiliate - the 'Slow and Steady Affiliate'.

The Slow and Steady affiliate doesn't usually have a massive mailing list. He/she may well have a website or forum or maybe they just sell on online auctions. Whatever, they have some form of online presence and they act as an affiliate by placing a link or banner somewhere on their site/forum/About me auction page or similar. Instead of sending thousands of visitors to your website in less time than it takes to reboot your computer, they send a gentle trickle of visitors each day.

But here's the difference - with a Slow and Steady Affiliate, the traffic doesn't run out after a week, it just keeps on coming day after day....

Now, the S&S Affiliate may only send you 50 visitors per day and from those 50 visitors, you might only make one sale but remember this happens everyday. 1 sale a day, 30 sales a month, 365 sales a year.....

As long as the S&S Affiliate is earning commission, they will almost certainly continue to send you traffic and as long as they send you traffic, they will earn commission (and you will generate sales).

Even though SimplyWholesale is only a week old, we already have a handful of Slow and Steady Affiliates who are making maybe one or two sales a day. That's potentially thirty to sixty sales per month, which on our average sale value works out at affiliate commission of between £266 and £533 per month. A very nice bit of additional income whichever way you look at it.

So which is best - the Big Hit Affiliate or the Slow and Steady Affiliate?

To be honest, I would really struggle to choose one over the other. The Big Hitter is great and can provide a very nice 'bonus' pay packet but then again the S&S provides your regular 'bread & butter' income each week/month. I suppose the ideal situation is an affiliate with a huge subscriber list AND a website with heavy traffic :-)