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Woot's take on affiliate marketing
- ericz 16y agoThe cool landing page really gets killed by the unfortunately drab commission junction page
- cilantro 16y agoI like the way your eyes get directed on that page. Read the whole pitch then follow the trail back to the top.
- rst 16y agoWell, if you're worried about scaling issues from a flood of affiliates, I guess this is one way of trying to manage the volume...
- CurrentB 16y agoPretty funny, and interesting that this comes from an Amazon company, Amazon having pioneered the online affiliate industry and finding much success in it. Still, It's a pretty accurate portrayal of the whole affiliate scheme, and I think it might have the effect of keeping away the low-value affiliates while not deterring those who could actually provide a mutually beneficial relationship.
- ggrot 16y agoIt's certainly more creating than adding a link to your commission junction page. It'll probably get more visibility too.
- patio11 16y agoAffiliate marketing is, to reuse a quote from the guys behind Spreedly, a "star search.". Many will enter, few will win. You keep the barriers to entry low in the hopes that you find one of the comparatively few professional affiliates who know what they are doing, as opposed to more numerous people who either intend to put a single link on their blog or, worse, have recently bought a Make Money Online ebook. What successful affiliates are doing is very frequently some shade of gray, which is one of the reasons to have affiliates in the first place - plausible deniability. [Edited to add: a well-designed affiliate program also generates organic SEO benefits, and this facet profits even from a single link on an unremarkable blog, when that gets duplicated at scale.]
- contravert 16y agoI've worked for an affiliate marketing company, and some of the highest earners do truly earn impressive amounts (tens of thousands of dollars a month). You are also incredibly right about the shady business that goes on in this industry. In my opinion, the most profitable and highest conversion campaigns are always the most gray. The fact that many advertisers usually require a landing page (rather than a direct link) is really fishy by itself.
- symptic 16y agoI used to make a healthy living designing landing pages for affiliates. Several of my clients were making several million a year (all made a "healthy" living) and I was bringing in several hundred a day from just designing landing pages. I left because I couldn't handle that "gray area" people talk about, but I swear those are some of the most intelligent and hardest working people I've met. Shame many are missing that deep entrepreneurial spirit many here on HN have.
- stephenbez 16y agoI'm not too familiar with this field, can you explain what the "gray area" is? Is it people linking to the affiliate without disclosing they are getting something from it? Or is it more blackhat SEO and spam?
- il 16y agoGo to any mainstream web site frequented by an older, less tech-savvy audience like weather.com. Take a look at the text ads on the right side and the landing pages they link to. There's your crash course in the current state of the affiliate marketing industry.
- codexon 16y agoI see one that is disguised like a news article. Isn't this just like the infomercials in magazines like time? The other ad is just a plain landing page.
- b0b0b0b 16y agoI wonder if anyone at woot had the groupon idea (before groupon came out) but was quashed because it just wasn't woot-like. It seems like woot lost a couple orders of magnitude of scale by (apparently) making themselves the fulfillment bottleneck.
- Helianthus16 16y agoThey're both important. I'm never sure I'll use a groupon when I buy it, but I can always be talked into buying a gadget if it's cheap or a shirt if it strikes my fancy.
- vaksel 16y agoit's actually a 50/50 proposition...many affiliates who actually make sales(besides the few rare super affiliates), do so by simply ranking for the first page as "[brand] review, since that way they reach the customer just before they hit the buy button So as an advertiser, you basically just end up paying money for sales that would have been yours anyways
- thenomad 16y agoWell, that depends on if the top review would have been good otherwise. One thing affiliate programs appear to be awesome at is stuffing Google with positive reviews of a product. (Which leads me to wonder how long it will be until the Big G starts downranking pages with easily-spotted affiliate links.)
- vaksel 16y agothey already do that, which is why affiliates link go to great lengths to hide the fact that they are linking to an affiliate site
- minouye 16y agoHow to manage expectations: 1. Amazon Associates: "Make money advertising Amazon products" 2. eBay Partner Network: "You can earn a lot of money" 3. Woot: "...destroy your online reputation AND earn literally pennies through dull, thankless tedium"
- edanm 16y agoThe funny part - Woot is owned by Amazon.
- fredoliveira 16y agoBut have clearly maintained their culture post-acquisition (as they said they would)
- threepointone 16y agoVery creative. I laughed a little.
- moontear 16y agoI didn't think it was funny at all, very creative indeed though.
- endlessvoid94 16y agoOf course they have that opinion. Affiliate marketing requires time and targeting, neither of which woot.com can offer affiliates.
- lachyg 16y agoI did very well myself with affiliate marketing. The trick (if you want to do affiliate marketing and still feel good about yourself) is to provide some value add. So when I started iPadCaseFinder (now owned by someone else and changed into a storefront), I built a really cool 'finding' application so people could find the perfect iPad cases for them. It earnt pretty well!
- edash 16y agoI think the disagreement most people would have with this approach is that you're coming at it from the wrong side. It's money first and then "oh yeah, I'd better add some value."
- lachyg 16y agoYou're wrong, I decided to found this site because my friend dropped and cracked my iPad, and I couldn't find any suitable cases. The site was inspired by a true life problem, and I know 100's of people that found it very useful.
- millerc 16y agoVery well done! Looks like a full script of our experiences with AdWords back when it was new and shiny. So, Woot is actually serious about this? Glad to see someone put things as they are.