Comments (1) Sixteen years ago, I received a call from someone who worked for a large computer manufacturer, which was planning to add an online direct-sales program. The caller was creating a business plan for this new division of the company, and wanted to hire me to design an affiliate program.
My first question was, “What about channel conflict?”
Comments Off on In Praise of GTmetrix.com GTmetrix.com is an awesome web site: it analyzes your web site and provides detailed suggestions for how to improve the page-load time; this is incredibly useful when trying to diagnose the issue, “why is my web site loading to slowly?”
Note that there are multiple tabs with information: make sure to click on the “YSlow” and “Timeline” tabs to see more information.
Here are screen shots showing the information for this site (markwelchblog.com). Read more »
The breadth and depth of the advice in Geno Prussakov’s book, Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day, is exceptional.
Comments Off on Risks of Hiring Interns and Students Over the past 15 years, I’ve often heard clients suggest that they intend to hire “interns” or “students” as temporary workers, and I’ve always offered warnings. The problem isn’t really hiring the interns or students, but instead assuming that they understand and respect “the rules.”
Students and other temporary workers “assign far more value to [their own] potential short-term earnings than to the merchant’s long-term reputation” (quoting myself).
Comments Off on Weird Characters after cut-and-paste A teacher asked about “Weird letter characters appearing when viewing [her] product description online.”
I’ve recently noticed several merchants who’ve created in-house affiliate programs with alarmingly high payment thresholds. Here’s why it’s a bad idea.
I’m often asked how merchants can find and recruit “super affiliates” to participate in their affiliate programs. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t simple, because there’s really no such thing as a “super affiliate.” Read more »
In November 2007, I posted a series of articles sharing my most common advice given to advertisers (merchants) who had hired me to advise them on the design and launch of their affiliate programs. Below are links to the whole series in proper chronological order. Read more »
Comments Off on Web Site Checklists for Merchants (draft) This is a “work-in-progress” checklist that I created in December 2007, but never finished. It is essentially a list of “issues” to consider when evaluating a merchant’s web site. Read more »
Comments Off on Types of Affiliates (Web Publishers) Most merchants find it useful to divide prospective and current affiliates into major categories, which usually have different performance characteristics and concerns. Read more »
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