Affiliate Marketing Blog

This post is simply to tell everyone about excellence in the Affiliate Area when I see it, I know many of my posts are not what you would call “very positive” and “up beat” as I am trying to right some wrongs but I also need to spend time telling people what works, what is good and what we can learn from and the dudes at Sunshine are people we could learn from.

I was reading one of their blogs today, Mission #6 and as I had not actually checked out Mission #1 to #5 I thought I had best get over and take a look. If you don’t know, basically they are setting different Missions that Affiliates can take part in and you have a chance to win prizes, and they made it open to everyone, heck you don’t even need to have done a single thing in travel and you can still find a mission to take part in, indeed Mission #6 is to get you started, to make your first travel site. It’s a very well thought out campaign and indeed the fact it’s not been just a one off has paid off, because here I am at Mission #6 writing about it, if they had not had this many so far I may never have checked it out.

However all that a side what I want to point out is something I never seen on an Affiliate Resource page on a Merchants site before, a live chat that is actually got the owners of the company standing by, now I doubt that can last for ever as these guys grow but just to test it wasn’t some on page eye candy but in fact really manned by the named people I clicked the link, waited less than 20 seconds and was in direct contact with one of the site owners to ask my questions, how good is that! Truly excellent from an Affiliates point of view, instant questions and answers, granted they are still at the starting stages so it may not last forever however it certainly would encourage me to get involved with these guys at the early stages as they are clearly chucking everything at this project to make it a success from an Affiliate Marketing point of view, so well done guys!

To-do: 1 upbeat positive post a year. I can now tick this off my list LOL

Note: Actually that was a lot less painful to do than I was expecting (hate American style cringe worthy your great posts), so I think I will do more in future on any Merchants, Agency, Affiliate (if they are ok with me pointing it out) or Network that is doing something note worthy from now on will find they get an article written about them, but please don’t ask me to do one, I need to find out and think it’s well done on my own time via the methods of being an Affiliate I use and they will be a limited number of posts, every so often, as I am no kiss ase love everyone type LOL

However what worries me is, are these sites and systems so fundamentally flawed that they can’t move from the beta stage or is their some hidden meaning, for example is this a protection method so if their systems do mess up then they are legally protected i.e. say they don’t pay you out the commission your expecting is it just simply a case of saying, “but we told you this is a beta program, your using it at your own risk”.

Recently I was quite pleased to see Affiliate Future buck this trend of “beta” releases, by doing something that Paid On Results done also. Have beta testers test behind the scene before releasing the new version but still offer access to the old one when it’s live. The new version is fully working and not a beta version, sure a few bugs might appear as is expected with every system however they clearly believe in their product not to tag it as beta but respect the fact with such a huge upgrade some people will like to use the old version for a time until they get used to the new features. I like the new version and not just the looks it’s actually better by a mile than the last.

So come on guys, won’t point any fingers but get your stuff out of beta, show you actually believe in your product and are giving it your full backing. Beta doesn’t mean you can “delay offering full support and/or responsibility for remaining issues” get them sorted and give us “your customers/suppliers” the reassurance that we are not using some half-baked system that could collapse at any time.