Could be a good business to be an affiliate?

Check out this thread to see some of the success some people have with envato referrals

I still think this is great as extra income but not something you should use as the main revenue stream for your business.

sevenstyles said
Envato need to increase the 30% referral cut to at least 50% or the sames as the authors commission rate. I think 30% is not a good enough incentive to spend time and money advertising. Lets bump it to 50% or greater, then we will alot more users come to the site. This really needs to change

30% is very normal with Affiliate Programs. And it doesn’t need to be higher. Envato needs to make money to in order to keep the business competitive.

However we need a “cookie” that doesn’t expire before 30, 60 or maybe even 90 days. So that if the user doesn’t deposit first they visit you will still get paid when they revisit within 30, 60 or 90 days.

Or it could be 2-pier program, which would make it much more powerful. Where the percentage is split between 2 levels. This way you wil get paid on your referrals – referrals.

Of course a smaller % recurring would be great, but Elite Authors already make 70% and if you would take another e.g 3-5% for recurring commissions it would cut in Envato’s profit.

RightHere said

sevenstyles said
Envato need to increase the 30% referral cut to at least 50% or the sames as the authors commission rate. I think 30% is not a good enough incentive to spend time and money advertising. Lets bump it to 50% or greater, then we will alot more users come to the site. This really needs to change

30% is very normal with Affiliate Programs. And it doesn’t need to be higher. Envato needs to make money to in order to keep the business competitive.

However we need a “cookie” that doesn’t expire before 30, 60 or maybe even 90 days. So that if the user doesn’t deposit first they visit you will still get paid when they revisit within 30, 60 or 90 days.

Or it could be 2-pier program, which would make it much more powerful. Where the percentage is split between 2 levels. This way you wil get paid on your referrals – referrals.

Of course a smaller % recurring would be great, but Elite Authors already make 70% and if you would take another e.g 3-5% for recurring commissions it would cut in Envato’s profit.

True, but ill stick to saying that 30% is not enticing enough to spend hours promoting. Im at 13,000 clickthroughs this month and 150 have joined, and not much earnings considering the hours and money I put in. Why would I want to spend more time doing this?

sevenstyles said
Why would I want to spend more time doing this?

to promote your own items….. who cares about the marketplace as a whole honestly promote your own stuff and if you get returns from referrals than its a plus….

TheBuckmaker said
As you can see, I’ve referred LOTS of users to themeforest and earned good money. As long as Google liked me. From one day to another, my site got kicked, despite my hand-written quality content. Two days later, the same happened to my AdWords campaign. So I removed ALL affiilate links and surprise, surprise, I got listed again, but won’t earn any money anymore.

As long as affiliate is a side business and your site has substantial value other than recommending third party products, you may give it a try.

If your site is just for the purpose of affiliate earnings, forget it. Don’t get in the way of Google’s own business model.

Here’s what I’ve found just today: http://www.seobook.com/brand-vs-affiliate-vs-spam

Google is the biggest affiliate of them all.

They are getting into everything now. Any new start-up that is successful, they will try to bully.

Also, you need to explain to Google that your site isn’t referral based / affiliate based. There is a different word you must use.

Personally I think if you find quality traffic, rather than simply quantity of traffic, your time is spent fairly effectively, you can actually reap good rewards.

quickandeasy said
Personally I think if you find quality traffic, rather than simply quantity of traffic, your time is spent fairly effectively, you can actually reap good rewards.

November: 1.41% Conversion Rate December: 3.19% Conversion Rate

Getting better! Issues I see, is that you don’t know if those registered members are roll overs from your previous months numbers.

I’m going to give you a little bit of advice from my own personal experience. If you want your site to be successful you need to add “rel=”nofollow” to all of your affiliate links. When your site goes under human review by Google (and it will happen) they will see your ref url variables and see that your links are dofollow and classify you as a spammer. This will instantly put a damper on your sites organic search results and will give your indexed pages an instant low quality score.

I’ve had it happen to 3 sites and I have friends in the affiliate marketing arena that have had it happen, along with getting their adwords account banned. Google is trying to clean up, and they are targeting affiliate marketers first, and then they will begin to move into the lead generation / directory listing portals next.

Good luck and keep up the good work!

sevenstyles said
^^ Really great ideas guys. Love the idea quickandeasy of your affiliate % going up with the amount of people you refer, this can increase as your badges upgrade, even if its just 5% increase its alot more enticing.

Indeed awesome idea, fits perfectly here

Raising dead topic, but i have a question about putting refs from your deviantart page. Haven`t got any clickthroughs from there, there are traffic from other sites tho. Doing something wrong or what?

Marrando said
Raising dead topic, but i have a question about putting refs from your deviantart page. Haven`t got any clickthroughs from there, there are traffic from other sites tho. Doing something wrong or what?

I don’t know what could be wrong, but there’s no problem with click throughs from deviant art, I get plenty.