How to be affiliate friendly

[patrox]

A quick post for all of you who are going to sell and affiliate their games.
Make sure you use the Paiement system that matches your affiliate program on your site else that won't get you very far.
I receive more and more requests of people affiliating with plimus or bmt and using esellerate on their site.
Be consistent in your paiement links if you want to build good affiliates relationship!

What you want to reach is the equivalent of the regnow Affiliate certification program, but for the vendor you are using. ( plimus, bmt,regnow, xyz..)

pat.

[ManuelFLara]

Yeah. I've been approached by some non-Plimus affiliates and I've refused them. Chances are an average affiliate will mean only a few sales to you. And I don't want to have RegNow, eSellerate and BMT accounts wth $50 each.

Maintaining them all is just a PITA and I think some ecommerce providers don't even send you the money until you reach some minimum revenue (like $100). Even better, creating a vendor RegNow account is not free. Definitely not worth.

[Savant]

I've been pretty open to the various affiliate programs but it's really cost me some time in certain cases .. eSellerate and Share-It, specifically. Terribly obtuse processes that don't make any sense.

I wish everyone would just use Plimus (or publish through Reflexive Arcade who have, IMO, the hands down best affiliate program).

[patrox]

Well what i'm saying is more like vendors, please use only 1 paiement system for your products, else there's no point in affiliating a product when we know there's no plimus link to buy the product. ( Serious affiliates do their homeworks and check the links back on your site ).

pat.

[James C. Smith]

Not all type of “affiliating� requiring links back to the developer’s site. I don’t see why the contents of the developer’s web site would limit or dictate what payment processing could be used by affiliates. For our own games like Ricochet, we have Reg Now versions of our games which any Reg Now affiliate can sell. We don’t use Reg now anywhere on our own web site. But the Reg Now version of the game contains a “buy now� button which links to the Reg now order form which is on the Reg now web site. We also have Softwrap and Trymedia version of our games. And of course we have version that use the Reflexive Arcade DRM and payment processing. Anyone wanting to affiliate our games can use Reflexive Arcade or Reg now or some of the other DRMs mentioned above.

So what am I missing? Is there something we should add to our web site to make it easier to affiliate to sell out games?

Note: In this message I am exploring the technical limitations of affiliate systems. This is not necessarily in line with Reflexive’s business strategy. In other words, I am saying it is technically possible for people to sell Ricochet as a Reg Now affiliate. However, for business reasons, we may or may not allow this since we have a business interest in all out affiliates using the Reflexive Arcade DRM. I don’t want to discus business strategy here. I am just trying to figure out the technical requirements to allow a developer to sell is game through many different payment processors and affiliate systems.

[patrox]

What happens when a customer who downloaded a Trymedia or regnow version goes to your site and buys direct from it ?

pat.

[James C. Smith]

First of all, I don’t know why they would go to our web site since they didn’t download it from us and nothing in the game leads to our site. Second, there is no way to buy anything on our web site. You can only download demos. The demos all contains links to the order forms. There is no way to get to an order form other that from the game which will link to the order form that is appropriate for the affiliate you downloaded the game form.

[patrox]

Ok, well you're probably one of the rare devs not to put link back to their site from their product line. That was a bad example in that case. ( most people do put links back to their site )

pat.

[cyrus_zuo]

Not sure if this is what is being got at...but my $.02

An issue with having multiple affiliate programs comes from the website link. The 'buy now' link is really quite independent of the developer. However if Game Tunnel sends someone to a site using 'Regnow' and then the person buys a different game through 'Plimus' then as an affiliate I'm not really very happy.

From the numbers I've run I believe quite strongly that affiliate programs capture less than 50% of the sales generated. That happens for several different reasons such as people finding out about your game from say DIYgames while they are at work, downloading it, playing it, and then going home and buying it by going directly to your site. Judging by sale spikes that occured during our GOTY awards in January and the actual sales increases versus the number of sales captured by affiliate sales I would say there are a lot of different ways that affiliate programs may lose track of the referral.

My personal favorite way to avoid that is the focus on providing a 'download.' Reflexive and Plimus both do this well. (when it is implemented by the developer through Plimus) Providing multiple links (as Plimus does) makes me the most happy as different people like different things.

In the past Game Tunnel has not provided 'Buy Now' links through the site and we've instead focused mostly on 'website' and/or 'download' links. However, as has been mentioned before we will be changing that in the future to try and always provide those two links as well as a 'Buy Now' link.

Anyway...from my perspective what makes your affiliation friendly is to not lose my referral. For example, Kraisoft has a RegNow affiliate program. They've encouraged me to use it. However, even though they provide a 'website' link, when you use that link and then go to buy one of their games you will find that you won't be purchasing the game through regnow...so my referral was lost. They also offer a 'Buy Now' link, but again I haven't yet started using 'Buy Now' links.

I would think the best referral system would take into consideration the site making the referral and try to minimize what is lost...some things you can affect (using multiple affiliate programs that may lose sales ---btw there is a way around this if you use scripts on your website) some things you cannot affect (people playing the game at work and then skipping the referral site when they get home and decide to buy it).

Consider both sides (what is in it for them...what is in it for me) and put yourself in their shoes (what would I want if I was doing what they are doing).

Sorry...long-winded...but hopefully helpful...and from someone who has set up affiliate accounts...many many too many affiliate accounts.