Teespring Marketers--Let's ask for an affiliate program

Nice idea, the affiliate makes money and the Teespring campaigner makes money also but there would be a congestion in T-Shirt Blogs and Teespring platform would be ignored soon.

There's no need to look for affiliates who have tee shirt blogs. I would never pitch to them, personally.

If you design a shirt for Trek fans, look for Trek bloggers, forum owners or FB group/page owners. I don't think the ecosystem would get clogged up. Besides, Teespring already runs general ads on forums.

Also, Teespring will get real competition soon, and those guys will probably create an affiliate program. I don't see a reason why Teespring should wait for that to happen.

Yeah, the issue is people who abuse affiliate programs like that. Sad i know but it happens. If they did introduce an affiliate program then their links would start getting spammed far and wide across the Internet which then helps none of the sellers when TS links start getting permanently banned from places such as Facebook, etc.

I can see their worry. I would be very hesitant also. If they really wanted to do it then it should be an invite only program where proven sellers are the only ones allowed to participate and/or sellers have to approve each affiliate.

Solid point, but allow me to draw a comparison between Teespring and a little company called Demand Media. In 2009, Demand Media's content arm had a huge presence on the Internet. For those unfamiliar, Demand Media used to pay "writers" $16 per article. They used an algorythm that produced article titles that had a high probablity of ranking in Google. The company also had a sweet arrangement with Google in the form of that company's AdSense program.

Unfortunately for Demand, the content that they produced was horrendous. However, the company was confident that Google wouldn't sacrifice the millions of dollars per year that they were producing, and continued business as usual. Bing launched in 2009, and Google took a hard long look at the direction that their search engine was going in. Google acted in its best interest—ensuring that Bing did not gain an "unreasonable" amount of market share—by forcing the low-quality articles produced by content mills like Demand far down the page. Demand lost a good chunk of their traffic over night. They own the websites ehow dot com and livestrong dot com.

Now, let's look at Teespring and Facebook. This is pure speculation, but what if Facebook digs into their data and determines that the onslaught of tee shirt ads is contributing to the adoption of ad-blockers?

Wouldn't Facebook, like Google, act in its own long-term best interest? Maybe this is extreme speculation, but the point I'm trying to make is that Teespring is overly dependent on Facebook.

IMHO, they are going to have to expand their marketing repertoire anyway. There are always risks.

Here's what I suggest: don't filter on the designer side, filter on the affiliate side. Forbid affiliates from advertising on Facebook with conversion pixels, and require all affiliates to own a blog/forum with xxxxx traffic. Also, tell them, "Look, don't let us catch you promoting shirts on your site that aren't related to your niche."

Keep the ads confined to highly targeted, high-traffic areas.

The reality is (and I am talking from a LOT of experience) that 99% of affiliates are crap. They make no sales for you, they have no idea how to promote, all they do is throw as much mud at the wall and hope some sticks. They do more harm than good in many cases.

So I think TS are smart to leave things as they are at the moment, especially when so much of their current revenue relies on Facebook traffic.