How important is this to affiliates?

Depends how lazy the affiliates are, and how many affiliates you want. More work you do, more likely you are to have affiliates promoting you.

Personally, that is one of the first things in my criteria for promoting a product.

If a product doesn't provide promotional material I'll generally pass on it.

And this has nothing to do with being lazy.

Many products are a dime a dozen so why am I going to waste my time on a product with no promotional material when another similar product offers more.

You want me to promote your product, make it worthwhile. Either give me a high percentage/commission or make it as easy for me to promote as possible.

I'm just the salesman. 7-11 doesn't make commercials for Pepsi... that is Pepsi's job.

If an affiliate is promoting your product via email marketing, reviews etc then yes, the probably wont need to use your pre designed banners etc.

HOWEVER,

There are MANY sites that will use your banners on their website to get you more sales through wondering clicks. For example, i'm in the men's dating niche. If someone is reading an article or blog post i've written (WHILE I'M PRE-SELLING THEM) and they suddenly see an attractive woman with some tagline on my sidebar in a banner they may well click on it! I've warmed them up with my content and they want to know more - for me, banners are another way of converting traffic on my website into affiliate sales.

Also, all amazing products I have seen on clickbank offer lots of banners and graphics for their affiliates to use..

Matt

The path of least resistance gets the most traffic. Make it easy for them and they will take you up on your offer.

It's relevant, one way or another, to 90% of affiliates.

Those are the 90% who collectively bring in 10% of the affiliate-referred sales.

The other 10% of affiliates, who account for 90% of the sales, couldn't care less. (Or, as they unaccountably say in some countries, meaning the exact opposite, of course, "could care less". Anyway, they don't care very much at all.)

These things matter, if you want "as many as affiliates as possible". I really wouldn't. I'd want to target specifically the affiliates who don't care about that stuff - the serious, professional ones. Just my perspective.

When I'm looking around at products to promote, if they don't have banners in the size I need, I gladly pass.

I can't make a banner, I'm not sending out E-mails (generally), and I'm busy trying to write new content for my site.

For me personally, most of the time if there's not any promotional material for affiliates, I pass on it. Why? Because there are plenty of affiliate programs that do have marketing materials ready for me to use.

I make a decent amount of money most months with affiliate products... products with marketing materials. In my opinion, if a product owner isn't going to take time to create marketing materials for his or her product, why would I take time to do it when there are so many products out there with the marketing materials ready to go?

Speaking as an affiliate, I much prefer marketing materials for the affiliate.

Also, an affiliate is not lazy for not creating affiliate marketing materials for a product he or she is wanting to promote. It's not the affiliate's job or place to create marketing materials for the product. That responsibility lies with the product creator.... unless, of course, the product creator is paying me to do the designing.


Cindy

Promo tools are very important.

Think about it. If someone who has a website stumbles
upon your affiliate page and plans on promoting
your product, don't you think that he would
love to find some ready made banners for him to
put on his website?

For me, banners I don't really care about since most advertiser creatives don't get high CTR. I'd rather know honest EPC numbers and conversion stats for specific traffic channels. E-mails are good too but really the cut and paste strategy isn't necessarily the best in my eyes. Just test your offer and get it converting.

Im an affiliate for a few products and to me its very important as it gives me flexibility for how i promote their site and also it offers some reassurance that they are atleast professional. Those products without it i am a but more hesitant to promote because they havent gone to the trouble of putting everything together

I would have to agree with Alexa here.

If a potential affiliate is less likely to promote my products, simply based upon the fact that I havent provided enough "marketing material" to help them, then Im not sure thats an affiliate I'd want to have as a partner.

Surely established, more seasoned affiliates are less likely to be concerned about whether or not the vendor is promoting fancy graphics and flashy banners.

Im more concern with analytics and demographics. It will let me focus on what is important. I give my and my client's affiliates as much as possible about the market it is in relation to.

•The less work affiliates have to do the better.

Providing affiliate partners with creative and promotional materials is a big help but I have to admit this is not the main thing I look at when choosing an affiliate program.

I am more concerned with the EPC, network earnings, payout and if it pays on time.

If it really is so easy and cheap, why shouldn't the product owner spend the cost once rather than 100 affiliates doing it 100 times. After all, if it takes $10 or 2 hours to create one, then that accounts for $1000 or 200 hours of time and money that could have gone towards marketing that product into someone else's pocket. Not to mention I am slow at graphics. I either need to spend a week studying, $50 on a course to learn it or hours hacking at it to get a junky piece of crap that the product owner will object to.

I mostly build autoblogs. When I set one up, I spend 10 minutes looking for and linking to an appropriate affiliate product. If I find three and two don't have banners built, it is obvious which one I promote.

Someone else said it in different words: If you don't care enough to promote your product, your competitor will promote his and your competitor will drive you out of business. More accurately, you will starve yourself to death.

I tend to agree to a degree with Alexa and Ramone as it makes sense according to the famous 80/20 rule. However, in order for you to have the conversion numbers, someone has to be promoting the product. Would there not be some material out there?

Also, where do the superaffiliates learn about the new product?

It sounds like you just said completely opposite things in the previous 2 posts.

Anyway, I don't see how adding affiliate promotional tools would hurt. I think it is definitely worth the little time and effort to provide those tools.

Perhaps the OP should do a poll. Would be interesting to see the results. I am a product creator btw -- not an affiliate.

I rarely use these additional materials, but I do on occasion. I would rather have a sales page and order form that converts. I agree with Alexa that the 90/10 rule applies here and those top 10% probably does not need your marketing ,aterials very often. They probably out market you anyway, plus they just send an email to their 100,000 member list every so often and BAM!, the sales roll in.

That being said, I am launching a new product (not in the IM niche) in a few months and I will most likely have a pretty full affiliate resources section, but I'll only put it together after I've done the work it takes to get a good conversion rate from my sales page.

It depend how you are doing and whats your requirement, it will be as good as much you work on it

it totally depends on the kind of promotion you are using for that, but banners are useful to create trust on your visitors as well as good website managed with god content and images...

I don't use that as a factor when deciding what product to promote. The main reason being that all the banners and graphics provided have usually just been designed to fit the look of the mini-site and they won't convert very well at all.

I much prefer create my own UGLY looking banners that convert much better.

As for the email copy, etc, it can be useful sometimes to give you some ideas but I would never just copy and paste it. I like to personalize all my promotions in a way that I feel will make me more money.

I generally don't end up using marketing materials provided unless I really think they're going to convert well. I'd prefer to put something together myself instead so I don't look like every other affiliate out there.

At the very worst, it cant hurt.

So, basically, my suggestion is even if you dont make it a high priority, one day when you are bored or when you have some extra money... Instead of going to shoot pool or paying to go to a movie, either make a few banners or pay someone to do them *shrugs*... cant hurt is all I can say.

It is very important i think to give them many affiliate resources. Give them everything on the plate so the can copy and paste it.

such as
-Banners
-keywords
-email copy
-ebook covers
-promotional text

etc.

Probably more important than the commission rate. Anything that will make your affiliates job easier will get them promoting.

I actually split test a site on exactly this point. Same site with affiliate area containing banners etc and one without.

The results of 200,000 page views was affiliate sign ups for the site with the affiliate area was 72% more than the site without.

Of those affiliates who signed up 62% became "active affiliates" registering 10 sales plus a month.

Best regards

Nigel

I'm much more likely to promote someone that provides decent creatives. I don't care about emails or articles at all, but creatives are important to me when I'm lazy That said, I've promoted many products that don't provide them if the conversions are high enough.

As I grow more experienced with CJ.com, I learned how to grab affiliate banners and now put them in the sidebars for most of my sites. This is especially true with the autoblog type sites that I don't control the article content of.

Depends, if the product is REALLY good then I need only a link code, but if not then the owner should have some banners at least

As a consistent top affiliate in some fairly competitive niches (1M$+/year) online here's my perspective on this.

About 99.7% of the time I look at the affiliate materials the owner has created for me, I shake my head in disbelief as to how in the world is that ever going to help me?

I never use any of the affiliate materials because they suck ass so bad. Not because I don't need any. Also, my needs are so specific that none of the template-stuff could really help me. And I always end up creating everything from scratch.

What **IS** valuable to me, is if I can talk to the product owner or email him, and have him create custom stuff I could use on my site (video, copy or emails), or answer my specific questions for me, get him to put tracking codes on his thank you page, or help me with my cashflow (pay me faster), weekly is best.

Another useful bit is that you could be pro-active. Don't just create affiliate materials and sit on your ass. Talk to affiliates. Create contests. And most important of all, make sure your sales letter converts and take care of the refund rate. That kind of stuff is like 1000x more important than affiliate materials. In fact, I don't give a **** if you have 0 affiliate materials, but if you have a high converting sales letter with low refund rate. You better believe that I'm going to promote the crap out of it.

Also: any product owner that picks up the phone and calls me will get my attention. In fact one merchant has even straight out bribed me by sending a Paypal cash bonus advance so I would take notice and promote his product instead of his competitor's (at the time I was promoting his competitor). Hey it worked.

I think its very important you want to make it as easy as possible for people to promote your products

I would in most cases don´t bother to promote your product without good marketing materials. I am also in most cases not a super affiliate but you would lose a decent amount of money from me without the ads, banners, emails etc.

For less experienced IMs it's very important to get quality marketing materials because absent of such resources there isn't enough knowledge or resources to put together a quality campaign.