I agree but just hope it doesn't take too long :)

Not all affiliates are like you my friend unfortunately.

I have trusted affiliates and it works really well. But they have to be communicative and, of course, sell product.

Exactly. I've never denied a request like that...but it's not like you get that kind of requests often...

Not anywhere near often enough over the years. Most affiliates just take the quickest least amount of work option/tools then wonder why they struggle to make sales. :)

true dat

Staggered most of the time that affiliates don't even ask for a pass to come in and take a look around the site they are going to try to sell. Unfortunately in the past all that affiliates had to do was throw up a load of (program prepared) links so when all of a sudden this throw shit at the wall method no longer works 100,000 affiliates suddenly become 1000.

Having traffic used to be a valuable resource. Being able to sell is now a lot more important.

When the spaghetti sticks to the fridge......it's done.

I agree with the concept of these comments but they are a bit too non-specific. What is expected from an affiliate? In my humble opinion our task is to get good volume, quality traffic to our sponsors sites. From that point, job done, it's down to the sites themselves to convert. Is that wrong?

As an affiliate of your sites I can honestly say I do my best. Yes I confess I haven't approached many sponsors with specific proposals, but equally nor have you two gentlemen approached me. If I am doing things wrong, or can do things better then tell me and I will listen. We are in tough times and we are, I hope, in it together to get the best possible results. I have tested many ideas, even set up multiple Aff IDs to get the most accurate results, so I am seriously open to ideas.

In 2008, my best year as an affiliate, my revenue was $81,000, all profit. In 2012 it was $42,000 and this year, so far, it's down even further. There seems, on the surface, to be several reasons for this including -

* Less good sponsors - especially solo models
* Fewer clicks out to sponsors (until very recently conversions had held up)
* More difficult to get appropriate content/galleries
* Some spectacular downturns in sponsor performance (e.g one site used to do $2000 per month and now struggles to do $50

So please help me, and other reputable affiliates, to help you and get maximum benefit from a system that can still produce, even though it could do better.

Traffic is far too easy to generate yourself in-house just to be spending time and money on any other area than doing just that yourself now.

Affiliates are great but they have to be able to actually "sell" now or they will just go broke and become too expensive to maintain.

A lot of big programs started to see that affiliates were calling far too many of the shots a few years back and they started to realize that in-house was a lot more efficient. Affiliates bring in extra sales and that's great but the days of everything hanging on affiliate only traffic is long gone.

Far too many solo model sites had everything set up with just affiliate traffic so when the affiliates started to drop away even very good sites started to get a lot less sales and started to close. Have to say that is down to far too many lazy site owners.

We can get clicks to *good* sponsors the same now as we did in 2005, problem is that there are just far fewer *good* sponsors now. Some of our best selling sites have been the sites that have recently closed.

Far too many cookie cutter shit glam sites that manage to strip away all of the personality of the model or far too many shooting the same old shit they were shooting ten years ago and the punter is bored to death with it.

The punter can now find much better on Tumblr and if they spent the next fifteen years there they wouldn't see the same stuff twice.

Once again I agree with the principal but it doesn't answer my question. What are we supposed to do to "sell" the sponsors site? You are not being specific.

Whilst I understand the growing interest in building in-house traffic it is incredibly time consuming and some of us are not lucky enough to have teams of people to undertake specific tasks. As a one man band it's a case of best results for least work, and I don't mean not working, more prioritisation.

One other interesting point are the demands from affiliates. My biggest argument (as a pay site owner as well), is the one of "leak free tours". Your very own site dropped ours because of our "leaky tours". . We have changed that now to meet affiliate demands - but lost tons of "in-house" traffic at the same time. At one stage it was even stated that links to Twitter and Yahoo were "leaks". Catch 22 or pot calling kettle black?

Well for instance, how many places still sell www.Lady-Sonia.com as a Femdom site? The last knee-trembler Femdom stuff we shot was in about 2006 I think? How many affiliates even look at the sites they are promoting to see what is relevant or what are the hot subjects in the updates?

The growing interest started years ago but no one really noticed. We have been lucky to have had a lot of very good help over the years from some very clever people and one guy in particular who ran a very big site told me how much he had paid out to affiliates in the previous year and how much more efficient it would be to use just some of that to staff an office with his own traffic people and generate his own. He did that and he never looked back and sold out to another even bigger company doing the same thing. Your own traffic has a lot of advantages such as pricing on the fly, using various billers/ payment options etc. This is just business really. Just because CCBill pay out your affiliates it doesn't mean that you are not paying them yourself.

For me now you can have as many leaks as you like. John ran stuff a different way until recent times but times have changed and yes I agree that so long as they are sensible leaks (Twitter, Tumblr, FB, Newsletter, etc) you would be daft not to have them there now. To be honest without some sort of in-house traffic a site will die shortly anyway and I would rather send traffic to sites that are going to stick around.

The problem, i think, is especially evident with "small" program owners (as myself). We try to provide promo material as much as we can, but it's nearly impossible to "nail it" for every single affiliate we have.

Best thing an affiliate can do (for his own benefit too!) is to try to promote our sites using the content that works well in the site he's planning to advertise them in. And what better way then come and grab it by himself?

As for not contacting every affiliate asking if they want a password...well, we send (as everyone) affiliate emails, always ending with things like "contact us for any sort of need you might have". Ok nearly no one, probably, reads affiliate e-mails but...what else can we do? Phone them up? :D

Why should you need to? The affiliate gets paid and that's the affiliates job?