Affiliate Marketing: Handle With Care

It’s really disappointing to see companies taking advantage of people. It’s even more distressing when it’s a competitor of your company making everyone else look bad by association.

Today, I discovered a company that offers a service similar to siteMighty, but the similarities end there. The most glaring difference between this company and our own is that it charges over $5,000 to get started. Immediately, a red flag goes up.

Being the marketing person that I am, the first question I ask myself is “What’s the pitch?” (btw, if you’re an affiliate considering this $5k+ program, your first question should be “What’s the catch?”). The pitch is important to me because it’s the value proposition we extend to our users and potential users. For the $5k+ company to pitch such an exorbitant fee, means that there pitch is either very compelling or untrue.

When we talk to our customers, we are very aware of the language we use and the promises we make. Especially for affiliate marketing, we have to be very careful about telling people “you’ll make X over the next month.” No one can tell you that for certain. People enter this industry (and join siteMighty) at varying stages of experience. Some of our users know how affiliate marketing works and can get started right away. Most of our users, on the other hand, are brand new to affiliate marketing.

These are the people we built siteMighty for. siteMighty is perfect for anyone who wants to start marketing affiliate programs, but has either no way to build a site, or no budget to hire someone to build a site. You can literally come to siteMighty with zero experience in site building and have a site up in less than 5 minutes.

Keep in mind that this is just getting the site up. Step 2 involves marketing your site, and, admittedly, in the beginning we thought all we had to do was get your site built and that was it. But there’s another step which involves setting you on the path to marketing and gaining traction with your siteMighty site. We’re figuring this out and have already implemented a number of features, tools and offerings to help our users market their siteMighty sites (i.e. training guide, 24/7/365 Live support, etc.).

We’re looking for love. We want you to love us at sign up, but also love us 7 months later when you’re rocking with your siteMighty site. We can’t expect someone to to come to us with no experience and start making $10,000 a month right away. Don’t get me wrong, $10k/month is a lofty goal, but it’s attainable.

The point I’m trying to make here is that we love affiliate marketing. We believe in it. But to do it well means that it takes time to get to know it. With siteMighty, you’re given all the tools and expectations you need to succeed. Plus, we’re here to help every step of the way. We’re nothing without our amazing users.

The bottom line is that we want to add value to the industry, overcome the stigma that a few in our industry perpetuate, and see our users succeed.