For someone who quite likes competitions, one thing that does bug me is affiliate competitions. Just what is the point of them! Let’s face it unless you’re a PPC affiliate or highly positioned in the search engines, the chances are you’re wasting any time even thinking being involved.

The idea of bonuses or sweeteners is nice – but surely there needs to be some realism involved to encourage affiliates to promote these companies?

Let’s look at the following…

“Carphone Warehouse are offering a £1000 cash prize for the top performing affiliate” – will this attract them new affiliates? Not likely! It’s just a gimmick. Makes the merchant look good. It’s not a competition! It’s a £1000 bonus to their top affiliate, and chances are they probably know who it will be.

“Driver Dream Days is giving away a Ferrari Thrill ride to the first affiliate to make £5000 worth of sales” – perhaps a better offering, but this could be gone before you update links or consider looking at the merchant’s program. How about a Ferrari Thril ride for all affiliates who achieve £5000 worth of sales? A nice target to aim for.

“Affiliates who achieve over 100 enabled Sky sales in a calendar month starting from May, will receive a massive £500 bonus” – this is better! Everyone who reaches a target gets a bonus. Much better!!

Merchants get your ideas sorted. How about competitions to attract new affiliates, build new pages, be creative (like the SEO Iceland competition, until Iceland’s program closed down), sales via non-PPC methods. Merchants, you can still reward the top guys who through whatever means generate 000s of sales – but you reward them with bonuses – just don’t call bonuses competitions, ok!!

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