Affiliate Best Practices and Insider Tips

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Affiliate Best Practices and Insider Tips

• Denise Purtzer
• Channel Manager, Digital River

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Affiliate Stats

• 2007 Affiliate Sales
• AOV across affiliates was 38.77
• Average commission was 42
• Average earned amount for Affiliates 16.28
• 83 of all DR affiliates actively selling
• 90/10 rule

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What Affiliates Want

• Guaranteed--
• Payments on time and frequent
• Guaranteed tracking
• Easy
• Full reporting
• Find pull data
• Lots of product to choose from
• Top selling products
• Niche products
• Easy--Complete information in one spot

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Affiliate Verticals-Types

• Content Sites
• Review Sites
• Paid Search
• Coupon/Discount Sites

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Content Site Affiliates

• Benefits
• Exposure for Downloads
• Opportunity for customer feedback
• Challenges
• Keep all top download sites updated
• Opportunity for customers to give negative
  feedback
• Quality Content Sites

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Review Site Affiliates

• Benefits
• Opportunity to get positive press
• Comparisons to competitive products
• Priority placement available
• Creative Advertising/name recognition
• Challenges
• Opportunity to receive negative press
• Timely

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Review-Key Tools

• Trackable trial
• Buy link
• Provide license key to reviewer
• Screenshots
• Boxshots
• Review Info/guidelines

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Paid Search Affiliates

• Benefits
• Highest yield vertical
• Experts exist
• Can handle for you
• Can still work in conjunction with your paid
  efforts w/o defeating
• Can eliminate competition in key search areas
• Multiple representation
• Challenges
• Not understood
• Can drive up your search effort costs
• Time consuming

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Paid Search-Key Tools

• Trackable trial and buy links
• Help provide content for affiliate site build to
  legitimize
• Terms and Conditions
• define and reinforce affiliates actions
• Prime commissions for top search affiliates

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Paid SearchStrategy

• How do I compete with the Big Dogs in Software?
• TradeMark Terms
• Organic
• Long Tail

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SearchApplication

• Long Tail Strategy applied
• Sense of community
• Blogs
• User Groups
• Forums
• White Papers

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Coupon/Discount Site Affiliates

• Benefits
• Audience that may not otherwise be reached
• Coupon sites adding software more and more
• Reach customers who might not purchase for full
  price
• Challenges
• Position as to not dilute overall pricing
  strategies
• Coupon codes scraped and posted en masse
• Key Tools
• System that supports use of coupons
• Coupon code and/or cart link with discount
• Short description

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Coupon/Discount

• Opportunity to reach new audience
• Deal of Day
• General coupon Sites
• Software on these sites
• Coupon specific to affiliate or general use

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Hot Software Trends

• Security
• Beyond Antivirus
• MultiMedia
• Anything iPod/iPhone/Smartphone
• Optimizers/Problem Solvers

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• Questions?

• Thanks,
• dpurtzer_at_digitalriver.com