AFFILIATE MARKETING MANAGER - INDIA

11 effective social media strategies for marketers

2010-03-10T13:48:00.000+05:30

Know the platform

The first and most important thing is to know and understand the theme of the social media platform you are using. Don't rush. Try to understand why people come here and what they want. Which is the best part people visit and why the leave. All these understanding will help you in understanding the psychology of the users of that platform.

Offer assistance
Want to create new relationships? What to make new friends? Want to win new customers? Then be ready to assist. Understand the paint point and help them in removing their pain point.

Be polite

You should be polite. Polite to yourself, the person whom you contacting, the media you using and all other fellow members.

Smile :)
Star a day with smile and positive statements in the conversions. Use sense of humor effectively in the communication. Make sure that your sense of humor don't affect anyone.

Meet the influencers
This is one of the best thing to do while you are using the social media. There are many influencers and your relationship with them can help you in winning new customers too.

Meet the newcomers

As we all know, our first relationship in a new environment starts with the first person who says "Hello" to us. That works in social media too. Greet the new members. Offer them useful information about the medium etc and how that will be helpful to him/her. You can win his/her trust.

Follow up
Most important thing. Never miss to follow up. If someone find time to comment on your post, reply it or at least say thanks. Follow up can you in winning long term customers.

Don’t sell and don’t spam
Even though we are here to sell something, don't do it straight away. Social media is a method of relationship marketing or relationship selling. Try to win them and they will be their customer.

Bring a gift
Bring doesn't means a physical or costly gift. What ever it is that should be free and a surprise for them. If some one is searching for some good tool then refer send them a good free version of software or send greeting cards online.

Find new events
Constantly look for the new things which are happening on the platform. New events help you in reaching to new people with new interest.

Introduce a new person
Introduce your friends to the new person. This will make a channel. If you introduce your friend to him, you will get a chance that you will get a new referral through him/her. Expand your network.

Buy.at Affiliate Network acquired by Digital Window

2010-03-02T17:49:00.000+05:30

A leading online affiliate marketing network, Buy.at, a group company of AOL, acquired by Digital Window at $124mn.

Digital Windows owns Affiliate Window, UK's one of the leading performance based affiliate network.

Recently majority of stocks of Digital Window was acquired by a German company which also owns Zanox affiliate network.

Cheap linux web hosting

2010-02-21T20:41:00.000+05:30

Let me frankly say that I am an affiliate of HostSo but I am not writing about it because I am an affiliate of HostSo but I though that I should have to share which can help others. I have tried many different web hosting companies and let me say that there is no match of HostSo. There are many things which lead me to write a review of HostSo.

> Price: The hosting plan starts at as low as Rs.29 / Month which is lower than a $1. And the best thing about this plan is that you will get 200 GB web space as well as unlimited data transfer.
> They support MySQL which is one of the most database used for online applications.
> Support: Even though the entire process is smooth, they also provide 24x7 unmatched quality services. Do you have question? Just go and ask and they will support in all possible ways to short out your query.
> Wide range of payment methods: They accept all major payment methods including PayPal, Money Bookers, Credit Card, Western Union, Discover, eCheck etc.
> Instant activation. You need not to wait to get your hosting account after you register. You will get everything immediately.

I am referring you to HostSo. I wish that you will visit them and order by following my affiliate link. Visit HostSo.

Paypal, India and Affiliate Marketing

2010-02-09T16:39:00.000+05:30

PayPal is one of the most popular online payment system as well as favorite of thousands of webmasters working as affiliates. As per the latest updates from PayPal, it would not be possible to send payment to Indian individual or no Indian individual can send or receive payment.

This will affect a lot of affiliate programs as India has a large pool of quality and well performing affiliates who were preferring to receive payment by PayPal as it is one of the best and convenient way to convert foreign currency payment to Indian rupees.

According to PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar, effective from Saturday PayPal had taken this decision and they have informed all merchants. There was no specific reason was given.

According to industry experts, the possible reason can be the new government regulation in which it is mandatory to give the details about the international payments.

Due to this decision thousands of affiliates will be affected.

People will search for alternative methods for money transfer and they will be diverted to services like Moneybookers.

Yes, we can make money online in India too

2010-02-01T12:57:00.004+05:30

There are many people who think that it is hard to make money online by promoting Indian merchant but I would like to share my personal experience with all the internet entrepreneurs who want to make money on net.

I am working with DGM India, a pioneer affiliate network of India and was able to make lakhs of rupees by promoting others' stuff.

Look at the figures to know about few things about my earning. I had not shown all earning due to privacy reasons.

You can join DGM and surely can make a lot of money.

Visit DGM India Affiliate Network.

An Interview with Parul Mehta - Global Affiliate Manager of vCommission Affiliate Network

2010-01-27T20:40:00.003+05:30

Recently I got an opportunity to meet the global account manager of vCommission affiliate network Parul Mehta and I decided to take her interview as she can give a lot of information about the past, current and future of Affiliate Marketing Industry in India.

I had taken an email interview of Parul and knew many things about affiliate marketing industry in India. Here is the questions and the answers given by her.

1) Hi Parul, can you please tell our readers a bit more about vCommission and how it can be helpful to Indian Online Advertisers?

vCommission is India's first International CPA Network. Though we're based in India, but we are certainly not India centric. We explore the possibilities of business all across the globe.

vCommission was started with a vision to give its publishers all the freedom. vCommission's founders (including myself) are all former super affiliates who have worked on Indian and International campaigns with various networks, so being affiliates ourselves, we deeply understand the needs of an affiliate and work hard to give them best services possible.

It won't be wrong if I say that vCommission is a Publisher's network rather than Advertiser's!

During our careers as affiliates, we all have faced problems because networks limited campaigns and niches. It is a well known fact that affiliates need to work with various affiliate networks so that they are never short of offers. THAT is our concept. A vCommission Publisher is never short of choice. He has over 800 offers to choose from, spread over all niches.

2) Can you tell me something about the current status of affiliate marketing in India and what is the role of an affiliate network?

Affiliate marketing in India is still unexplored and this makes it even more exciting because the scope of growth is immense. Indian audience is becoming aware of this concept now, but there is still a long way to go! To add on it, I would proudly say that many international networks rely on their Super Affiliates from India to get business rolling! So it is an interesting mixture of both.

An affiliate network brings many offers and opportunities under one platform, this reduces an affiliate's precious time and effort to a great extent. It won’t be wrong to say that Affiliate Networks bring variety and choice of offers.

vCommission is different from all the other networks in India so far because we also bring in International offers for all our publishers, along with campaigns targeting Indian traffic.

Secondly, we have better paying offers as well, for example we have simple email submits that pay upto $3/lead!

3) How can affiliate marketing be a better revenue model as compared to other avenues of marketing and sales like pay per click and search engine optimization?

Much has been said about this before and now. CPA model is pay per action model, that is, advertiser decides to pay per lead (which can be a simple email/phone/zip submit or registration) which is definitely more optimized than Pay Per Click! Most international brands are now opting to run CPL campaigns because it gives them targeted leads which can be converted for company's benefit. Affiliates also find it easy to promote! So when both advertisers and affiliates are comfortable, it makes a great concept!

I would like to quote an interesting figure here in context, a couple of days ago while just experimenting with Adwords PPC, I came across some very expensive keywords that cost upto $100/click. That would almost be like robbing the advertiser off! CPA would definitely be a refuge for such advertisers :)

4) There are many affiliate networks in India, what is special about vCommission?

vCommission is different from all the other networks in India so far, we bring in International and better paying offers for all publishers.

We pay NET30.

We have over 800 active offers, spread over all niches, to give our affiliates the freedom to choose.

So I would sum it up in points in comparison to other networks in India:

1. Indian offers to cash your Indian traffic
2. International offers to cash your International traffic
3. Competitive payouts in the industry.
4. NET30 payment cycle
5. Variety of payment options (Cheque, PayPal and Bank transfer)
6. Varity of niche and offers to choose from.

5) How the new FTC guideline will affect affiliate marketing?

Positive and Negative both, personally I think testimonials should include a mixture of average and above average results. But it will be difficult to include a full disclosure in one 140 character status update. It would certainly be nice to know when people are doing paid reviews, but what’s wrong with that if they have purchased the product themselves and have achieved great results

I am not in a position to give you any legal advice regarding the FTC guidelines but strongly recommend you implement a disclosure policy on all your affected websites, blogs, etc.

I also recommend you take time to watch the following video by Jim Edwards of an interview he conducted with a senior FTC representative.

http://jimedwards.s3.amazonaws.com/ftc-advertising-interview/index.htm

6) What types of benefits should affiliates look for when joining an affiliate network?

Choice of offers and their payouts is the major concern, added to that would be payout terms, reliability and support.

7) Which are the major challenges to affiliate marketing in India?

There are many! I find lack of awareness most saddening of all. Indians are very very intelligent, thanks to our education system, but most of the time we don't get the exposure. People still see "affiliate marketing" as MLM or fraud! Many international companies or networks see 'India' as fraud leads etc. But this is changing now, we see advertisers now looking for Indian traffic.

8) Indian affiliates gives preference to pay per Click and Pay per Lead affiliate programs as compared to Pay per Sale affiliate program. Is this true?

Not just Indians, affiliates all across the globe! A lot depends on the offer too. Click/Lead campaigns are easier to convert for the affiliate, and now-a-days, it is considered that it is advertiser's job to convert the lead. We ourselves have 800 active offers right now, out of which 700 are CPL and 100 per sale.

9) How vCommission attracts affiliate to join their affiliate network?

We, the team of affiliate and advertiser managers at vCommission, have worked as affiliates formerly, so we know how to generate traffic :)

On a serious note, we do a lot of online advertising and to add to that we have a strong referral program paying a flat $10 per referred publisher.

10) Where you see affiliate marketing in India after FIVE years?

Hmmm, a lot more advanced than what it is now. What I would love to see is recognition. Usually when you go upto someone and say that I'm into Internet Marketing/Affiliate Marketing, all you see is a weird expression coupled with a "What's that?" until you explain!! And some affiliate summits in India :)

Visit vCommission Affiliate Network

Affiliate Marketing in 2010 and role of a quality affiliate tracking platform

2010-01-12T13:40:00.002+05:30

Affiliate Marketing, a pay for performance advertising medium for online advertisers is growing. Due to increasing cost of acquiring top position in search engines, recession and tight advertising budget lead many online retailers to move towards accepting affiliate marketing as a preferred method of advertising online.

In year 2010, there are lots off opportunities for the affiliate marketers but there are few threats too. Tighten online advertising rules by Federal Trade Commission (FTC), new features in web browsers like in private browsing and changes in search engine algorithm poised few threats.

All these lead affiliates to become choosy while joining an affiliate program. Now a days many affiliate program rely only on Cookies to track the click, leads and sales referred by affiliates but as the new technology and increased awareness among the web users is becoming a threat to cookie life time and affiliates are loosing thousands of dollars as commission.

Then affiliates love to join the affiliate programs that use new age technologies. As being an affiliate as well as affiliate manager for more than two years, I got a chance to encounter with many different affiliate tracking systems and I recommend ClickInc.com. ClickInc come up with a new technology feature after an extensive research which is called TruLink.

What is TruLink?

In traditional affiliate marketing system, affiliate has to place affiliate IDs at the end of their landing page URL. Example like, merchants website is www.merchant.com and affiliate's Id is 123 then the landing page URL may look something like this:

http://www.merchant.com?a_aid=123

TruLink offers some additional features which are not depended entirely on URL. The affiliate has not to use or remember those affiliate IDs. ClickInc.com's TruLink gives a facility so that affiliates can use direct link to the merchant. So affiliate have to link directly to the merchant's landing page without using the affiliate ID. The link will like as:

http://www.merchant.com

The clicks, leads and sales will be tracked on the base of the referred URL and the dependency on cookies can be reduced.

For more details, visit ClickInc.com

Happy New Year 2010

2009-12-31T19:15:00.004+05:30

How the recent change in Google will affect affiliate marketing?

2009-12-23T18:48:00.005+05:30

Google is working on a new version of its search engine program which is code named "Caffeine". Google Caffeine is faster, more reliable and accurate as compared to old Google. The main differences of new version as compared to old one are:

Google going faster: The speed of the search is doubled.

Google relies more on keywords: SEO professionals, your job just got a lot harder. The algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results.

Real time search: Google is making itself able enough to show the real time news as it happens as well as Twitter, FaceBook, Friend Feed etc.

The new changes in Google will have a significant impact on Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing using SEO as preferred method of promoting will have to face more challenges and hard work. SEO affiliate marketers have to target more keywords and will need to stay updated in the social media.

FTC Guidelines and Affiliate Marketing - New Challenges in 2010

2009-12-23T18:10:00.006+05:30

Federation of Trade and Commerce declared new guidelines for web masters promoting products of others and making commission for each sale referred effective from 1st December 2009. The new guidelines have imposed strict restriction on the way the testimonials and endorsement are being done.

According to the new guidelines, if a webmaster or blogger is promoting some products or services and making money from it, they have to disclose the all details including the commission received and the way it will be received as well as from whom the commission is received. It will increase extra headache to the webmaster and blogger.

According to FTC, it will increase the transparency of the way business is being promoted as well as customers can save their selves from being misguided.

Commission received - Google Adsense

2009-12-09T12:14:00.003+05:30

I was happy seeing the latest check of Rs.5125.61 from Google adsense. :-) Still need to work hard to convert more impressions to clicks.

Happy Googling....

Affiliate Manager India | Affiliate Marketing India

What makes an affiliate program stand out of the crowd?

2009-12-01T14:20:00.003+05:30

There is hundreds of affiliate marketing in each category and even in niche. If you, as merchant think to create a difference among the affiliates then you have to be extra friendly with your affiliates. I had tried to share my views about how should be a good affiliate program.

80% of the affiliates or publishers enter the affiliate marketing industry with a single motive: Making quick money at minimum efforts. People think that it is easy to make money online and in search of making quick money online, people prefer affiliate marketing. But as we all know the 80-20 rule, 80% of the business of a company is generated by 20% of its staff. Affiliate marketers are merchant's sales force who works for performance only.

Here I am discussing about the mindset of the 20% of top affiliates who can refer 80% of the total business which merchant will get from the affiliate channel.

Affiliates look for websites which are clean, fast and having good user interface. The website should have an easy menu structure, easy to understand order processing system, secure payment system, a wide range of payment option which can increase the click to sales conversion ratio.

Many websites list contact emails and phone numbers on every pages as well as accepts order on phone also. Affiliates prefer to stay away those websites which accepts order through phone also because the orders placed on phone may not be tracked.

Few characters of a good merchant website which attracts the affiliates:

Wide range of salable products
Full range of payment options including PayPal, Money bookers, Credit Card, Bank Transfer, Debit Card, Cheque etc
Easy to understand and less complicated order processing forms
Fast loading websites
Secure payment process
Easy navigation
Facility to deep link to the products

Affiliates always want to join those programs which care of them. The few characteristics which can help an affiliate program to stand out of the competition.

Regular communication with affiliates
On time payment with minimum threshold
Easy commission structure
Quick validation of sales orders
Consider affiliates as part of your sales force and treat them accordingly
Competitive commission structure
Competitive prices
Provide as many tools as possible to help them to promote your affiliate program
Don't change your terms and conditions frequently and if do, give a valid reason

Unethical affiliate marketing practices by merchants

2009-12-01T12:26:00.002+05:30

Few months ago, I joined ZnetIndia Web Hosting affiliate program. It was mentioned on their website that affiliate will get 10% commission on hosting plan and 10% commission on domain registration. I started promoting them as an affiliate and referred few sales. After few months when I checked the status I found that they had not given commission on few sales. I was wondering that why did that happened. I had spent a few bucks promoting them and referring new business but still then rejected the commission on sale.

I contacted them. There was no dedicated affiliate manager to reply the query. After 5-6 calls and 4-5 emails I got a reply from them: "The commission was declined becaused we had given discount to the customer and therefore our margin is to low and therefore we can't give commission".

What a funny answer. First of all, I was never informed by them but when the time came to give commission, they had raised the question. I had written about how merchants cheat affiliate and this is a live example. You (The Affiliate) spends money and other resources to promote and refer business to them but when the time comes to give commission, they decline by giving such reasons.

If merchants are launching the promotional offers, they do it to increase their business. Affiliate Marketing is a channel through which they get extra promotions and have to pay for the performance only. But by using such type of unethical business practices, they cheat affiliate and save more money for their business.

Affiliate Marketing fraus by merchants is increasing and affiliates must take care of it.

Comments are welcomed...

Affiliate Manager India | Affiliate Marketing India

An interview of Mr.Anurag Gupta, Director of DGM India

2009-11-25T11:42:00.006+05:30

As we all know, affiliate marketing is not accepted as preferred medium of online advertising and customer acquisition among Indian advertisers at its potential. I want to know that what is happening in the Indian affiliate marketing industry and if I want to get the right picture than none other than Mr.Anurag Gupta, Director of DGM-India, one of the largest affiliate networks in India, can help me in getting the answer of this question.

I contacted him through Email and he politely spent some time to give the answers of questions asked. He had presented the current status of affiliate marketing industry in India, challenges and opportunities. I had published the interview with him in my Blog.

Yogendra Oza: What is the current position of Affiliate Marketing as a preferred method of advertising among Indian advertisers?
Anurag Gupta:I would say that Affiliate Marketing as a channel of customer acquisition is still pretty nascent in the Indian Market despite DGM being a major proponent of the same in the Indian Market for past 2 ½ years! However what is heartening is that we have recently begun seeing a huge amount of acceptance from the Indian Advertisers.

Yogendra Oza: What are the challenges to Affiliate Marketing in India?
Anurag Gupta: The challenges are manifold. Few top ones would be:

Low level of understanding amongst the advertisers as to how affiliates can potentially drive winning traffic to the Advertiser Eg PPC Affiliates
Poor payment cycle norm in India amongst the Digital ecosystem
Small size of eCommerce business in India.

Yogendra Oza: What is the future of Affiliate Marketing in India?
Anurag Gupta: Future looks to be very bright as Affiliate is the only channel that delivers pure performance / ROI to an Advertiser. Hence over a period of time I am certain that every Advertiser who is on digital medium will be using Affiliate Marketing.

Yogendra Oza: Why very few retailers have their own inhouse Affiliate Programs?
Anurag Gupta: Like I said earlier, eCommerce in India is woefully small as of now. Hence we do not see too much action in this segment as of now. However, in line with the global trends, we feel that ecommerce / retailing will be one of the most significant revenue earners for Affiliates in times to come.
As far as in-house programmes are concerned, world over Affiliates mainly tend to trust third party programmes like DGM. Hence we strongly recommend our Advertisers to use third party programmes rather than setting up their own programme which can prove to be more uneconomical & less efficient over a period of time.

Yogendra Oza: What can be the reason that an advertiser stops using affiliate marketing?
Anurag Gupta: There are 2 categories of Advertisers. One category is where the Advertisers have a campaign to run with a limited budget over a limited period. In such case an Advertiser uses our network for a defined limited period to meet his specific objectives. We call these Advertisers Campaign Advertisers.
The other category is where an advertiser is looking for performance over a sustained period. Such Advertisers generally do not stop their Affiliate Marketing programme. One rare situation where we have seen such Advertisers pausing our programme is where they are unable to track sales at their end and de-duplicate them. In such instance these Advertisers will want to continue the programme only after they are able to sort these issues.

Yogendra Oza: What is your strategy to recruit new affiliates?
Anurag Gupta: We have a 2 pronged strategy- Push & Pull. We advertise on Search Engines like Google and we have a publisher acquisition team that has the mandate for acquiring new publishers

Yogendra Oza: What are your expectations from a serious affiliate marketer?
Anurag Gupta: A serious Affiliate Marketer must look at Affiliate Marketing as a long term channel and not look at a short term campaign strategy, Only then will he be able to invest money and resources to grow this channel that can ultimately become a significant source of customer acquisition.

Visit DGM-India, the top affiliate network of India.

Affiliate Manager India | Affiliate Marketing India

DGM Advertiser ClearTrip removed the PI Cookie

2009-11-20T19:50:00.007+05:30

This is the latest update from DGM Affiliate Network. A leading travel portal of India ClearTrip.com who is working as an Affiliate Advertiser with a leading Affiliate Network of India, DGM had informed the affiliates that they had removed the PI.

It is a matter of debate that whether to give commission on the base of PI or not but if we consider in the context of India, there are many advertisers who use Affiliate Marketing channel for branding purpose only.

If we think like an Indian consumer, they will normally not prefer to buy at the first instance from any advertiser just by seeing the advertisement.

Affiliates work hard to promote the advertisers and due to that they should get a fair chance to earn the commission.

Affiliate marketing fraud

2009-11-19T15:10:00.003+05:30

Affiliate marketing fraud involves the fraud by advertisers, affiliate networks / agency or by the affiliates.

Advertisers do fraud because they can save money which they have to pay to affiliates. Affiliates do fraud because they want to earn more money from the advertisers. Affiliate network and agencies do fraud to cheat advertisers or affiliates.

Frauds by Affiliates:

Fraud or fake transactions:
There are many black hat affiliates who use fraudulent techniques to generate fake clicks, leads or transactions. The most common example is to fill fake leads. The affiliate fills fake leads with fake information to earn commission. The serious offences are like stealing credit card information from people and using them to make purchase.

Parasites:
Fraudulent affiliates used adware and other malicious applications of scripts and overwrite cookies of the genuine affiliates with the frequent affiliates. In this way the genuine affiliate will not get paid and they will move on.

Typo squatting:
Affiliates registers look a like domains same like the merchants and then sign up with the affiliate merchants and make money. Example like Makemytrip.info (Original MakeMyTrip.com), Yaatra.co.in (Original Yaatra.com) etc.

Copycats:
Copycats are the sites having the same look and interface as merchant's site. They sign up with merchant's affiliate program and earn commission when a confused visitor the merchant from these sites.

Email spammers:
A special category of email marketers who join affiliate programmers and then send spam across thousands of email and earn commission when a visitor clicks on those emails. They are harmful to merchant as the brand can be diminished.

Frauds by Merchants:

Declining sales or leads:
This is the most common practice where the merchant declines a lead or sales only for the sake of not paying the commission to affiliate. Merchants even don't care to give the reason. (I had worked with many merchants and found some who are doing this).

Altering affiliate tracking system:
There are many merchants who intentionally modify the tracking system so that all leads/sales are not reported. This happens during the festive season when the merchant expect to get more sales and they use these types of unethical business practices.

Offering those products which don't sell:
There are many fraudulent affiliates who use affiliate marketing channel just for branding. They offer a limited number of products to promote to their affiliates which don't get sold.

Frequently turning on/off the campaigns:
This is a method to cheat the affiliates. Merchants cheat the affiliates by frequently turning on/off the campaigns during the peak hours and in this way they can stop many sales from getting tracked.

Frauds by Networks:

Playing with CPA rate:
Affiliate Networks increase the commission to lure the affiliates and manipulates the sales so that they are not shown to affiliates but shown to merchants.

Last but not least, a different type of threat to affiliate marketing is the affiliate code alteration by the webmaster or web hosting service provider. You have hosted your website on some cheap servers and they will replace your affiliate ID with their unknowingly to you and then reset back. In this way you can lose a lot. Beware!!

Affiliate Marketing and Indian Online Advertisers

2009-11-19T12:48:00.005+05:30

Even though it is not a new concept, Affiliate Marketing is relatively less adaptable medium of online advertising among Indian online advertisers. Now a day, the majority of online advertisers belongs to the travel, finance, education, matrimony and online retail segments. If you monitor the online advertising on all major portals or the advertisements served by the Google Ad sense or other advertising networks, you will find majority of the advertises are related to these segments only.

The most popular medium of online advertising among internet advertisers is Pay per Click. CPC and CPM networks and agencies are making good money from it.

Now look at the psychology of using Affiliate Marketing channel by these online advertisers. DGM India, Shoogloo India, SMXChange are the few most popular affiliate networks in India. Majority of their merchants are either related to Finance, Retail or Travel. Earlier matrimony websites had used affiliate marketing to promote their business but later they moved to CPC advertising.

It looks like that all online advertisers in Indian Internet industry want to use affiliate marketing only for branding and as an alternative to CPC advertising. Affiliate Marketing is a cost effective medium as merchant only have to pay for performance. In this case advertisers are attracted towards affiliate marketing as they even have not to pay for clicks also or very less as compared to Google Ad Sense etc.

If we look at the cookie period of few advertisers in those networks, it is merely 1-2 days. Global reports say that Click through ratios is declining year on year. People normally not prefer to click on an unknown banner and rather than search in Google etc and then go to that site for more information. In this case when an affiliate tries hard to create a website and optimize it for search engines, he will not get the ROI on his efforts which he put to promote those advertisers. Low cookie lifetime means the visitors have to take the action immediately after their encounter with the affiliate site and in Indian environment where the credit card penetration is low; the cookie period should be long.

As we all know, relying on cookie for tracking affiliate clicks and sales is a concern as browsers are becoming more and more private. In this case they should have to implement new methods like direct tracking etc.

It’s also looked like that the entire affiliate marketing game is advertiser friendly and not affiliate friendly. Advertisers increase their term and condition only because they want to get more brand exposure at lower cost. They advertise on Google and other search engine and pay in advance but when the matter of payment to affiliates they delay it for 90-120 days. Affiliate networks accept all the terms and conditions imposed by the advertiser or its agencies as they want business and want to survive. They don't fight for affiliate’s interest.

In long run, it will affect the future of Affiliate Marketing industry in India.

Change in DGM India Affiliate payment terms

2009-11-17T18:45:00.005+05:30

Recently I got an email from DGM-India, informing me about the change in the payment terms. It was said that the network is not able to get the payment from the agencies of the advertisers on time and due to that the payment to affiliates will be delayed. That delay can go up to 90 days or even more.

Now it creates many questions about the way the Indian affiliate marketing industry is working. I had worked with few western advertising networks and affiliate programs where the merchant have to deposit some amount and that was used to make payment to affiliates.

But here the situation is different. It looks like that affiliate network needs advertisers and then they are able to convince the affiliate networks to work on their own terms. In long run, this is not a good sign.

Affiliates work hard to bring sales to the advertisers. They spend on Email marketing, SEO and even PPC. In all these cases, affiliates have to pay in advance but the advertisers for whom they are working pays them after 90 days and according to me it is not fair.

The affiliate networks should not accept all the terms and conditions of the advertisers or agencies as they have to make sure that they have to keep their affiliates happy. Happy affiliates can deliver better results.

There should be some win-win situation where they payment term should not increase more than 45 days.

Online Advertising Networks in India

2009-11-06T18:29:00.004+05:30

India is one of the fastest growing countries having a lot of opportunities in the online advertising segment. The increase of internet and mobile penetration had increased the opportunities for the online marketers. There are many online ad networks active in this segments which provides an opportunity to the online marketers to get new avenues of marketing their products or services online. They also play a role of middle man and help the people or companies who want to make money from their online advertising inventory.

List of popular online advertising networks in India.

Komli Media

Komli is one of the leading online advertising networks in India with specialization in Lead Generation. They have their own group of websites for lead generation activities related to Finance and Travel. Komli media had developed their own online audience measurement system named ViziSense.

Visit www.komli.com

IndiAds

IndiAds is an advertising network founded in 2000 with a goal of helping advertisers reach to the American wealthy people in North America and South Asia. They are also focused on targeting Non Resident Indians. IndiAds network unites dozens of high-traffic Indian sites, whose audience is composed of ethnic Indians living all-over the globe, mainly - in the US and Canada, Europe and India.

Visit www.indiads.com

Google Adsense

Google Adsense program help the publishers in making money from their online traffic. Google adsense is a Pay per Click program where the publisher is rewarded for each quality click he/she refer to the merchants.

Visit www.google.com/adsense

Sulekha Ad Network

Sulekha Ad Network is a network of 600+ websites serving Indians and NRIs. Sulekha Ad Network focuses on branding and lead generation. It has 2 million unique Indian users across the world out of that 1.2 million NRI audience and rest from India.

Sulekha is a targeted ad network focused on global Telugu and Tamil Indians and NRIs.

Visit www.sulekha.com/AdNetwork

Ozone Media

Ozone Media advertising network was founded in 2006 and now a day it is among the top online ad networks in India with some of the largest online publishers in India as partners.

Ozone Media has leading online advertisers of India including HSBC, SBI, ICICI, Yahoo!, Dell, NDTVjobs, Lenovo, Cleartrip, In.com, Britannia, Huggies, Virgin Mobile, Timesjobs.com, SimplyMarry.com, Zapak, Makemytrip and Citibank.

Visit www.ozonemedia.co.in

Tyroo Media

Tyroo is the only startup in India and funded by Yahoo!. Tyroo was chosen as one of India’s top 25 hottest startups this year by Proto and among the top 10 ‘most interesting start-ups’ by business daily, Mint. Smile Interactive Technologies Group (SITG) is the investor backing the company. Headquartered in New Delhi, the company is a leader in representing publishers and delivering online marketing solutions to advertisers.

Visit www.tyroo.com

Pub Matic

PubMatic is a global Ad Revenue Optimization company that provides premium online publishers with a full service solution to manage and monetize non-guaranteed ad inventory.

PubMatic is venture backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Nexus Venture Partners, and Helion Ventures. In India their office is in Pune.

Visit www.pubmatic.com

Affiliate Networks in India

2009-10-21T11:28:00.006+05:30

Affiliate Industry in India is still at its nascent stage. The online advertisers started recognizing the importance of the Affiliate Marketing as additional performance based revenue models.

In India, individual in house affiliate programs are not successful. Affiliates prefer to join an affiliate program trough an affiliate network rather than joining them directly. Due to that reason very few companies have their own in house affiliate programs.

DGM Affiliate Network is considered one of the pioneer of Indian Affiliate Marketing industry. Few more affiliate networks were existed in the industry but none of them was able to reach at the stage DGM is.

Few of the most popular affiliate networks in India.

DGM India
www.dgm-india.com

DGM India is a wholly owned subsidiary of Deal Group Media, UK. DGM India Affiliate Network was started back in 2007 and headed by Anurag Gupta, who is a veteran internet marketing professional having 18+ years of experience in Internet Marketing.

DGM India have a good number of Indian online retailers. Few of the top online retailers associated with are ICICI Lombard Insurance, TATA AIG Insurance, Yatra.com, MakeMyTrip.com, IndiaTimes Shopping, Rediff Shopping, AirTel, FutureBazaar.com, Expedia.in, Yahoo! Small Business, Nokia, Dell, Lenovo, IndiaMart.com etc.

Shoogloo
www.shoogloo.com

Shoogloo Affiliate Network is a new age company. The founder and CEO of the company L.D.Sharma is a person with immense knowledge, experience and understanding of performance marketing using the latest online tools such as affiliate marketing and search engine marketing (PPC & SEO).

SMXchange (Formerly Axill.in)

www.smxchange.com

SMXChange Affiliate Network is the online marketing divison of Social Media India Ltd., a leading online and offline advertising agency in India. It also operates the most popular social networking site BharatStudent.com. It has more than 15 online retailers in its portfolio including IBN, SimplyMarry, ICICI Bank, Idea Cellular, Garnier, DHL, CricketNext.com, Shaadi.com, TravelGuru.com, TripMela.com etc.

vCommission India

www.vCommission.in

vCommission India Affiliate Network is one of the top performance marketing company based in India.

Rupiz Affiliates
www.rupizaffiliates.com

Rupiz Affiliates Network was started back in 2007 by UK based Rupiz Media Group, an online marketing company.

RupizAffiliates have PaisaWaisa.com, Masterji.com, RetailsDirect.com, YouTring.com.

ClixGalore India

www.clixgalore.in

ClixGalore.in Affiliate Network is the Indian version of one of top affiliate network ClixGalore. ClixGalore has DigitalBhumi, Talash.com, etc in its protfolio of merchants.

Affiliate Marketing in India

2009-10-13T19:49:00.005+05:30

There is no official publications of reports available which can show the results of the current state of affiliate marketing industry in India. India has a large pool of people having good knowledge of English and Internet marketing techniques and the entrepreneurship in them motivated them to start their own online business sitting at their home and operating from their laptop.

This leads to the growth of affiliate marketing industry. Affiliate marketing gives an opportunity to an individual or a company to start their own business without investing a single Rupee. You just need a computer, access to internet and basic knowledge of HTML and you can start your own business by promoting other's products or services online.

Merchants or Advertisers had not accepted this medium of advertising as compared to diplay advertising and search engine marketing. There is huge potential and space for the growth of affiliate marketing.

Welcome to Affiliate Manager India Blog

2009-10-13T19:38:00.004+05:30

Affiliate Marketing is a term used for the way of doing marketing using Internet in which a business or individual get rewards from a merchant or advertiser for each customer of visitors brought to the advertisers.

The individual or company who do the marketing for the merchant or advertisers is called affiliate or publisher and rewarded for the actions which can be in the form of Impressions, Clicks, Leads or Sales.

There are basically four palayers in the core of the Affiliate Marketing concept. The Merchant (Also known as Retailer or Seller), the publisher (also known as affiliate and execute the marketing activities for merchants), the Network (An agency which acts as middle man between the merchant and publisher and provides tracking technology and affiliate management platform), the customer (the final user who take an action).

Affiliate marketing is a concept and not a technology. It overlaps with other online marketing activities as affiliates regularly use other marketing activities like organic search, paid search advertising, email marketing etc.

Affiliate Marketing is gaining popularity because its a purely a performance based marketing activity where an affiliate get rewards only when it shows result.

AffiliateManager.in is my personal blog. I, Yogendra Oza is working in the Affiliate Marketing Industry for the past 2.5 years and had seen industry changing. My blog will help you in keeping yourself updated about the latest happening about the affiliate marketing industry in India.

Although this blog is targeted to Indian Affiliate Marketing Industry, I had covered many other topics like Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing etc which can be helpful to affiliates.

If you want to get tregular updates about Affiliate Networks in India, Top Affiliate Marketing opportunities, latest news and articles about the Affiliate Marketing industry in India etc then subscribe my blog.

Keep visiting.

Yogendra Oza

Affiliate Manager India

Affiliate Marketing Books

2009-09-01T19:15:00.004+05:30

Affiliate Marketing Tools

2009-09-01T19:12:00.005+05:30

Affiliates tools help the affiliates in enhancing their productivity. There are different types of affiliates which have different needs and the tools can help them in doing the same work in better ways.

There are many affiliate tools which can be helpful to affiliates. Few good tolls are as below:

Google Keyword Suggestions Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

AffiloRama Free Tools
www.affilorama.com/free-tools

CleverStat
www.cleverstat.com/en

DigitalPoint Tools
www.digitalpoint.com/tools

Keyword Spy
www.keywordspy.com

Affiliate Marketing Software

2009-09-01T19:10:00.005+05:30

Affiliate Software plays a vital role in the affiliate marketing industry. Affiliate Marketing industry can't exist without it. Affiliate software tracks the impressions, clicks, leads and sales. Affiliate software provide user interface for campaign management, advertising material management, Impressions, clicks, leads and sales tracking, reports about the performance of campaigns, products, affiliates etc. Affiliate software also help the management of payment to affiliates.

Choosing a right affiliate program is always a questions of debate. There are many affiliate software available in the industry but when the time comes to choose them there are many factors which are needed to consider.

Affiliate software are of two types. Hosted and manage yourself type.

Hosted affiliate software are installed on the website of the vendor and the merchant get an user interface from where is can manage everything from campaign to affiliates as well as can see every type of reports.

Manage yourself type of affiliates can be installed on your own website.

There are advantages and disadvantages of the both of the software:

Advantages of Hosted affiliate software:

Hosted affiliate software provides facility where the merchant have not to buy the hosting for that affiliate program. Merchants need not to focus on the technical side as well as about security as those things are managed by the affiliate software vendor.

Disadvantages of hosted affiliate software:

Hosted affiliate software give you less control on the way you can customize the software. You have to pay for every small customization and even though you have a strong team of technical experts you have to pay for making technical changes. Many hosted affiliate program management companies charges monthly fees etc.

Advantages of manage your self type of affiliate software:

You can host the software of your own servers. You have total control on the way it works. You can customize the software as per your requirements as you will get the source code free with the purchase. You have to pay only onetime fees and need not to pay again and again. You can hire your own programmer and can customize the software as per requirements.

Disadvantages of manage your self type of affiliate software.

This type of software can be easy target to hackers as the code is open and everyone can learn the code. That increase the chance of venerability. It is a tedious task to manage the security and updates etc.

I had reviewed many hosted as well as manage your self type affiliate tracking software. Few of them are as below:

Post Affiliate Pro
www.qualityunit.com/postaffiliatepro

iDevDirect
www.idevdirect.com

DirectTrack
www.directtrack.com

MyAffiliate Program (MyAp)
www.myaffiliateprogram.com

ClickInc
www.clickinc.com

AffiliateTraction
www.affiliatetraction.com