In Part 1 of this series, we looked at some of the “big questions” one must confront when considering an affiliate-driven promotional strategy. In Part 2, we pick up with an examination of the lynchpin of success, not just for affiliate programs, but for their affiliates, as well. I’m speaking, of course, of traffic. Traffic is such a rich area of discussion that this article will only deal with a few major traffic categories, with more to follow in Part 3 of this series.Obviously, without traffic, essentially every other facet of your strategy is rendered irrelevant. You can have premium-quality exclusive content, brilliant marketing and advertising techniques, and rock-solid technical infrastructure – all at once, even – and still not make a dime, unless you get enough pairs of eyeballs to view your site/product.

There are, of course, a multitude of permutations within the traffic generating methods and traffic sources that follow and it would be a mistake of epic proportions to view all webmasters and/or sites within a given category as the same thing. For example, the term “TGP webmaster” is a convenient way to indicate the general area a webmaster specializes in, but within that market are innumerable different ways to go about your promotions and traffic building. Such specifics are simply beyond the scope of this series. You could literally write a book about each major heading of traffic that I refer to…

These traffic types are not listed in any particular order in terms of value, desirability, or benefit to a program. Instead of ranking them in such a way, I’ve indicated in the description of each the various associated pros and cons, costs and considerations from the sponsor/affiliate program perspective.

Different types of traffic do have different levels of value, of course. Where per-signup based payout structures are concerned, I’m a strong advocate of offering reduced payout rates for customizations which serve to make incoming traffic less valuable to the sponsor. A requirement that a site/tour be “console-free” is probably the most obvious example, but it is not the only one. If an affiliate or specific deal requires that there be no measure of cross sale on your signup page, requires lower price points, more generous trial access terms, etc., then the per signup payout needs to be adjusted accordingly.

If I had to choose a mantra when it comes to the operation of a program and the relationship you will have with webmasters it is this: “be flexible.” Keep an open mind and an open ear, and don’t hesitate to make custom deals with people as those can often be the most lucrative arrangements you make.

Within that notion, keep your options open and don’t lock yourself into custom arrangements until you have successfully tested them. For example, let’s say you’ve got an affiliate who says he can send 20 sales a day if you pay him $40 per signup, and – here’s the catch – you have to prepay him for the sales. Obviously you can’t just send the guy a check for $40,000 and trust that 50 days later he has held up to his end of the bargain and sent the promised 1000 sales. Start with a test, some sort of short-run experiment you can use to confirm the affiliates’ ability to deliver sales and then decide whether a continued custom arrangement is worthwhile. (BTW, anyone who won’t agree to such a test should be considered automatically suspect, anyway. If they can deliver traffic worth paying for in advance, then they should have enough money to their name that receiving payment in advance isn’t truly a “need” of theirs.)

Enough preamble already; let’s get to the traffic types.

I. Search Engine Traffic – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and “Free” Listings:

I place the word “Free” in quotation marks because there is nothing free about gaining top search engine response positions on the major engines under desirable adult keywords. At the highest level of the art, SEO is time consuming, and both labor and resource intensive. Webmasters who have mastered the art of SEO are very desirable affiliates to have on board, indeed.

Although search engine traffic is not the plum it used to be and the overall conversion ratios on SE traffic have dipped somewhat over the years, SE’s still stand as one of the best quality sources for adult site customers. Surfers who are unfamiliar enough with the adult internet that they still depend on Google or Yahoo to locate porn are on average somewhat less jaded than their more experienced peers.

Provided that your site delivers what it promises to the customer and is sufficient on other fronts (content quality and quantity, regular updates, good functionality, etc.), you can expect to see longer average retention from members who came by way of SE’s. The difference in average retention length might appear small, but the difference between an average retention of, say, 1.4 months vs. 1.7 months looks much larger when you start multiplying it all out and looking at the implications when you reach a point of hundreds of new incoming members per day.

Important features to offer as part of your affiliate program in order to attract webmasters talented in the area of SEO include “SE-friendly” tours, meaning text-rich tour pages that are heavy with relevant keywords without losing natural language sense, with well crafted meta tags, title tags, etc.

Showing flexibility and valuing the input of the SEO webmasters is key to keeping them happy, as well. When working with SEO webmasters, I give pretty free reign to use site graphics, text, and other copyrighted materials in their promotions, provided they don’t abuse the terms or use my materials to advertise someone else’s sites or program. So long as the materials are used appropriately and responsibly, I’ve always been of the mind that what my (productive) SEO webmasters ask for, they get.

Beyond the aspects mentioned above which can help make your program more attractive to SEO webmasters, the usual list of obvious things applies. Namely, a competitive payout rate, payments made on-time and in full, detailed stats (tracking/reporting of referring URLs being a huge plus here) and other features that you will commonly find among the successful players in the affiliate program sector.

One of the possibly less obvious features you could offer is sub-account tracking. Many older affiliate programs do not offer the ability to utilize and track sub-accounts, which is a most convenient and useful function for all webmasters, SEO experts in particular.

II. Search Engine Traffic – Paid Listings:

Affiliates that are essentially “click brokers” passing along SE traffic that they purchase on a per-click basis are somewhat rare, but there is definitely a number of webmasters making effective use of promotional tools like Google Adwords to send traffic directly to their sponsors and/or who use gateway pages with multiple and varied advertising links.

To benefit those that are sending PPC traffic directly to your sites, make sure your sites are up reliably and structure your click accounting such that you are not utilizing an extremely long “IP lifespan” or doing anything else that could lead to under-counting of unique clicks. Google and other PPC ad engines tend to count their outgoing clicks pretty liberally (which only stands to reason when you’re selling traffic by the click), and if your own click counts come up drastically short of what the engines and other outgoing click counters report, it can lead to a decline in trust from your affiliates, as well as make it tough for affiliates to do a quick “eyeballing” of their campaign performance by a quick check of your program’s stats alone.

III. TGP/MGP Traffic:

As mentioned previously, to lump the enormous number of webmasters/companies and the wide range of techniques that constitute the TGP/MGP sector into a single heading is to really sell this sector short. There’s tremendous variation in methods employed and resulting traffic quality within the TGP/MGP game. That said, there are general rules which can be applied and things you can do to make your program more attractive to a wide range of TGP/MGP webmasters, be they gallery builders, TGP owners, or fill some other niche within the TGP “ecosystem.”

To resonate with this particular sector of the affiliate market, it’s important to provide flexible use of promotional content and a significant amount of such content to use. That flexibility might include allowing webmasters to design their own custom gallery designs, but making them use design elements from your sites. Again, so long as the affiliate plays by the rules and doesn’t use the content irresponsibly, I see no reason why you shouldn’t give them a fair amount of rope here.

In addition to offering flexible use of content in the age of (let’s face it) increasingly lazy webmasters, it’s important to offer hosted galleries that are competitive with the rest of the affiliate programs on the market. In addition to having solid designs, hosted galleries should contain:

• Good sales text – does not necessarily mean a lot of text, just enough to aid in the sales pitch
• Solid functionality – videos load fast, play reliably, no dead links, broken images, etc.
• Plenty of links within the designs – don’t make the surfers search for the way to move on to the site/tour
• Linking flexibility – console-free tours, direct to join page links, etc.
• Frequent updates to the selection of galleries available

In terms of gallery designs for video galleries, I think the ones that include a small grid of non-clickable thumbnails at the bottom, showing a sampling of the action from the beginning of the scene to the end, are particularly effective.

Additional things to offer for gallery webmasters of all types:

• Multiple tour options for each site
• Flexible terms and conditions and “acceptable use” policy with regards to your promo content
• Solid USC 2257 compliance, including properly labeled gallery pages

There is a certain danger to giving webmasters too much rope in terms of what they can do with your content, naturally. The challenge is to find that balance between giving your affiliates what they need and at the same time keeping your valuable content from being over-distributed on the Web. There are no magic answers here; it’s a balance that programs great and small wrestle with, and each comes to its own level of comfort through the course of running its program and corresponding with its affiliates.

That’s it for Part 2. Next time, more traffic points, including the increasing importance of “Review Site” traffic, the declining significance of exit traffic, and making the most of “link lists.”