• Part of the 1% of all legitimate affiliate marketers (ebooks don’t count!)
• Monthly affiliate marketing revenues should be no less than $250k a month (revenue, not profit)
• Annual profits should be no less than $1 million based on your total affiliate marketing revenues
• You must be hitting the minimums for at least 1.5 years consecutively (to make sure it isn’t a fluke)

Now I’m not about to say that I qualify for that realm but I would like to talk about becoming a different type of affiliate (one that could possibly lead to becoming a Super Affiliate), the Exclusive Affiliate. Being an exclusive affiliate means to either be a businesses only affiliate or to capture a percentage of every sale, of course the latter is the greater.

Recently (as in yesterday), I finished a deal to become the exclusive affiliate for a motorcycle parts sales site. I personally know the gentleman who operates this site and we worked out a deal to where I would receive a percentage of Every sale. I obtained this position by first figuring out his needs without talking to him, when doing business it is vital to be able to anticipate needs. I reviewed his site and came up with a one page detailed analysis of his standings, including SEO factors, a marketing plan, target keywords, needed site changes, and customer acquisition strategies.

When I finally approached him about the site we started to discuss what he wanted and the possible direction he wanted to take the site. He was very impressed with my presentation and told me that he didn’t want to market through PPC and only wanted to grow through organic, he also explained to me that others have approached him with their “SEO Services” often with price tags over $10,000. We finished our first meeting with handshake and planned our second meeting for the next day (which was yesterday).

The next day our meeting went as planned with about an hour discussion into marketing then compensation. We discussed his margins and markup on the products he offered, and eventually we came out with a compensation rate of 5% on all products sold, indefinitely.

Now to some 5% may not sound like a large amount of $ because most are dealing with limited relationships. You only get paid on the sales you bring in. But as an Exclusive Affiliate, compensated on all sales, the totals add up quickly. For example ranking #1-5 for popular term can mean a residual, passive income even after position in the SERPs has been obtained. Yes this will be ALOT of work up front, but after top placement has been achieved it is relatively easy to maintain a top result by killing the ranking in comparison to others for the same keywords. Overall becoming an exclusive affiliate for several business can help you wallet become fat quickly. My advice would be to try and strike some deals with local companies… it can be very rewarding!

New Job Title: Exclusive Affiliate.

Job Description: SEO, SEM, Marketing Director.

Affiliate Policy

• We allow affiliates to use AdWords advertising. Please note that we’ll only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same Display URL per search query. We also monitor and don’t allow the following:
  • Redirect URLs: Ads that contain Display URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
  • Bridge Pages: Ads for webpages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
  • Framing: Ads for webpages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site.

  https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html

Why does Google try so hard to kill off affiliates? Honestly 95% of the ringtone affiliate landing pages out there are in violation of this policy, and it’s not just ringtones! Insurance, Dating, Heath, and just about any other affiliate program has affiliates sole purpose is to drive traffic to the their affiliate link. Quality score is another issue where they were after MFA (made for ads) sites but ended up hurting affiliate marketers in the process as well. Google says they are always trying to provide a positive user experience, so why do they target aff’s when our entire business model revolves around driving extremely targeted traffic and providing a very positive user experience? More so why are other type of sites like shopping.com not getting stung by Adwords so much? Shopping comparison is essentially the same thing.

I guess I’m just tired of Google walking on affiliates…