How About An Affiliate & Merchant Matchmaking Service?
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
Spurred by the consensus that there’s maybe a lack of recognition for “content affiliates”, I want to bring up a very old idea we had about a matchmaking service for affiliates & merchants.
Quite simply there is a directory of various categories from Sport (which can include sub categories like Football or Golf) to Credit Cards to Electrical Products etc .. and even genre categories for sites which are primarily finance portals, cashback, voucher codes, competition websites, shopping directories / price comparison & so forth.
This directory is populated by affiliates with their websites into the relevant categories.
This would allow merchants to easily indentify which affiliates are most suited to them & open up the lines of communication & liase directly, hopefully forging closer relationships with the calibre of affiliate which marries their own product offering.
At the moment I don’t know if networks categorise affiliate websites properly to ensure their clients, the merchants, can identify which affiliates are most suited to their product offering. I can imagine a network when pitching to a client at some point saying we have X thousand affiliates & blinding with numbers. But if the merchant turns around and asks “exactly which, not an estsimated how many, of those affiliates promotes football boots?”. Would the network really know?
Obviously this can be expanded further with contact details being provided for the merchant or an internal instant messaging system. Another addition could be complete categorisation of merchant programs too from all the main networks where affiliates can easily find the right merchant. Then perhaps merchant & affiliate can meet in the middle.
Maybe this will just assist merchants that little bit more.
The downside is that some affiliates may wish to keep their websites to themselves, if that is the case they wouldn’t have to include themselves, so this is geared towards those who are maybe looking for a better deal by negotiating directly with the merchant (who initiates the contact).
