Using Affiliates on Your Forum

[Callie Rose]

This was real helpful, I had know idea how to put in an affiliate untill i came accross you post.

[Patrick [ASE]]

Oct 13, 2009 7:58:22 GMT -8 Callie Rose said:

This was real helpful, I had know idea how to put in an affiliate untill i came accross you post.

support.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=promotion&action=display&thread=28689

Your posts should be at least 4 sentences long. Anything less shows that not enough thought was taken in the post, and is most likely not productive towards the conversation.
Thanks

[Gateway Hogwarts]

Affiliates are really helpful to get views for your site. I recommend, however, that you affiliate with a site similar to your own as you're more likely to get members instead of just guests to your site. Advertising a Bleach rp on a Harry Potter rp probably doesn't make much sense since you won't be hitting anyone's attention with a different rp compared to the one being advertised on. Affiliating a Bleach rp with another Bleach rp might get you more members as your plot might be better than the other site's plot.

[valderra99]

My personal experience with affiliation has not been all that great. When I used to affiliate with others, I added their banners to my list of affiliates, and they did the same with mine.

However...

1) I had to keep checking the sites I affiliated with to make sure they still had my banner up. Often they would redo their forum, and then get either rid of their affiliation list or they hid it in a place that was not the main page. Needless to say that non-members are not going to find such a hidden list easily if ever.

2) I also had to check the banners on my own site, because often I got broken links. So I had to chase up the forum owner, trying to get hold of them (a little difficult if you are not a member on their forum and you can't post as guest. And even then, it's not a good idea to openly complain about the broken link in a guest board).
Or I had to try and find their username here so I could send them a PM, asking me if they could give me a new url for their link.

All in all, it was more hassle than it was worth. I only know of a very few times where someone registered on my site, because they saw the link on another forum. And then they registered, because the owner of that forum was already a member on mine, and had kind of promoted my forum on their site.

[grieves and squick]

Well, lately, my site has a new problem: too many people applying to affiliate. Our "accept anyone" policy has worked up till now but we are way over 100, over 150 after the last cleanout. I don't want more than 100 but can't just take people down like that, so instead, I've decided to try a new policy or two to limit, for a time at least, how many new people get added. Something has to give.

Policy One: We have to be added static, unless the other person ONLY has a marquee on their site for affiliates.

Policy 2: The site has to have at least 5 active members in the past 24 hours.

9 out of 10 of the sites wanting to affiliate with me lately are sites that barely have any members or even no members. Sometimes they take off in activity fine afterwards, usually they don't, and I wind up hosting their buttons for 4 months while they flounder around barely doing anything and then finally die. Meanwhile that's one more button doing absolutely nothing for us. In 99% of cases, affiliation is an ad exchange to keep members flowing between sites. In our case the flow is pretty much one-way from what I can tell.

We get around 10 to 15% of our members from affiliates and it's one of the few variables we have any control over, so I always seek to expand on it. Do you think requiring X amount of active members, even if just 5, is too draconian?

[Infinity Recruitment Services]

Specifically about the injunction against a Harry Potter site only linking with Harry Potter, I think I'd go further and purposely avoid banner affiliating with sites that are too close. This is because if you're a member of a forum that's for Harry Potter or Marvel Comics or Lord of the Rings or whatever, your members are already ON a site of that nature. Unless it's for the benefit of someone surfing through sites, having forty sites of the same topic is not going to make your members receptive to joining yet another Lost site.

What I would encourage personally is to seek out RPs of the same or similar genre, say fantasy in general, Sci-Fi in general. So, maybe a Star Trek site would link to Star Wars or something. Same genre (which your players are presumably interested in) but different flavor and therefore more likely to be mutually benefitial. Players are however a diverse lot. They might want to be in a forum RPing a zombie apocalypse and also RP as cute little kittens. Therefore, excluding non-genre sites might be bad as well. Perhaps, have two sections: in genre and out of genre?

In response to the previous thread:
No, requiring X members is not draconian, as long as you allow links but not banner affiliation. That way, new sites can use links to boost members until they stabilize.

[grieves and squick]

Links but not banner affiliation?

...We don't use text links on affiliate tables--it would look kind of messy in there with the buttons. If you mean plain old ads, we allow anyone to do that as long as we can linkback.

As for allowing sites "too close," I get many if not most of my affiliate hits from other Warriors sites. Some other animal games, too, but doesn't seem to be quite as much as Warriors.

[victory1]

I have 0 affiliation. I read about it when I 1st joined proboards earlier this month when I decided to start my site. I for one don't see a need for it but might change my mind later. I've seen sites with affiliations and they have a ton that none stands out. If I ever decide to go that route, then I think a maximum of 5 well thought out ones would be enough. Probably some reading & book sites affiliations.

[grieves and squick]

Just go with less. I finally got down to 50 and am whittling further from there. We only affiliate with other large sites now and it really has worked well. The main page loads faster, and we aren't suffering any blows in new member signups. I guess the whole quality vs quantity thing is what works best.

[irfan13050]

When I was doing affiliates, I usually accecpted just about everyone. However, I would go through my affiiates list once a month and check on each board. If a small forum that I had affiliated with had not grown at all due due to lack of effort, I dropped them.

regards.
irfan-13050

[Thesealion]

I am trying to get started affiliating but it gets hard to find boards that aren't dead to affiliate with. I wonder how people go around looking for people to affiliate with? For some reason the boards i find either have way to strickt rules for my board or they don't fit with my board. I only have 3 affiliates now but am trying to grow that number because i am seeing a higher guest number since i started. The only problem with this has been that no one has actualy joined the forum. I think that once i start getting members they will come in numbers but those first 10 members can be the hardest to come by. Over all i think it helps but if you over do it or have hard rules to keep up with than it just isn't worth the time.

[Veedaz]

I have only just discovered (Affiliates) and I am now wondering is it a good idea ? any advice on this would be very welcome

Edit: -

all posts should be four sentences long at the minimum

I do apologies I missed that bit.

[Candice]

Jul 19, 2010 7:53:47 GMT -8 Veedaz said:

I have only just discovered (Affiliates) and I am now wondering is it a good idea ? any advice on this would be very welcome

Hi,

Welcome to D:YP. Please remember to read over the [discussionrules]. Also, please remember that all posts should be four sentences long at the minimum. As for your question, you might try reading over the other posts and commenting on various bits if you're not quite sure.

[shylaes]

Hi. I pmed someone asking to affiliate with them (guessing how to word it) and they said what I was doing was against the rules. I had read here that the way to do it was to pm them. Was that the right thing to do?

(I don't want to be a rule breaker! T_T)

[Candice]

Sept 16, 2010 18:12:05 GMT -8 shylaes said:

Hi. I pmed someone asking to affiliate with them (guessing how to word it) and they said what I was doing was against the rules. I had read here that the way to do it was to pm them. Was that the right thing to do?

(I don't want to be a rule breaker! T_T)

Hi,

This thread is not for these types of questions. Asking to affiliate, I'm not positive if that's against the rules, might not be the best approach. You can certainly try, but some sites state on their site how to affiliate with them. You could try that way.

Thank you.