You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

I got sent a question via email…

Hi Tim I love the blog and have learnt a lot from you and others but my site while popular doesn’t get very many sales through affiliate links what am I doing wrong can you help?

A quick look at both the site (which sadly will remain anonymous as the original emailer has asked it be kept that way ) and its stats indicated it was indeed a pretty popular site with nearly a 1500 visitors a day, which for a news portal is pretty good going. One of the features I really liked was at the bottom of each article was a have your say section which had a simple poll.

Do you think Mclaren should have been fined over ?£50 million pounds for spying?
Yes|No

Each poll was a question and a yes no answer along with the results, most of the polls no one had entered however to help get this site out of the red they would make an excellent place to peddle our affiliate links.

Zip and Email submits

Many Affiliate companies have zip or email submit campaigns running these campaigns offer the chance for people to win free items like phones computers etc, in exchange for giving up some personal details. The person is then entered into the draw, the affiliate gets paid per lead, so every time some one enters the affiliate makes some money between $0.80 - $5 you are not going to get rich of these schemes but they can easily compete with adsense earnings if properly managed. Zip submits tend to pay out more then email submits and both tend to be very geographically targeted a quick look at the site revealed nearly 70% of the site came from the US while a further 21% was from the UK so we hunted down two suitable campaigns. In the end we found two geotargetted campaigns both through the Affiliate group Copeac one was a Win IPhone and $500 visa zip submit for the US the other a Win a Digital Camera for the UK. Both have appalling small print but hey they worked well for our needs, however before we could get started we needed to organise a few things.

Incentivised or Encouraged

With most Zip and email submits you will come across the phrase ‘This offer Can NOT be incentivized’ what this means is you cannot offer something to go with it. So for example you couldn’t click here to receive a free pen and a chance to win an IPhone for example. The line between encouraging and incentivised is simple you can not give away a physical or electronic product to lure a person into providing their information. While we did check that offering the chance to take part in the poll was not an incentive we also took some extra steps and included small print offering a link to the free iphone/camera offer as well.
Finally we added both an entry in the privacy statement about linking to a third party who may require information to conclude offers, a statement in the terms of service indicating that we are not responsible for offers on third party websites.
To give you an idea of what the poll looks like here is one of the early mocks

Geo-targetting

We knocked together 3 versions of the poll settings, USA, UK and international each with their own offer for the USA and UK they went to our affiliate site once voted via a timed redirect with a means to escape if they just wanted to vote. For international users we asked if they would be interested in doing an online survey to win $100 through yet another affiliate company. You can easily do the same thanks to posts by both Nick and Patrick from Blog Storm on the subject which we linked to just last week. Once this was done, we had checked out that all the links worked, via proxies we sent it live.

The results

The number of people taking the poll rose by 900% this initially sounds a staggering figure but remember we only had around 10 people a day taking the poll so in reality this means we increased the number of poll takers to around 90 a day.
Out of those 90, 50% were from the US, 41% UK and the other 9% international.
In terms of conversions

• 45% - From US resulted in lead payment well above average for this sort of submit
• 5% - From UK pretty much average
• 0% - Well technically not 0 1 person did take the survey but I think it might have been me via a proxy!

The result is that in the last 3 weeks the site has been earning about $24/day from its polls but these are already dying with the last week seeing a disappointing number of results, this is down to several reasons the very high US conversion rate is coming down, Lots of regulars have either stopped voting or more likey are not visiting the same offer. My job was done and I have left my new friend to find some more offers for his polls I have suggested that either run several offers and rotate between them or at least offer a new offer every couple of weeks seems to be a good balance.

Have you had success with Zip and Email submits? Do you think that using them this way is a good idea, perhaps you think its slightly manipulative let us know!