Best of the Banter: ClickTrade
by Donna Stryk, Moderator of the Online Ads Discussion List
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Affiliate programs have become a great way to get your name out and drive traffic to your site. As a matter of fact, Lori Faunce at Educational Directories Unlimited receives 25 percent of her traffic from her more 1500 or so affiliates. That's why she became very concerned when she started to receive substandard service from ClickTrade, the company that runs her affiliate program.
"Their server is constantly down and we were over-charged $1300 twice," Faunce said. This is why she came to the list to ask for ideas that would make the transition to a new affiliate program smooth and keep the traffic to her site constant.
Shane Sacobie at VGF.net provided tons of insight and ideas on the subject. First of all, he mentioned that ClickTrade will be dropping their CPC campaigns as of 2-28-2000 and offering only CPA campaigns. ClickTrade is recommending that their customers start advertising on LinkExchange, but Sacobie points out that, "They're basically telling people using nickel or dime (or less) CPC advertising to begin using $25 CPM ads."
So where else can current ClickTrade customers turn? Sacobie recommends looking at www.webmaster-programs.com as well as some major search engines for lists of available affiliate programs. He also suggested looking at GoTo, ValueClick, TeknoSurf, and Burst Media, all of which offer CPC programs.
Losing traffic has become one of the chief concerns with Clicktrade's service. In order to avoid losing traffic, list member Jim Reardon has some advice.
"ClickTrade lets you email your affiliates-just drop an email, tell them where you are moving, and why," he said. Reardon recommends offering an incentive to entice them to sign up for the new program. His suggestions for a new program include www.cyberbounty.com, www.cj.com, www.linkshare.com, and www.clickxchange.com.
Stewart Hochwert said that his company has used clickxchange and highly recommends them. He also mentioned looking into www.pennyweb.com. He said that both companies take fraud seriously and respond by email or phone promptly.
Stephan Iscoe added another way to help make the transition a smooth one. Iscoe suggests that you, "Follow up with the sites that have sent the most traffic - a personal note is more likely to get results."
You can view this thread and read each post in its entirety at http://maggie.tenagra.com/clicktrade.html
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