Affiliates Past and Future
At TollFreeNumbers.com we don’t do any advertising. We earn our business the hard way, through natural search engine rankings and satisfied customers. Affiliate marketing is an important extension of that and we’ve tried a couple different things in affiliate marketing. We’ve had some issues with our affiliate program and have had some success and some failures. We’re going to try to correct those failures and build on the successes to make a better program for everyone.
The Problems with our old affiliate program
The straw that broke the camel’s back was 1shopping cart’s changes to the order form, which ironically made the affiliate entry field they set up for us, stop working. More specifically it made the order form with it, stop working in Internet Explorer. I also have to admit that I was not very good at administering and promoting it. We stuck it on the web and never really did much more and it’s time for us to do something better.
Just a link isn’t really that helpful to visitors and provides no real added value and doesn’t even bring users to the right spot. Our biggest value is obviously our lookup tool so it seems like time to combine that with the affiliate program. We’re going to make special lookup tool for the affiliate program which can be added to any page very easily. This will both add value for the user and your webpage and it’ll also bring visitors to the numbers available for what they need. We are also looking into some existing affiliate networks to simplify some of the administration and payments.
We can’t rebrand the lookup. So the results will link visitors back through our site and order process. We can’t give away our unique value proposition but we feel this actually helps because it keeps the customer questions about our part with us and it also gives the customer a lot more information as well as maintaining the independence. We provide a very unique value and an overall excellent user experience and we hope we can be a real asset to several related organizations.
It’s still not ready yet but I wanted to write a little more about our old affiliate program and what we’re trying to do so you would understand where we’re going.
(3 votes, average: 2.67 out of 5)
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Christian Wilson (1 comments.) says:
February 6, 2009 at 4:44 pm
cant wait to see it met you guys back a couple years ago in new york when i worked for website magazine
hope it is up and running soon
Aldrin Giler (1 comments.) says:
April 27, 2009 at 3:38 pm
We would like to be a reseller of your product on our web site.
affiliate program
You could email me with the information needed to get started.
Best regards,
Aldrin
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
April 27, 2009 at 11:39 pm
We really don’t have an affiliate program right now but we’ll add that back in the future. There are just several big projects under way at the moment and since we left 1shoppingcart that’s been left on hold. Sorry!
Bill
Fabio says:
July 18, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Hi Bill,
Cordially,
Don
Don Bloom says:
July 18, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Hi Bill,
I’d like to get involved in the sale of vanity toll-free numbers.
Earlier this year I registered a domain name and website, still yet to be constructed. It’s specialtollfreenumbers.com
Can we somehow work together for our mutual success?
Cordially,
Don
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
July 18, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Hi Don,
I don’t have an affiliate or referral program right now. We lost that with the old shopping cart and the new one sends people to the wrong place. And when I do set up a new program, I’m probably going to have terms that specify that participants can’t use or register a domain name related to toll free numbers or make that a major theme of a website or promotional content. I’m not interested in professional affiliates or getting people into the toll free business. It’s a very small niche and most of the crap content and spammy things I see done tend to be for affiliates and the affiliates don’t care if they look crappy or give the site they promote a bad reputation. But I do.
I want happy customers to be able to put up a link and a review etc, but I don’t want people doing what it sounds like you’re thinking of doing to promote my service because it can hurt as much as it helps. As much as it helps me anyway, even the crappiest site really won’t hurt the owner or the owners business much, which is the point. And I’m sure you may do a good job, but if I get into judging that and allowing some people and not others, it creates even more headaches.
Bill