Affiliate Marketing: Telephones, and Your Commissions

It's a webmaster's worst dream: you bring a customer to your website, convince that customer that your affiliate partner's product is worth purchasing--but then, in a sudden turn for the far worse, that customer decides to call the company directly, and order by phone.

You just caused a sale, but didn't get paid.

It happens every day. Especially in the case of a big ticket or highly technical product, customers often prefer to order by phone.

Indeed, this affiliate marketing nightmare occurs many times daily.all the company directly, and order by phone.

RingRevenue Is a Smart Little Business

A story from the October issue of Entreprenuer magazine profiled a company called RingRevenue, led by Jason Spievak. RingRevenue "helps businesses track phone purchases consumers make after viewing online ads." Which is, of course, huge.

Read the full story here.

RingRevenue and companies like it (and competition will only enlarge the market) make it possible for the affiliate marketing business to become yet more highly profitable.

Affiliate marketing profitability is about knowing your profit margins and then ramping up accordingly; thus the popularity of pay-per-click ads that enable you to see how much you're spending on ads, see how much you're getting paid for that traffic, and find that balance.

But the ability to cause phone sales could change all that--for the better.

Big Ticket Items, Staffing Considerations

Generating phone sales through your website may not seem world-shaking, but delve deeper into the topic and we all can see that this is a MASSIVE development.

The ability to sell big ticket items--with big commission attached--via telephone could as much as double the affiliate marketing potential of your website. Affiliate-friendly phone software should make it easier to sell big ticket items, for instance--seminars, cruises, artifacts.

People, a lot of them anyhow, still like to buy those things if not in person, then by phone. As of now, it's no use affiliate marketing to this group. But they are a large fat group.

It may be time to think about staffing. Will affiliate marketing innovators decide to maintain some call center function, to educate those discerning customers on behalf of their partner?

Probably not. Affiliate marketing remains, at its best, a low overhead, profit-centric business. But what affiliate marketing innovators will need to do is investigate the phone staff of their affiliate partners. Perhaps that "phone staff" will be purely virtual, perhaps part virtual, part outsourced.

Regardless, selling a big ticket item takes a level of skill.hat--for the better.

Immediate Implementation Is a Personal Choice

Whether or not you want to revamp your affiliate marketing operation to accommodate phone orders is not a matter of should, but of could.

If you think you could be making more money from affiliate marketing, if you think you could be having a better lifestyle, if you think you could get paid more for doing less work, then you could be looking at immediate implementation of a positive phone order strategy..hat--for the better.