Behind The Scenes: Affiliates

Affiliates are a mixed blessing – on the one hand, it’s an absolute godsend financially that you can take a small cut (in most cases, it’s literally pennies) of products that you’re recommending on your blog. Readers never seem to mind at all that it’s an affiliate link, although I offer non-affiliate links too so that nobody feels under pressure, and a direct link to a product that you’ve spent time testing or talking about works for everyone.

What’s not working right now is the bombardment that I get every single day from affiliate agencies to promote certain brands. Individual people at agencies don’t have a clue about your site – you are literally a set of stats to them – so if they see you’ve done well with one thing, the whole party piles in so you can do well with them too! There’s a huge assumption that as a blogger, it’s incumbent upon you to sell product for brands.

Nine times out of ten, the PR agency doesn’t know what the affiliate agency is doing, and vice versa, and the client stuck in the middle supposed to be overseeing doesn’t know what either of them are doing in relation to each other. It’s just a mess. I tried to sort out one such mess (Marks & Spencer) but what a misfire! It turned out worse. What neither of the three parties realise is what it’s like to be the person on the back end of their inability to talk to each other.

While (in my case at least) it fell to the PR agency or media agency to negotiate an ad fee or promotion for a particular brand, it’s now also in the remit of an affiliate agency. So, you can have one party saying no, we have no budget, while the other party is offering you generous budget to feature the same brand.

If affiliate commission forms a significant part of your income as a blogger, and maybe your only income, it’s hugely important to ‘sell’. That can only inevitably undermine the integrity of the posts sometimes, and I won’t lay any blame at a blogger’s door for that – this is a highly competitive environment and quite frankly if you can make a single penny from your writing, you’re doing well. When brands decided the simplest thing to do was ‘buy blogging’ by offering commissions and incentives left, right and centre, they also put paid to meaningful relationships. Many bloggers have a better relationship with the affiliates than they do with the PRs – in fact, John Lewis is a good case in point for me. I have no relationship with them in a PR capacity and yet, a great one with the affiliate agency. My readers like shopping at John Lewis, it’s that simple, so if possible I always offer that link where I can. It’s a trusted brand coming from a trusted source so everything absolutely works on that front – but I don’t exist on any blogger or press list from the store. Weird, hey?

Beauty world is such right now that brands completely rely on bloggers to ‘sell’. They’re such adept marketeers that we’ve come to think that being ‘allowed’ to ‘sell’ a product is something of an honour and we should very much leap to the challenge. I’m not immune to this – I catch myself every now and again not posting for the wrong reasons because it’s all over for me if I do that but doing a mental calculation of how much I can sell. I have to remind myself that I don’t really care and certainly not enough to sell my soul. I feel that bloggers have lost control of their own world and damned if I know how to get it back. It’s 100% not wrong to make money from your blog but if you feel all you are is a glorified sales person or you feel under great pressure to sell products then that’s not right. If sales was my thing, I’d get a job at a counter (and earn far more than via affiliates, that is for sure) assuming they’d have me!

Incidentally, if you do a post that is entirely affiliate led (let’s say for example a round up of winter coats or winter hats and scarves) you are supposed to mark it as #AD according to the ASA. This is to let readers know that there is a financial incentive behind the post. It’s one of the reasons that I always put in a non-affiliate link – so that you know it’s affiliate and that you know you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.

As a side note, in terms of sales trends, make up is finally losing some of its power in favour of skin care which is at last starting to see an upturn. Is the palette bubble about to burst?


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8 responses to “Behind The Scenes: Affiliates”

  1. Lizzie

    I’m always happy to use one of your affiliate links if I’m buying something, but what I really don’t like is when certain other bloggers do a generic affiliate link to (say) Amazon or Net A Porter, because the way some of them work is that if you subsequently buy anything at all from (e.g.) Amazon/NAP having once followed that link two weeks ago, they will get paid a cut, even if you bought something totally unrelated to the product in the original link. I’ve started noticing some bloggers increasingly linking to these more generic sites, presumably because they sell a broader range of products, so the chances of a referral payment are that much greater. I don’t think nearly enough of them are as transparent in their dealings as you are, Jane (unfortunately).

    1. Jane

      Thanks Lizzie – I really don’t think that anything is lost from transparency so it’s better to be straightforward. I am vaguely aware of the cookies thing but I find that people only tend to buy on the day of the post but you’re right – you can click through on a link, decide to do all your Christmas shopping of all sorts while you’re there, and the blogger gets a cut of that when they only posted about a bubble bath! I tend to think of that as a lucky happening that has literally never happened to me that I know of although I’ve got blogger friend who it did happen to (the person bought a pram and a cot). Some sites only let you link generically though – I’m trying to think of an example but can’t immediately.

  2. Julia

    Jane – thank you for the consistently high quality thinking, writing & integrity you deliver day in and day out on your site. I completely agree with both the “shopper’s support” move of using an affiliate link (to acknowledge a blogger as the source of referral to a new or nice product) and your offer of the non-affiliate alternative. I just really appreciate your openness about how it works & giving us the choice. It is one of many ways BBB continues to stand out from the crowd.

    1. Jane

      Thank you Julia!

  3. Jane, I love the fact that you have opened this conversation, and how lovely are the comments so far from your followers, I think there is a misconception that a link will earn ££ instead of the few pennies it actually brings in. Spot on about the relationship front which really is no help to me as I have no memory for names so can’t remember who is who on most days !
    Lyn

  4. Toni

    I guess I’m an old school blogger that just shares what she’s bought from her last shopping trip. My blog doesn’t contain affiliates or any adverts (I’m not sure I understand how I’d go about joining one) nor have I done any sponsored posts. Yeah sure, I get the odd PR package to review, but on the whole it’s mainly about products I’ve bought with my own money. I don’t frown upon bloggers who do though, as at the end of the day money has to come from somewhere. The only thing for me is that I kind of feel stuck in the middle as a blogger and also as a reader because I don’t want to lose the integrity with my posts but at the same time not wanting put-on the hard sell that I see so many do. Any advice, Jane?

    Toni|sheergloss

    1. Jane

      It’s tricky – all I can tell you is follow your gut instinct … if you aren’t using affiliate links then you’re not ‘selling’ as such, you’re advising and that’s a different thing. If you absolutely love something and are encouraging readers to buy it there is nothing wrong with that because I’ll assume that it’s because you know your readers and think they’ll love it too. You can only babysit so much and one of the things I’m careful about is not to judge what others spend on beauty – for some it’s really high and for others a lot is unaffordable: it’s about balance in the end I think.

  5. I don’t do affiliate links, I think the only one I have is for amazon.. everything else just seems so much of a hassle to sign up for. I don’t have a huge following and I doubt I’d get any clicks, my amazon one never did.. so the hassle doesn’t seem worth it right now to me. I’m happy when a brand offers me a product for free to review, the whole money side of things is non existant.

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