[Ron_S]

Hello Everyone,

We’re mid stride of creating a custom affiliate program and we’re looking for some advice as to what you as managers want.

-What kind of controls do you need?
-What are the common mistakes other affiliate programs make when it comes to the most important piece, YOU (the affiliate manager)?
-How do you want to get compensated, performance based, salary, both?
-Do you want to be an employee or an independent contractor?
-What about an office budget if you’re remote, do you need an office or enjoy working from home?

Our industry is extremely competitive and partly saturated with cheap ineffective products. However, we have big mainstream media budget, a great PR firm, an even better creative team, a solid product and we love what we do.

I would like to meet a few people that can guide us in the right direction and might even be interested in challenge and change of pace.

Thanks for your help,
Ron
rslavick@allmera.com

[Naffiliate]

This group will tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about an affiliate program...

I'll get started with a few thoughts, and the rest of the group can follow.

1) the first thing that you need to do is have Consolidated Payment at a fixed time of the month. If you have to escrow 90 days, then do it. Have it flexible enough to be able to direct deposit, or snail mail it... That is #1.

2) Be sure that there are quality merchants.. there are only so many x10 cameras, and men's nocturnal recreation pills that can be sold.

3) Be sure to be ACCESSABLE!!! Staff up your customer service! And have your merchants day phone and email addresses up to date.

4) have a technical crew that is top of the line.. If your product fails, then you will fail. Your service not only represents you, but all who link to it.

5) Be sure the interface is usable. There are so many different areas that don't show the right things (merchant side as well as user side). Remember the KISS theory. (Kiss the dummy..)

6) No surprises.. Here today, gone tomorrow, is total BS... If a merchant has problems, COMMUNICATE... too many rumors, not enough fact..

That's my penny for starters..

[Adam Ward]

Welcome Ron
http://www.allmera.com

These subjects might be better covered via PM

[Ron_S]

Hey everyone…

We’ll soon be looking for an individual who enjoys the excitement of working with a well funded start up in a very competitive industry.

I am new to abestweb.com and do not have access to the private message feature as of yet, so please email me so we can talk about this further.

Talk Soon,
Ron
rslavick@allmera.com

[Clicks4Nut'n]

Ron,

Can you tell us what the industry is? It will probably be hard to get interest without giving any info. out.

[Ron_S]

We have partnered with a leading nutritional research firm and have created a product that promotes cellular health aka longevity and wellness. We’re very excited about this product but can’t reveal too much at this time. So basically we’re in the nutrition / wellness industry entering into a category (anti-aging) flooded with snake oil and ineffective products.

[ecomcity]

Wouldn't be novel to just sell Snake Oil?

Should be an opening in there somewhere if you know the history.....

"Snake oil." The expression has come to be synonymous with a quack remedy. But questions about the origins of the term provide the basis for an interesting investigation.
Although considered quintessentially American, patent medicines actually originated in England. The recipient of the first royal patent for a medicinal compound is unknown, but the second was granted to Richard Stoughton's Elixir in 1712. By the mid-eighteenth century an incomplete list included 202 "proprietary" medicines-those protected by patent or registration. Relatively few of the ready-made medicines were actually patented-which required disclosure of their ingredients-but rather had their brand name registered. Nevertheless, the term patent medicine has become a generic term for all self-prescribed nostrums and cure-alls.

Shipments of patent medicines were halted by the Revolutionary War, and American entrepreneurs took the opportunity to meet the demand. Post-war nationalism and cheaper prices of the non-imported medicines helped American vendors maintain their lead over English suppliers (Munsey 1970).

Among the notable patent medicine men and women were Perry Davis, whose Pain-Killer became famous in the 1849 cholera epidemic and was subsequently spread worldwide by missionaries who used it as a cure-all for heathen sufferers; Lydia E. Pinkham, whose portrait on her Vegetable Compound, first marketed in 1875, made her the most widely recognized American woman of her day; the Kilmer brothers, Andral and Jonas, who moved to Binghamton, New York, in 1879 and were soon selling Swamp Root kidney and liver medicine and other "family remedies" from a palatial eight-story building; the trio of "Doc" Healy, "Texas Charlie" Bigelow, and "Nevada Ned" Oliver, who originated the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company in 1881; and Mrs. Violet Blossom, who as "Lotus Blossom" ran a medicine show with her husband in the early 1900s and became known as "the queen of pitch doctors" (Holbrook 1959).

Among the most fascinating peddlers were one-time preacher Fletcher Sutherland and his seven daughters, whose hair had a collective length of thirty-seven feet. When the young ladies performed their vocal and instrumental concerts-at such venues as the 1881 Atlanta Exposition and, by 1884, Barnum and Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth-Fletcher Sutherland shrewdly observed that the girls' long hair was a greater attraction than their musical ability. This led him to create the "Seven Sutherland Sisters Hair Grower," a concoction of alcohol, vegetable oils, and water. When the fifth daughter, Naomi, died unexpectedly in 1893 business was so good that, to keep up appearances, the remaining sisters hired a replacement. Overall, their hair grower and related products brought in more than $2.75 million over a 38-year period, but the septet squandered it on an opulent lifestyle that included each having a personal maid to comb her luxuriant tresses (Lewis 1991).

The medicine peddlers used a number of tricks and stunts. The larger traveling shows, employing advance men to herald their arrival, entered town with circus-like fanfare, typically with a band leading the procession of wagons. Skits and other diversions were used to attract audiences, who eventually were treated to the "Lecture" (which, when medicine shows expanded into radio, became the commercial). Assistants who moved through the crowds were often garbed as Quakers to lend an air of moral respectability. Native Americans were frequently recruited to promote the notion of "natural" medicine which was given names like Wright's Indian Vegetable Pills, Seminole Cough Balsam, and various Kickapoo cures (Holbrook 1959, 196-215; Munsey 1970).

A major component of most tonics, "cures," bitters, and other nostrums was alcohol. During the Temperance era the patent medicines were often sipped, with a wink, "for medicinal purposes," leading the promoters of Old Dr. Kaufmann's Great Sulphur Bitters to advise the public: "Never Use Cheap Rum Drinks Which Are Called Medicine." Interestingly, the manufacturers never felt obliged to disclose the alcohol content of their product (Holbrook 1959, 159). The alcohol-as well as the placebo effect-explains why the nostrums often won testimonials from their purchasers, who felt better and so believed they had been helped rather than victimized.

In time worthless cure-alls came to be known as "snake oil." One source asserts, "There is no such thing as snakeoil, though many thousands of bottles containing stuff called snakeoil were sold to gullible patrons of carnival sideshows in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (Morris and Morris 1988). Actually, real snake oil was prized for its supposed medicinal properties. In 1880 for example, a newspaper article on a Pennsylvania man-"a celebrated hunter, trapper and snake-tamer by the name of John Geer"-told how he killed rattlesnakes and extracted "oil from their bodies." The article stated: "this oil is very useable and sells readily for $1 per ounce. It is said to have great curative powers" ("Killing Snakes" 1880). I once saw a bottle in a private collection with a label on which was actually penned "Snake Oil" and that (if memory serves me) may have dated from the mid-nineteenth century or even earlier.

In any event, a cowboy named Clark Stanley, who called himself "The Rattlesnake King," sold a Snake Oil Liniment that was reputedly "good for man and beast." In 1893, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Stanley is said to have held crowds spellbound as, dressed in colorful western garb, he slaughtered hundreds of rattlesnakes, processing the juices into the cure-all.

A circa 1890s advertisement described Stanley's snake oil as "A wonderful pain destroying compound." It was "the strongest and best liniment known for the cure of all pain and lameness." To be "used external [sic] only," it treated "rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted muscles, toothache, sprains, swellings, etc." It also, the ad said, "cures frost bites, chill blains, bruises, sore throat, [and] bites of animals, insects and reptiles," in fact being "good for every thing a liniment should be good for." Promising "immediate relief," it sold for fifty cents a bottle (Fowler 1997, vi, 10-12).

Stanley claimed the secret recipe came from a Moki Pueblo Indian medicine man. (Reportedly, some Native Americans, including the Choctaws, did treat rheumatism and other ills with applications of rattlesnake grease.) In 1917, however, tests of a federally seized shipment of Snake Oil Liniment revealed it to be mostly mineral oil containing about one percent fatty oil (thought to have been beef fat), along with some red pepper (probably to impart a soothing warmth to the skin) and possible traces of turpentine and camphor (perhaps to provide a suitably medicinal smell) (Fowler 1997, 11-12).

[Mr. B]

Did you get my email? I sent you one a few days ago. Just wanted to check on that.

B

[Ron_S]

Bruce,

I did get it ... i'm just about to drop you a line.... thanks for taking the time and contacting me...

Ron

[WatchdogAM]

Are you developing a program to do in house? If so, why don't you want to use one of the established networks..i.e CJ, SAS, etc..