Yesterday i posted here what popular blogger had to say about their affiliate program. The blogger who accused Domainking Affiliate as being fake after earning just N1 for referring over 500 persons to them. I received an email explaining everything that happened between the two parties. fraudulent
I was actually blamed for not hearing the other side of the story. So apologies to Domainking. According to Angad from DomainKing.NG, Ogbongeblog owner Jide actually didn't understand the entire affiliate system but i think him being an expect technology blogger, he should be professional and understand the terms. Official Post bellow.
Official Post From Domainking After being called Fake by Jide
Hi Everyone,
I am Angad from DomainKing.NG.
I have checked the issue being discussed at: http://www.ogbongeblog.com/2016/06/shocking-domainking-affiliate-marketing-report.html and i would like to bring clarity to the issues discussed on this blog post about our Affiliate Program as we take our online marketing and Affiliate program very seriously.
As much as we love Jide, but we would like to say this post has been published without much research.
I would like to clarify all the issues that have been mentioned in the above post & would like Mr. Jide Ogunsanya to please take note of these. We expect person with experience & following like Jide to have more diligent approach while writing such posts. But we are so disappointed to see how such immature post was published on ogbongeblog.com without prior research and clarification from our team; such posts can mislead customers & bloggers who don't have full knowledge of how our Affiliate program works. And can create a bad impact on a goodwill of a brand like ours and its reputation that we have spent millions of Naira to build over the years.
Please read the following as this should answer all the things mentioned in the above blog post:
1) Please note that the 599 "Visitors Referred" does not mean that 599 people have bought hosting after clicking the Affiliate Link. It simply means that 599 users have clicked the Affiliate link of the affilate and have come to DomainKing.NG using that link. It is the total number of users that have clicked the affiliate's link and opened our website.
And this does not means that all of 599 visitors have bought hosting after clicking the affiliate link. I can see that from the 599 visitors that were referred from Jide's affiliate link, 9 users had completed sign up at DomainKing.NG by placing the hosting order at DomainKing.NG. This is listed as "Signups" along with the date in the given screenshot.
None of the 9 users that have signed up using Jide's link have completed their hosting orders. And please note that we don't pay for sign ups. We pay our affiliates for a successful sale that results from the sign ups.
Please note that if no user has completed their order after sign up from a Affiliate Link, then it is not possible to pay for that as no sale was made from the sign ups. Most Affiliate programs pay for a sale (when customer has paid) & not for sign ups.
Signups in any given affiliate account are the users who have placed order at our website and these users don't always end up buying a service. Many users visit our website and place the orders for testing. And some may not have made their mind yet about buying the service. So reflecting the status of these user, there are different statuses like pending, cancelled & active. The users that have paid for their order have their status are marked as: "Active". And the unpaid Signups are marked as: "Pending". And the duration for "pending" orders is not fixed in our system. So an order can remain pending even after 2 years of Sign up as the referred user has not paid for it. And the user can pay anytime he wants even after 2 years. And this is done to ensure that the Affiliates get paid even if the referred sign up pays after 2 years. Similarly the orders that have been cancelled by the client by requesting us are marked as "Cancelled".
2) Please also note that Affiliate marketing is about relevance. If you target a user that is interested in shoes & build a website about Nike shoes with a affiliate link to a Nike shoes on Amazon. Then the user is much likely to convert. And many bloggers in Nigeria have dedicated their websites to promote Jumia/Konga products. And the ones earning the most have built their websites related to Jumia/Konga products like for Phones, Laptops etc. So the target audience is super relevant.
For example: If a visitor will come to a post by Mr. Jide about our Domain name Service: http://www.ogbongeblog.com/2014/11/domainking-domain-name-registration-guide.html
In above example, user will mostly likely come to our website with an intend to buy a domain from the above post. And that user may not even be interested in buying hosting. And we pay our Affiliates for hosting sales only. And the buying intent of a user to buy hosting after clicking the Affiliate link from the above mentioned post would obviously be less than that of a user coming from a post like: "Best Hosting in Nigeria by DomainKing". I hope you get the idea.
We would like to add that people earning from Affiliate programs bring super targeted leads that may convert to sales. This is due to the fact that not all users that read a post about something on the internet may be interested in buying that good or service.
3) Also, the conversion of the Sign Up is highly dependent on the quality of lead & their buying intent. We spend over 500,000 Naira on Google Adwords per month to get very targeted visitors from Google keywords. And our conversion rate from these ads is close to 7-8%. And this is from relevant audience looking to buy domains & hosting & still the conversion rate is not very high.
So the conversion is a very important factor. And this totally depends on the Relevance or Quality of the lead highlighted in point 2.
4) We always promote full transparency in our Affiliate program. Currently we have an affiliate program for Web Hosting only. And we don't pay our Affiliates for sale of domain names from the Affiliate link. We have always mentioned this clearly on our Affiliate Page: http://www.domainking.ng/affiliates/
We pay our Affiliates upto 30% for Hosting sales made using an Affiliate link. And this Commission can be upto 4500 Naira for higher plans.
Also our hosting Affiliate program is fully automated. The software is coded by WHMCS & almost 90% hosting providers in the World use this software. And the software is fully transparent & you can view all the users that have placed order from your link & have completed the order. The tracking & commission is fully automated & is based on Cookies stored in the browser of the visitor.
5) Also, 1 NGN shown in Jide's affiliate account was our default Affiliate Sign Up Bonus Amount when we launched our Affiliate program in 2014. Since Mr. Jide has 0 hosting sales from Affiliate Link & the commission is still 0 Naira. We have now increased the Affiliate Sign Up Bonus amount to N500 since early 2015, just for Sign Up as an Affiliate in our affiliate to encourage more bloggers & webmasters to Sign Up as an affiliate with us.
Also we always promote full transparency with our Affiliates & our customers. And we answer all the question that our users ask without any lies. And this post has led us to believe that we must educate our Affiliates on how they can earn more from our Affiliate program. So we would work to introduce education posts for this.
How we are going to improve our Affiliate program:
1) We would work with our team to introduce Educational material for our Affiliates on how they can earn more from our Affiliate program. Generally if you will write a post related to hosting like: "Best Hosting in Nigeria by DomainKing" with our latest banners with offers that catch user's attention. Then you will most likely get very targeted leads & such leads can turn to sales. And we would work to educate our Affiliates on this.
2) And also we have noticed that most bloggers in Nigeria are interested in buying Domains & not Hosting. And we currently only have an Affiliate program for hosting sales. And we believe that if we had the affiliate program for domains, then Mr. Jide & our other blogger Affiliates would have earned a lot of sales. So we are already working to code & introduce Affiliate program for domains in which you can earn upto N1500 for sale of domain names. We will update all our Affiliates accordingly.
We are open to other suggestions that may be put here. As we love our customers & our Affiliates & would like our Affiliates to grow as we grow.
And also we would like to implore Mr. Jide to kindly contact us first for clarification before writing such a post. And we expect that a big blogger with high following should do total research of facts before writing a post. As such posts impact our brand & we take such issues very seriously. We read almost every post that is written about us on the internet & we try to interact with most of them for positive suggestions. And we are always open to criticism that will lead to improvement of our services.
I hope this will add more clarity to the issue.
Best Regards,
Angad
DomainKing.NG
Check my blog 9jaedublog.com.ng
BalasHapus