A little help please! :)

S

Steve @ THM

Wannabie Member
Hi Everyone,

My name is Steve, I work at The Hogfather Motorcycles in Southport.

Firstly, I hope I am not breaking any rules here. I'm not looking to promote anything but I need to show what we are doing to get feedback on the idea I want to present that will benefit you guys.

Right now my job is to develop their online store.

We are getting to the point where we seriously need to think about marketing. A suggestion of mine was to set up an affiliate program where we take on guys like you who are hardcore bikers who produce entertaining content and have the audience behind you.

The store has over 1.5 million items. Item values are from pennies for nuts and bolts right up to £20,000+ for kit bikes.

The general idea is this...
We find a group of Motorcycle Vloggers, like you guys.
We set up an affiliate links 'thing' where people who click your link and then buy earn you commission.
We pay you....

We basically pay you a commission on the sales from the traffic you send to us.

I've done a fair it of research into you guys, I know of the 20 or so channels I looked at the views per month according to social blade was like 15 million! You guys have one hell of a reach and entertain millions of people each day. These were not even the biggest channels I could find, just randomly selected with subscriber bases from 3,000 to 170,000.

When you look at the gaming guys on youtube they monitise everything they do, they have deals with companies like netflix, dollar shave club, activision and EA.... A lot of them do youtube as a job and I appreciate that may not be your thing but how doesn't want more money, especially when its for something they do anyway.

We are not going to be asking for pre rolls, shout outs or anything really. You know your audience best. Maybe when you talk about a product link it to them via your affiliate link, or maybe you want to really promote it, I don't know you're the editors here.

What I would like is feedback from you guys, does this sound like something that would interest you? What would I have to do to make this something you guys would go for and use?

Any feedback would be welcome.

Cheers
 
Lurch said:
Sounds interesting. I guess if you want someone to review something, then they would have to have tried it first.
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We would not be sending out items for review, well its not part of our plans. Thats more what the manufacturers should be doing not retailers.

But say you were talking about an item you bought, you may use your affiliate link to show your fans where to buy it. That's the kind of use we see for this program.
 
lightitup said:
i know revizilla does something like that with a few vloggers.

link to ur site *link gone*
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Thanks for the link :) I did think about posting it but didn't want to go over the line and be seen to be promoting our selves.

thanks for the link to revzilla also, will have to check out what they are doing :)
 
Steve @ THM said:
We would not be sending out items for review, well its not part of our plans. Thats more what the manufacturers should be doing not retailers.

But say you were talking about an item you bought, you may use your affiliate link to show your fans where to buy it. That's the kind of use we see for this program.
Click to expand...

I wasn't saying you should be sending things out, certainly if it's not part of your plan. I know some manufacturers will send things out, think Drift did it with the Ghosts for example. Maybe get the manufacturers on board?
 
so like how actioncamera uk gives a 10% discount or what not?


Post some more details, What commision percentage will we get? Or will our viewers get a discount (Id rather have the 2nd option)
 
Marbro_za said:
so like how actioncamera uk gives a 10% discount or what not?


Post some more details, What commision percentage will we get? Or will our viewers get a discount (Id rather have the 2nd option)
Click to expand...

We are in the super early stages of this so bear with my on my vague answers here...

We are not looking at the coupon option. This is great for manufacturers etc who have a much higher margin on the items they sell. 10% discount + 5% commission is a big chunk to be taking off. We still might go down this route after more research but for now we are looking at a commission on sales tracked by a cookie. The number will be between 2% and 5% but again we will need to look into this. 5% seems about the market average commission to you guys from companies currently doing something like this. 5% is also a standard commission across affiliate programs in other areas from what I have looked at.

Can I ask why you would prefer the coupon code? If a user clicks your links but does not use your code you get nothing, our way would mean you are certain to get the commission from the traffic you send us unless they block cookies (which is like 1% of users).

Our store currently has 1.5 million items, take a look. You simply flick through the catalogues and find your item number. Search for the item number and add to cart, its very very easy. Our average order value is over £200 and we have items from £1 nuts and bolts to £30,000 kit bikes.

There are catalogues for everyone there, from guys who are into cruisers, off road, racing bikes, quads... even snow mobiles. We truly have everything covered. When its complete the store will be the leading motorcycle store online I feel.

We also have long term ambitions to wrap the store up into a 'package' and franchise it to other countries, starting with Europe and then spreading out to America, Asia, Australia... Although currently we still get and process orders from overseas.

Some of you guys are generating 1,000,000+ views per month! That is a lot of people who have a fairly big interest in motorcycles (or why would they watch...) They have to buy their stuff somewhere... Point them to use via your channels and this could very easily turn your YouTube hobby into a potential career. We would absolutely love to pay you guys £10,000 a month through our affiliate system and some of the numbers I've been looking at it looks possible. Even if you only get 30,000 views a month, that's a lot of people who have to buy their gear somewhere!

If you get 1 million views per month, with our link at the top of the description youtube say about 10% of people will click it, but to under do the numbers a little lets say 5%. That's 50,000 potential people on our website from your link, but to make this realistic lets say 25,000 as some of your viewers will be the same people. Right now we have a conversion rate of 3.2% on our website, 3.2% of people who visit our website order something but again, to under do the numbers lets say 1.5%. That's 375 people who in theory will order something from 1 million views a month, but lets under do this again and say 300 people will order.

With an average order value of £218 which it is right now, that's a total of £65,400. 5% of this is £3270 and all you did was your affiliate link to our store at the top of the description. That leaves £62k for us, but we are providing the store, packing orders, buying the item, shipping, we hire 2 full time web designers (I'm one of them), premises to pay for and very few people have the trade accounts and network we have. The business has invested massively into this. In my opinion, £3.2k a month for putting a link in the description of a video you are doing anyway is good going. What do you think? (and remember, every number in that equation was low balled except average order value)

I'd like to thank you all for your feedback so far, it really has helped. Keep it coming :)

If you look at youtube 2/3 years ago, the gaming niche was nothing. It's now one of the most popular parts of youtube and the channel owners are making a killing! There are dozens and dozens and dozens making 6 figures easily,
 
Lurch said:
I wasn't saying you should be sending things out, certainly if it's not part of your plan. I know some manufacturers will send things out, think Drift did it with the Ghosts for example. Maybe get the manufacturers on board?
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That could well be something we could look at :) I've no idea if any of them would be down for it but I am sure once they see the success we are having with our program they will want to get involved too.
 
Lurch said:
I guess it's down to your relationship with them and the volume you sell as to how much leverage you have there really.
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Absolutely.

Like I said if we show them what we are doing and the results I believe we will get, they will be getting involved very very soon.
 
Personally, I think its a good idea and it will work both ways! However, there is 2 points I would like to make.

1st point being, once a viewer clicks the link to your website (purchases something or just browses) they will now know your website so they will not go through our video description to click the link again. Unless you can somehow track that person ip address/cookies where they've come through our channel and we get the commission every time they purchase something. What this means is you will gain a lot of customers in a short amount of time and we will then not receive any commission once they've clicked the link once. Majority of people would not go onto your website through our channel more than once.

2nd point being, how would you prove to us that our recommendation (viewer who clicks the link) has purchased anything? For someone like myself who does not understand computer programming etc and who has no clue how cookies work to their full. How can we keep track of what our viewers have bought?

This can only work on purely a trust trust relationship. Awesome idea for marketing for your work place.
 
truestory, it's how affiliate marketing works. But remember, those numbers only work for people with very high numbers of views. Me? Pah, I get diddly squat views.

But question: you say you cover everything - does that include scooters?
 
First - No rules broken and thanks for leaving out links etc

This is something that I know a lot about - I co own an affiliate network and run my own successful online marketing company. I also own this site.

A few things I'd like to know -

  • How long would a cookie last for? Most people are quite savvy and compare products etc so anything less than 72 hours really is a con to the affiliate
  • How often will you pay out? 7, 14, 30 days?
  • How will you pay out? Paypal, BACS, Cheques?
  • What about refunds etc - How do you balance that out? I know a lot of affiliate network keep a 'fee' for 90 days to cover that.
  • How will you prevent cookie stuffing etc? I've known a lot of affiliate campaigns who have been robbed blind because of it
  • What about repeat customers? Do/Will you pay out twice if they've brought under two different sales?
 
dan does!


@Steve @ THM , Im not trying to make money out of vlogging, So the incentive to me doesnt matter.
However I try to help people out where ever i can, So if some of my subs want something cheaper, why not?


Also, Sadly i dont think id be purchasing from you. Im not that fond of the importing side of things, And to south africa generally i pay a hell of a lot more than if i sourced it locally.
 
Marbro_za said:
Also, Sadly i dont think id be purchasing from you. Im not that fond of the importing side of things, And to south africa generally i pay a hell of a lot more than if i sourced it locally.
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I try to be the same :) That's a good thing to support your locals.
 
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