If you have been running a successful campaign for a good length of time, odds are you will start thinking about moving the campaign off the CPA network. Sometimes this is called whitelabeling, direct to merchant, or just plain direct affiliate marketing. Whatever you call it, this can be very profitable for you. It is terrible news for your affiliate managers, but in business you have to look out for yourself.

How do you move to these direct to merchant setups? Well, often you will be “recruited” by certain companies. Somehow word has a way of getting around when you are driving big volume to an offer. Also you can contact companies directly in your niche. You can use an approach like, “I am driving x signups a day your competitor. I can guarantee you at least that many.” Then the price negotiation begins. Obviously if you are cutting out the middleman of the affiliate network, you can earn a higher rate for your clicks and CPA actions. Sometimes you can get easier actions to convert, like page 1 instead of page 2. Sometimes you can be paid on a CPC basis for every click you send them. You like it because you make more money, the merchant likes it because they pay less. It’s really a win-win.

Of course finding these merchants takes work. It’s also a lot more like doing “real business” than some people in Internet businesses like. You have to contact people, arrange conference calls, sell yourself and services, set up billing agreements, work with their tech staff, and so on. Here are some positives and negative for each setup.

Positives:

Less rules and restrictions: When you work directly with a company, you usually work out your own agreement of how you will promote it. You can often use trademarked terms, and have access to the actual landing pages and confirmation pages.

More profit: No brainer here, no 3rd party taking a cut of your commissions.

No middleman: You speak directly with the merchant and become almost partners in their success. Unlike the sometimes adversarial relationship merchants have with affiliates, these relationships are more personal and cooperative.

Negatives:

Bad tracking: affiliate networks have very sophisticated tracking systems, allowing sub-ids and real time tracking. Merchant systems often don’t have this level of tracking. Some dump all the traffic into one bin with no way to split it out based on source. You might have to wait a day for your stats, if you even get anything useful. This can make running PPC campaigns extremely difficult, and the reason its only really viable for a campaign you have extreme confidence in based on prior real world testing. (The tracking problems may be eliminated if the merchant allows you to host the offer yourself).

No middleman: Yes not having a middleman is both a plus and minus. If their is some kind of dispute, you are on your own to resolve it. affiliate networks work as the middleman, giving you a certain level of protection if something happens like leads are lost.  Sometimes they will pay you regardless of fault. You lose this insurance policy going direct and take on much more risk of lost PPC spends.

Hard to find: It takes a lot of effort on your part to find these deals, and set them up.

So the bottom line is, once you have proven you can convert traffic in a niche, start doing some homework and find a merchant to work with directly.  It can be a huge boost to your bottom line as an affiliate.  I can speak from experience as I am now doing my largest percentage of revenue this way.  Good luck making the jump!

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