As you may know, eComxpo lives on for those of you who were able to snag a 90 day pass.  Myself, I couldn’t help but notice some of the outstanding information the conference continues to provide our industry. 

This year, Shawn Collins of ShawnCollins Consulting (and, of course, The Affiliate Summit) asked the following questions to his session attendees:

How do you recruit most of your affiliates?

To my continued amazement, nobody has taken Collins up on his dynamite best practice - that of using direct mail to recruit affiliates.  That stated, getting an actual mailing address on these characters can prove to be difficult… but perhaps not if given the right tools.  That stated, in today’s day and age, affiliates who hide (do not provide their contact details with Whois registrars and/or use Domains By Proxy to evade detection) should probably earn less consideration by marketers.  After all, what’s to hide when doing business together? 

Of course, I also know a place where you can find 200 top producing affiliates complete with names, address, email addresses and most of the time phone numbers… all of them eager to hear from potential marketing partners.

Which affiliate directories list your program?

Once a popular way to promote your affiliate program, directories have fallen out of fashion… probably given that there is no clear leading index and the data within them goes stale pretty quickly.  Combine this with the fact that affiliates know where to find marketers with affiliate programs—inside affiliate networks—and its no wonder directories have collected so much dust.

What is the strongest affiliate vertical for your program?

Here’s a great question that doesn’t focus on recruitment and responses are all over the board but, once again, look at how search stands out as the leader.  Is it any wonder?  Not to me as I just got done reading MarketingSherpa’s Search Benchmarking Guide book. 

What are affiliates suggesting is the biggest challenge for them looking forward?  Nearly SIXTY percent report their inability to control the search environment (paid and natural/algorithmic) as their biggest headache. 

eComxpo is already promoting its 2006 event and with 5200 registrants this October (and a solid line of sponsors) they’ve got a serious head of steam.