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18 Apr 2001, Germany

Hi Dr. Ecommerce,

Over the last year I have set up an affiliate program that allows other web-sites to leverage airline flight booking technology for their own sites thereby providing them with flight booking technology. And, of course, we pay them a commission on each booking made. I have spoken to several people in the eTravel industry about how to best utilize the limited resources that we have to market this affiliate program to various different target groups. The first step is to define a target group - which brings me to my dilemma. How do I determine which affiliates will produce the highest number of bookings? There seem to be two schools of thought here with the one side saying that one should concentrate on the larger players and the other side saying market it to the masses and see what happens. My experience has shown that the larger portals, ISPs and large shopping sites do not necessarily produce as many bookings as some of the smaller players and therefore we have chosen to market to the masses. However, I am convinced that there must be a better method of evaluating potential affiliates. We have looked at factors such as numbers of unique visitors and whether a site is transaction based or not but at the end of the day if the responsible content manager does not conceive strategies to direct users to the booking engine then we will not see significant numbers of bookings. In light of the above situation I would be interested to hear if you have had any experience in dealing with such problems or can offer some insight as to what you think would be the best way to tackle such a problem.

Best regards,

Jason

Dear Jason:

That's easy! You simply need to choose affiliates with the largest number of potential customers. Ideally they will also be enthusiastic about your programme. Determining who these are is a bit more challenging, I admit.

Now, you know your customers better than I do. And I expect you know more about affiliate programmes than I do. But, my suggestion would be to initially target relevant on-line communities.

Assuming that most customers are frequent leisure travellers, I would be tempted to look at travel oriented on-line discussion forums. Your interface could be placed on the forum's web page and be promoted by the moderator of the discussion forum in the discussion forum itself (many discussion forums blatently ask: "support our sponsors"). Because good forums generate strong community feeling and support, members are more likely than ordinary web surfers to use the service. Moreover, some members of the discussion forum probably operate web sites or other forums that are also suitable for your affiliate programme.

One other community that you might also look into is the Association of International Business. It has around 10,000 (if I remember correctly) members all over the world and, because they are all involved in international business, many of them travel a lot.

Good luck,

Dr. Ecommerce