ONE OF THE most effective ways to market on the Web is through so-called affiliations. One of the most effective “affiliators” has been Bill Lederer, who founded a site called Artuframe, which recently re-presented itself to the cyberworld as Art.com (www.art.com).
When president/CEO Lederer started the business-which offers more than 100,000 framed and unframed prints-he had $700,000 in capital. Not enough, he felt, to pay for advertising. He heard about bookseller Amazon.com’s technique of scattering links to its site around the Web and giving away a percentage of the sales to those partners. That technique, he realized, would work for his site-which recently signed a deal to be the featured art merchant on Yahoo! throughout 1999.
The number of Art.com affiliates has been increasing rapidly. In September it had 1,700; it now has over 3,000, and is adding 50 a day. Sales from affiliates represent 20% of revenue. Art.com currently gets 400,000 unique visitors each month, and it hasn’t yet listed with search engines or done any advertising other than the affiliations.
Lederer tested paid advertising but it only showed him it was the wrong path to take.
It proved to me that we shouldn’t do it,” he says. “We have a really good idea [now] of what doesn’t work.”
Among his affiliation partners are iVillage.com, Brandsforless.com, Zing.com, Card4you.com and 19thhole.com.
In what’s becoming a slowly growing trend, Lederer pays his business development staff a commission on the affiliate sales. He also takes strong measures to stay in touch with the partner sites-including sending out a newsletter to them.
Lederer says the best affiliates are the ones closest to the kind of art advertised in the button ad, banner or link; pictures of birds do better at bird sites, those of sports heroes do better at sports sites. “The more specific it is, the higher the click-through and conversion rates,” he adds.
In another innovation, Lederer is planning a massive direct mail campaign-$1 million worth (he just got $11.5 million in venture capital)-to send traffic to Art.com, which officially opened for business March 15 after having been in soft launch for several months.
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