Update: September 2, 2015
Sadly, we've discontinued the Moz affiliate program. After running it for a couple of years, we found it simply wasn't delivering the value to our customers or ourselves that we had hoped. Thank you for your interest, and if we ever revive the program, we'll make a big announcement here. Cheers!
Disclaimer: This post doesn't contain any awesome SEO tips, tactics, search engine revelations, or anything of that nature. Instead this post contains information on how to make some quick cash...don't hate me, k?!
Can you believe it's been almost 5 months since we launched the affiliate program here at SEOmoz?! Crazy I know. I guess time flies not just when you are having fun, but also when you are making money! We now have just around 1,000 affiliates helping us spread the good word that is SEOmoz PRO, and we couldn't be more thankful. It has been a unique learning experience on both a company wide and personal level, as we created the program, set it live, befriended affiliates, and collaborated to help educate a greater marketing circle about our PRO tools.
Now that we have almost half a year under our belt (and lots of data to help guide us) we have decided to make some pretty bold moves on the affiliate program front, and I wanted to take a little time today to tell you all about them.
#1 Get paid $25.00 for every free trial lead
We are changing our payout from "pay per PRO signup" to "pay per free trial lead" {insert crowd gasp here}! Yup, you read that right. Previously we were paying out only if you sent us a visit that signed up for PRO right away, at a price point of $99/month. Needless to say we knew this put a huge burden on our affiliates. That price tag was a high barrier to entry for a lot of visitors who really wished they could try out our SEO management services first.
Back in February we launched our first 30-day free trial of SEOmoz PRO. Since then we have been revamping the site in hopes of showing off the free trial to new visitors. Since we have changed the site to really sell this signup process, we think it's only fair to pay affiliates for every free trial lead. We are super excited about this change, and optimistic it will help our affiliates across the board.
#2 Affiliates get paid faster with less hassle
We have moved to the PayQuicker online payment platform to pay out our affiliates more efficiently. The PayQuicker platforms empowers affiliates to choose the way they want to be paid out. This platform with also save SEOmoz quite a few hours validating affiliates, issuing payments, and more. All around we are excited to see this facilitate us paying out more and more commissions in a less time consuming, more ideal way for our affiliates.
* I would like to take a quick second to send a huge thank you to Mick, our PayQuicker rep. We really appreciate your great service in helping us get set up and grooving on the PayQuicker payment platform.
#3 Get all new affiliate assets to work with
Given that we are now paying out $25.00 per free trial signup, we made sure to update pages, update banners, and do as much as we could on our end to set you up for success. We are also currently hiring for another online marketer to help me manage this program (as well as other acquisition channels) so you can expect top-notch customer service from your affiliate management team.
Phewww, okay who is excited? I know I am. The truth is, the team here at SEOmoz has always been so thankful for all of your support. We know that even without getting paid for it, many of you are willing to send around our name and SEOmoz PRO as your SEO software of choice. Our success to date is largely due to your generous evangelizing. These changes are our way of saying "thank you."
As more and more marketers, journalists, entrepreneurs and site owners jump on the search engine optimization fan bus, we are hoping they give SEOmoz PRO a chance to be their SEO management platform of choice. If you know someone that could benefit from our tools, feel free to signup for our affiliate program, grab your unique affiliate ID, and send it their way. If they sign up for our free trial, you get paid $25 a pop. It's that easy friends.
Okay I've taken enough of your time today. If anyone has any questions about the affiliate program feel free to send them my way, you can email me at [email protected]. You can always read more about the affiliate program details here, and if you want to skip all of that and just get started, you can sign up for the program here.
I like the changes and I think all the affiliates will enjoy getting paid faster with less hassle. I think the $25 for each free trial is great and everyone should take advantage of that. Plus i have to admit I love the new Roger banners that people can put up on their sites!
If I wasn't already working at SEOmoz, I'd sign up in a hearbeat!
Now this is showing how tempting this offer is ... :)
I think we all know what to say here....
WINNING
Really does sound like a stellar aprogram. I have been working with Hubspot on their affiliate inbound marketing platform, and I have to say not only do I feel the SEOMOz tools provide stronger inbound marketing support, I also like the streamlined nature of the affiliate program. Now as to that Online Marketer you mentioned to help out, I may have a suggestion or two ;)
hardly groundbreaking. I still stand by my comments that £99 a month is way too much. I can get unlimited internet and cable tv for less. I would be the first to sign up if it was $10 a month.
$99/month might not make sense for your business, but for the vast majority of professional SEOs, the value they get from the tool is worth much more than that. The time saved by the SEOmoz Pro tools is priceless. If they tripled the prices tomorrow I would still keep my account. I suppose it depends on how much SEO work you do.
Hey there! Thanks for the feedback on pricing. We are constantly evaluating new options, and we do get quite a few requests for a SEOmoz PRO "lite" level. Just wanted to let you know we hear ya! We do believe that $99 is a great value for all the different pieces of PRO, but we will keep your opinion in mind as we continue to evaluate our pricing. Thanks!
How long does it usually take for an affiliate account to be vetted? I know you must have hundreds to manually check through but I have someone I am training in SEO is waiting on my link to signup... I had to tell him just to go ahead and purchase it without the link if he'd rather get crasking.
Is it available right now? Because i don't see the page.
Thanks so much for your interest! Sadly, the program is not currently active.
Is this still going?
Hi Rebecca,
No, the program is not currently active. Thank you for your interest though!
Hi Guys can anyone tell me how to join the affiliate progamme for moz as the links in this article are broken!
Hi Jason,
Thanks for your interest. The affiliate program is not active at this time.
So the only payout is a one-time payout of $25? Are there any recurring payouts for people that stay on beyond the free trial?
Hey there! We are actually dropping the recurring payouts but we did this for two reasons: (1) the recurring on PRO monthly ended up being around nince dollars, and to exchange that was hard to scale (we really wanted to avoid payout minimums on recurring commissions but the second reason is a much bigger one (2) we have a good number of people that pivot up a tier, and given that those upgrades are due to the product, it felt unatural to payout on upgrades. With that said it messes with recurring commissions quite a bit. Basically to avoid the hassle of it all, and make a much cleaner payout structure, we wnt with pay out per lead rather - flat. Hope that makes sense :)
Yep. That makes perfect sense.
Thats awesome! I personally am not an affiliate so this doesnt really apply to me, but I hope you considered the potential for fraud and abuse in a pay for free signup program.
You guys are pretty smart so I am sure you have thought about that, but just in case I thought I would throw it out there.
Good luck, sounds great!
Hey there!
We sure did. The program has a number of fraud detection pieces built in. One of the main ones being that the offer comes with a performance qualifier. All affiliates can read more about that when they sign up, but I will def be keeping a very close eye on every conversion that comes through. Luckily using HasOffers, has helped a ton with this. There are dozens of safeties in place, so we are super fortunate there :)
This is fantastic news... I'm sure you'lll get a lot of users testing the trial version... but I have 2 questions: 1) For how long will this be available? 2) Does it really worth it? I mean.... the number of pro subscribers that you get compared to the number of free trials? Good luck with the campaign.. I'd say this is meant to be viral, right?:) Everyone will talk about it, no doubt:)
Pretty standard Affiliate program push here, Many compaines do it. While viral is good i would expect SEOMOZ has crunched the numbers and is trying to adapt this into a long term solution to attract more affiliates. Its a win win.
Glad you like the direction we are headed! To answer you questions:
1) This is from here on out, with no plans to change it2) We are super fortunate to have a high retention rate on free trialers, and we believe this will certainly be worth it ;)And yes, we'd love for you to spread the word! :)
But there's one clause there that is a little... strange, I might say: "A minimum conversion rate for traffic sent to the free trial offer is set at 20%. If you fall below this quality threshold, the affiliate manager has the right to refuse pending conversions, and terminate your affiliate account"... So if the conversion rate is 10%, but I got 10 or 100 referrals, I won't get the money?
I like the model presented above, can you report back the success of this campaign?
Hey Mike! Yes! I am actually hoping to gather some data around our best landers and banners as well. Id love to present our findings on what is working for us as well as what didn't ;) More on this soon!
That's great news!
This is good news,
But I am still waiting to be accepted for the program applied a long while ago =((
Sent you a few emails and PM's Joanna, hope you got them =))
Hi there! I also wrote you back letting you know you were accepted the same day you applied back at the beginning of the month. it doesn't take more than 48 hours to be accepted or denied to the program. i think this is a spam folder issue. If you don't mind checking that would be great, we might have to take this to the phone (whoa!) feel free to call the mozPlex and ask for me :)
Very helpful =)
Thanks I will give you a call when I get free time, I think it must have been a email issue with the email redirects. thanks for the help.
I never really paid any attention to SEOMoz affiliate program - this article was an excellent prompter as I do have a suitable blog for this that sits there and does nothing.
I wasn't aware of the affiliate program - I'm certainly looking at how I can utilise it now though!
Awesome! Just signed up and waiting for account to be aproved. Can't Wait!
I think I have to talk to my boss today :-)