BlogSprint Needs Referral Program for Webmasters
What do T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon have that Sprint doesn’t? No, it’s not the ability to use unlocked devices (well, that’s true). One of the reasons Sprint has had trouble growing is the lack of affiliate marketing to webmasters.
If you’re an aspiring blogger, one of the ways that you can make money, is with affiliate marketing. This is mostly because people with few page views… don’t make a lot of money from advertising banners. And, since spamming people with even more of them isn’t usually an option (since you don’t want to alienate that small viewership you’ve cultivated)… you have to think smart about monetizing your site.
One of the options that they chose is to use affiliate marketing. Everyone that plays to win online does, that’s no secret. But, the problem is, Sprint isn’t playing the game, and so they’re losing by default. Without an affiliate advertising program, people are more likely to post about the other carriers, which they can turn around and profit from those new service activations.
We at PhoneNews.com don’t discriminate on coverage based on if we bring in money. But as I explained above, others clearly do. We’re big enough that we have affiliate marketing with every major third-party indirect on the web. When a phone comes out, we usually have a place to point people to where they can buy the phone.
Hopefully Sprint has already realized this is a major, major problem, and has probably cost them hundreds of thousands, if not a million or two subscribers over the past few years. Sprint appears to be headed in the right direction. They just scrapped the decaying Sprint online store in favor of Nextel’s more robust web store. Probably one of the reasons that they did that was to ensure better affiliate relations, and they’re probably already at-work on such an offering. If not, time to wake up Sprint, and smell the coffee once again.
In fact, until the merger launched, Nextel did have an active affiliate marketing presence. Sprint, hopefully, will tap the Nextel store to bring such an offering back to the fully-consolidated company.
