Dominos: Rewarding fans or cheap affiliate deal?

Interesting to note how Springwise reported a new Dominos widget which lets you refer people to order a pizza and earn cash. In the headline, ‘Domino’s recruits fans’, but in the first paragraph ‘lets consumers serve as affiliate marketers’.

The agency behind it, BLM Quatum, describe is as a ‘Social Affiliate‘ tool.

But let’s be honest.

It’s not recruiting fans or being social. It’s a nice affiliate marketing widget which pays 0.5% of any order for every person you can shoehorn into buying a pizza.

Without knowing what the average cost of an order is at Dominos, I can’t tell you whether or not it’s a good deal. Someone ordering a £13.99 medium pizza would earn you a little under 7p. Or 100 medium pizzas would earn you £6.99 for example. Apparently about the same as you’d get for an hours work delivering pizzas.

I’m not against affiliate deals – I often refer people to Amazon for example (See, did it there!)

You’ll find varying percentages for varying products, and unless you work very hard at it, none of them will make you rich, so I’m not necessarily querying the rate of reward. Although it does seem a little stingy when someone pays £100 on pizzas via your widget and inherent recommendation, and you earn a shiny 50p out of it.

But what I am questioning is whether this is ‘rewarding fans’ or a ‘social affiliate’ when it’s a shinier way of putting a tracking code on a hyperlink.

Where are online trading standards?

Trading Standards is a UK institution which aims to enforce consumer protection with information, settling dispuates and issuing fines…

The reason they’ve come to mind is that my Twitter account contains the word ‘marketing’, so I appear to have attracted an inordinate amount of followers who claim to be internet marketing experts, mavens, network marketers and other such terms proclaiming their expertise.

The strange thing is that they appear to have misunderstood Twitter, and have decided to follow way more people than are following them.

And their linked webpage is normally a single page proclaiming their expertise and offering the chance to learn more by paying a small sum. A quick check reveals their page has a Google Page Rank of 0.

Now, I’m in no way an internet marketing expert, but I do think it’s slightly suspicious that someone who is able to teach you a way to be hugely successful and make large sums of money on the internet hasn’t found out how to give their page any authority, or use Twitter in the right way…

Hopefully most people who read my blog share my cynicism, but if not, do make sure you check easily accessible background evidence like Google PR, or Technorati rank etc before parting with cash for anyone who claims to know about marketing!

Almost everyone who I’ve had the pleasure of learning from will happily share for free via their blogs or websites in order to build up their real world authority to lead to opportunities of future employment – not try and sell you an ebook or dvd set. And those that do offer tuition tend to also back this up by sharing a lot of information for free, and having a website which has a legitimately large following, for instance, Problogger. (Note: Real experts are always honest about constantly learning more)

To save some time, here’s the real secret behind huge financial reward from internet success:

1. Have a really good idea.

2. Work really, really, really, really hard to make it a success.

3. Have a bit of luck.

4. If it still doesn’t work, have another good idea and go back to Step 1.

After 10 years of running websites, including for one of the biggest magazine publishers in the UK, I’ve yet to see anything which defies those rules and isn’t a scam in some way!