Thalasar Ventures

Ok since I am pretty effective affiliate for Commission Junction I have opted to recieve their mailing for affiliate programs. One of the recent program offers I recently received was for Fathead.com. I took a look at the program and decided join it and review it for the site.

Fathead.com makes wall decorations of your favorite colleg, NFL, NBA, Nascar and MLB figures. I got an email from cj.com highlighting the program’s benefits.

• Earn up to 18% commission on all sales
• Enjoy high conversion rates and EPC
• 60 day cookie!
• Huge brand recognition
• A money back guarantee! (To help improve conversions)

I seen the Fathead commercials and from an affiliate perspectative it seems to me to offer some excellent possibilities for monetizing and then generating revenue because let’s face it sports are big VERY BIG. So to join the program, I clicked on the link provided. It opened up to a blank page at cj.com! Ok it turned out the redirection they were using only works in IE. Mistake number #1. Mistake#2 was when I joined the program, I was told they manually approve publishers! Why send me an offer to join your program? I am never a big fan of advertisers who manually approve advertisers since it usually adds 2-3 days to the process.
However the guys that run the Fathead.com affiliate program were quick to approve me – approval took about 20 minutes. In the notification email I recieved a further breakdown of the program terms and commission structure

• $1 to $2,500 = 12%
• $2,501 to $5,000 = 15%
• More than $5,001 = 18%

So the original term was somewhat misleading but only a little. And here’s where I saw the real opportunity.

We do allow our affiliates to participate in PPC bidding, provided that you do not bid our branded terms, or any variations, or utilize Fathead’s URL as the display URL on any search engine.. Please review our keyword link for additional details.

So I am going to be able to use PPC engines to drive sales and cannot bid on the following keywords (“fathead, fathead.com, www.fathead.com, www.fathead, fat head”). Please note those are from keyword link at CJ.com and will undoubtedly change from time to time.
The merchandising possibilities for Fathead.com are pretty extensive since they offer every single college logo, every NBA, NFL, MLB and Star Wars characters (Remarkably Darth Vader is the most popular, not Boba Fett).
I will be setting up campaigns for various PPC providers and I will let you know how they convert. If you have a sports memorabilia site, Fathead.com should probably be in your marketing mix.
On the other hand the range of PPC bidding options this opens up makes it a good number of options on bidding. Fatheads are rather unique items so you just should be competing with posters and other fathead affiliates.