Affiliate programs are reliant on their affiliates to sell and pre-sell their products and services. Affiliates expect regular communication, open communication channels to contact their Affiliate Manager, and improvements from their affiliate program. Welcome the affiliate newsletter; an important document connecting affiliate programs with their affiliates worldwide.

The affiliate newsletter allows Affiliate Managers to brief their sales force all in one fell swoop, which is impossible geographically without the Internet. The main components of affiliate newsletter are to recap affiliate’s progress, a clear to call action and an effort to build relationships. Newsletters are received by the handful for most affiliates, so catching their attention is a must. A smart, calculated subject line is an important first step in engaging your audience. A recap of past efforts is a nice personal touch for most affiliates (even though they generally track their own stats). The body of the newsletter should be your call to action. What do you want your affiliates to accomplish over the next measurable period of time. Preparing goals based on the S.M.A.R.T. method (Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) lay down a reasonable plan that affiliates can accept and digest before setting out to obtain goals set forth. After goals are laid out and explained the next step in the newsletter offers tools the affiliate program is providing. Coupons, discounts, promotional offers, datafeeds or any other tools should be listed and emphasized by the Affiliate Manager. The final section of the newsletter should contain any incentives or bonuses affiliates will be able to earn; these offers should be time sensitive. The newsletter pulled together should be a cohesive communication that is informative and easy to understand.

Affiliate newsletters suffer from three major pitfalls. The newsletter email is eaten by SPAM controls and the affiliate never even sees the newsletter. The newsletter does not captivate their audience and the affiliate disregards the letter. The most frusterating downside to emailing newsletters is that you are going to receive a sizable portion of unreturned/undeliverable mail. Either the addresses are wrong or they have strong anti-SPAM measures, but an Affiliate Manager must find a way around broken emails in order to contact affiliates. Overall, if an affiliate newsletter has an open rate of above 30% and a click-through rate of 10-15% then the newsletter is a success. Affiliate newsletters are a great tool to motivate affiliates and encourage them to reach new heights with their affiliate sites.

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Calculating the perfect affiliate CPA

Calculating a competitive CPA is an incredibly important part of any successful affiliate programme and yet it’s one of the first hurdles merchants fall at.

With more and more companies launching affiliate programmes, there is a huge amount of choice for affiliates, and if you expect them to promote your programme over your competitors, you need to set the right CPA and continually review it.

Continuing on from the trend in my last post , here are your seven tips for this week, this time on the subject of how to set the right CPA for your affiliate programme….

1) Forget CPA, think EPC – Good affiliates aren’t blinded by a big flashy CPA; it has to translate into a competitive Earnings Per Click (EPC). If your site doesn’t convert it won’t matter how high the CPA is, you still won’t be competitive.

2) Align your channels – If you see affiliate marketing as an opportunity to get sales at a discount CPA you will never realise its true potential. You should always compare your affiliate CPAs to those you are achieving in display and search activity.

If, for example, you run a search campaign, it’s worth bearing in mind that search affiliates will keep an eye on your bid prices. If they see huge discrepancies between the price you’re willing to pay per click, and the effective EPC they earn on your affiliate programme, expect to receive a call demanding a higher CPA.

3) Communicate with affiliates – These are the people you are trying to motivate so speak to them directly. If you’re just about to launch a programme, then ask your network to connect you with strong affiliates in your sector. If your goal is to offer a compelling CPA then most affiliates will be happy to give you their feedback.

4) Understand the true value of a sale/customer – This sounds obvious, but to be able to offer the best CPA possible you need to understand exactly what the customer or sale is worth to you. The best affiliate programmes are often those where the merchant has factored in the lifetime value of the customer and passed this onto the affiliate.

5) Watch the competition – Checking out your competitors’ CPAs is an easy job as the information tends to be readily available. Because of EPC’s significance, it is important to dig a little deeper. Make sure you speak to your affiliate network, who should be able to provide you with average EPCs for your sector.

6) Watch the paid search space – Affiliates have more choice than ever when it comes to where they send their traffic, and it’s not just confined to CPA-based models. More and more affiliates are comparing the returns available from contextual advertising options such as Google Adsense to those available through affiliate networks.

If the keyword prices on generic terms are incredibly high, and your CPA does not reflect this, then you may see your affiliates switching to the more profitable contextual advertising.

7) Consider hybrid models – These are becoming more popular and often work by providing affiliates with a CPC rate for all traffic sent and a CPA. Under this model the merchant shares more of the risk in terms of their site converting by guaranteeing the affiliate income on the click, and then a higher bounty if their traffic converts to sales.

Duncan Jennings is the managing director of eConversions, a specialist paid on performance search marketing company.

Recruiting affiliates can be a challenging task for any Affiliate Manager. Affiliate Managers who want to expand their affiliate base need to evaluate their strategy for recruiting potential affiliates. The Internet is a massive dominion and it is difficult for Affiliate Managers to locate and target potential affiliates. Super Affiliate lists are sold by consultants to Affiliate Managers and the only real way to act on that data is to directly contact these people via phone or snail mail discussing the selling points of their program. Locating other potential affiliates can be done through diligent research of other affiliate programs, affiliate forums and by networking in the affiliate realm.

Locating the affiliates you want to target is the easy part of the recruitment process. Now that you know who you want to talk to, how do you reach out and make a strong first impression on potential affiliates? To this day one of the most popular techniques is sending out mass emails explaining to affiliates their product, superb commission rates and how easy it is to climb their tier system. People receive so many of these offers, especially Super Affiliates, that conversion rates for signing up new affiliates through an email campaign will be very low. You also run the chance of being thought of as spam and the more people that report you as spam it could have an effect on your website and your program. There are two techniques that are used that are more successful than emailing offers. The active approach is to personally call or mail affiliates and attempt to sell your program’s benefits directly. The passive strategy is using the benefits of your affiliate program page to sell people on your ideas and your affiliate program.

Affiliate Manager’s have a limited number of tools for recruiting potential affiliates. One of the strongest tools that is available to Affiliate Managers is their “Affiliate’s Page”. This webpage should be informative, concise and well-written explaining facts and benefits of your company’s program. How are Affiliate Managers to draw people to this sales page? Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is an under-utilized tool for recruiting and attracting new affiliates. PPC is an intelligent strategy if you choose strong keywords with weak-moderate advertising competition. PPC requires keyword research to determine which words and phrases have the most popularity in search engines. Combine keyword research with the lowest bid price and highest advertising position that bid will buy you, and an Affiliate Manager will have a strong advertising weapon to draw affiliates to their program page. Attracting potential affiliates to your program page means nothing if there is weak content, no sales pitch or no thin program details. A well-developed affiliate information page is a must for any affiliate program.

Keeping costs down with PPC advertising is important requirement for most Affiliate Managers, but with proper research PPC keywords can be bid on at a low price with a high advertising position. Here is an example of some keywords with attractive bid prices and advertising placement:

Affiliate Sales and Marketing: $.05 bid . . . 1-3 position

Best Affiliate Marketing Program: $.05 bid . . . 1-3 position

Affiliate Marketing Companies: $.05 bid . . . 1-3 position

These keywords all have moderate traffic, and with an attractive bid price and advertising placement should drive people to your program page. Affiliate Managers would be wise to use all the tools they have in their arsenal to recruit new affiliates. PPC advertising is cost-effective, visible and targeted and is an efficient strategy for attracting new affiliates to your program.

Its been over a month since our website started being affected negatively by Google.  In attempts to diagnose the cause of our Google rankings descent, we were able to determine there were definitely site errors needing attention.   Broken links, missing URLs, and HTTP errors are now fixed and we have even created a new, efficient design for our homepage.  As of today our rankings continue to fall and we have now discovered a new issue.  Google only has 150 pages indexed for www.denverfabrics.com and our site actually has over 10,000 pages.  Advice from some very intelligent people (thanks 5 Star) has lead me to believe the problem might be duplicate content.  Google sees Denver Fabrics as having two sites:  www.denverfabrics.com and denverfabrics.com.  Today we will be creating a re-direct from denverfabrics.com to www.denverfabrics.com and will wait and see if that solves our problems with Google.  As Tom Petty says “The waiting is the hardest part”.

Borders will be ending their strategic partnership with amazon.com after 6 years of partnership. Borders is interested in improving their financial position and climbing out of the red and into the black. Beginning in January 2008, Borders will open their own e-Commerce site where they will keep 100% of sales earned. The deal amazon.com and Borders entered into called for Borders to only receive payment for referrals and not for any of their products sold. The reason for this was because amazon.com was responsible for fulfillment, a job Borders will now have to undertake.

Preparing for the split Borders has hired new e-Commerce executives, as well as a new e-Commerce staff to lead the website to success. Understanding the success of the new site depends on how well they get their name out in the very competitive field they are in. Border’s has begun preparing for Web 2.0 and will roll out podcasts of music performances and author’s readings to build brand awareness.

Borders’ effort should help their bottom line which reported staggering losses in 2006. Borders and their sister company Waldenbooks will be on the same platform and are looking for a strong showing when their new site debuts in early 2008.

People who enter affiliate marketing should not rush into putting up a website.  A smart affiliate marketer will grow their website and establish it in the online community.  The first step is choosing a topic or theme for your website.  An affiliate marketer should not be swayed by affiliate manager’s offers and develop their website around an affiliate’s products.  Affiliates should do proper research into choosing their website’s topic, including, but not limited to keyword research, keyword competition, and size of market.  Finding a niche that has room for additional competition, but has enough interest to be profitable is the ideal placement for an affiliate website.

Now that the affiliate has chosen the topic for their website it is now time to design the site.  Affiliates must keep in mind that they should optimize their website for the search engines to drive traffic to click on affiliate’s links.  Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a scary undertaking for an affiliate without training or knowledge on search engine optimization.  Affiliates often have problems with search engine optimization, because to properly design your website for search engines you must have keyword rich content.  Search engines will overlook affiliate’s sites that contain only banners and no content.  Search engine optimization also calls for keywords in tags, meta names, meta descriptions, titles, title tags, page name, and in image tags.  Adding the keyword in the first 50 and the last 50 words on the page being optimized is also important.  Affiliates also must develop a link strategy and follow through with strong links to other sites and strong sites linking back to the affiliate’s site.

Search engine optimization can be the key to success for an affiliate marketer.  Profits and traffic will follow to an affiliate’s website; not only because the site is search engine optimization, because it now has rich content targeting your visitors.  Affiliates who target their visitors and and offer an effective presell based on site content will see high sales and commissions.

Online directory submission can be an arduous and confusing task for any e-Commerce business. Companies need to find a way to get their name out on the Web in order to be successful in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Companies must submit their links to directories to increase their level of incoming links. Incoming link relevance is a part of Google’s algorithm for ranking websites in their SERP (Search Engine Page Results). There are three different methods that can be used when submitting links to an online directory and all three should be implemented and utilized for a successful link inclusion campaign. Directories offer three linking opportunities: Paid inclusion, free inclusion with reciprocal link, and free inclusion.

Business should do research before choosing their link strategy and the amount of paid links and free link submissions to online directories. An important measure businesses must be conscience of is Page Rank. Search engines value links with a high page rank and will reward websites with high-quality links. A strategy to avoid is submitting your website to a directory who promises to submit your website to thousands of directories and search engines. Google sees this practice as spamming and will penalize the website. Following SEO best practices is important when spreading your link throughout the Internet.

Paid inclusions in directories are an important piece of any link submission strategy. In most cases the better paid link submission directories contain strong Page Ranking. Directories that require payments have a wide audience assuring your company that a high amount of traffic is possible from the paid inclusion. The strongest paid directories will be ones within your business’ niche. Including your links in directories that are in your business’ focus area it will ensure that you are targeting your customers who visit your website. Researching paid submission directories and locating niche directories will give a business the highest ROI for their link inclusion campaign.

Strategies for link submission must include free directories as well as paid directories. Researching page rank of free link submission directories is important and submission should be restricted to sites with Page Rank 4 and higher. Free directory submission and link submission with reciprocal links should also be focused on niche directories. The goal is for you site to appeal to the highest percentage of people who view it as possible. Clearly the way to a higher conversion rate is to target your business towards people who have an interest in your company’s target.

Link submission to Web directories should contain an optimal amount of paid and free inclusions aimed at your business’ specific niche. Spreading your word is the name of the game. It is important that you respect the power of SERPs and include your links to strong partners and not Spam directories. It is better for a company to contain few strong links than thousands of weak unconcentrated links. Link submission in directories is a delicate process that must be properly researched and implemented to reap the practice’s full benefits.

Affiliate marketing is a business anyone with a computer, a website and time can compete in. There is a misconception that there is very little work to be done in affiliate marketing. The website will take care of itself and you the affiliate will rake in money. While it may not be difficult to enter into the affiliate game, the percentage of successful affiliates is small. To be a success in affiliate marketing a person must be persistent and patient and willing to make mistake and to improve upon these mistakes. Different combinations of web design, advertising, content, and affiliate links must be tested and results analyzed. Affiliates Managers appreciate their affiliates who actively maintain their website and optimize it for success.

The curse of the lazy affiliate is present for most affiliate managers. Inactive affiliates don’t affect program statistics; however, time is spent and often wasted in an effort to help these affiliates. Certain online companies will restrict affiliates from joining their program by requiring a formal application that must be approved. The downside to applications is that affiliates may not want to spend the time filling out the form and valuable affiliates could be lost in the process. The advantage to requiring an application is that you are able to prescreen affiliates and decide if they can provide the image you want to show of the company and the profits to go along with it.

The goal for merchants and affiliates alike should be to make as much money as possible in the fewest amount of clicks. Affiliate managers should lead their affiliates to the highest possible conversion rate by using their knowledge, tools and program perks to drive affiliates to success. Datafeeds are quickly becoming one of the most popular tools affiliates can utilize in their websites. Datafeeds allow the affiliate to display products, pictures, prices, and categories on their website. Affiliates using this tool can effectively target their customers and send them to the merchant’s website in a buying frame of mind. Targeting the customer and offering a strong presell using tools and content lead to increased conversion rates and profits.

The main ingredient towards the success of an affiliate program is open communication between an affiliate manager and their affiliates. The leadership needs to be focused and driving towards a purpose for the merchant and the affiliate. Teamwork will provide the best attack towards completing the goal of increased profits for the merchant and the affiliate.