Black Friday Sales 2012

One of the best and most effective ways for an Affiliate Manager to keep in touch with their Affiliates is to send out an Affiliate Newsletter at least once a month. Affiliate newsletters allow the Affiliate program to share their thoughts, program news, and broad Affiliate support and tools with their Affiliate database.

I ask you, as an Affiliate, do you read Affiliate newsletters, or do they get forwarded straight to the trash bin?

At the very least, you should take a peak at a Merchant’s newsletter, see if there are any customer or Affiliate promotions that you can use to your advantage. You also might find that Affiliate incentives are thrown into Affiliate newsletters, and you might be missing out on some extra cash by avoiding the newsletter. Affiliates, try and make it a habit to read through your Affiliate newsletters, you never know when you will come across something that could increase your profits.

I receive the this question all the time. What are the responsibilities of an Affiliate Manager?

• Recruiting new Affiliates
• Motivation of Affiliates
• Building Affiliate relationships
• Creating Affiliate promotions and incentives
• Supporting Affiliates, whether it be technical support or any other advice that is asked
• Improving the Affiliate program and keeping Affiliates aware of changes
• Keeping an open line of communication with Affiliates.
• Tracking Affiliate sales
• Guarding against fraud
• Updating Data Feeds
• Paying Affiliates
• Affiliate Newsletters
• Creating or identifying Affiliate Tools
• Affiliate Terms and Guideline

In this month’s issue of Internet Retailer, they dive into a common Affiliate Marketing issue. Can an Affiliate Program have too many affiliates?

While presenting both sides of this issue, they show how some affiliate programs and networks say it isn’t worth working with Affiliates who have been inactive for over 6 months. It is wise to cut these affiliates from your program and bring your program down to a size your company can manage.

They also took a look at the Affiliate managers and companies who believe that it is foolish to cut Affiliates from your program just because they have been inactive. The sentiment being, you never know when one of your affiliates, active or inactive, may become the next Super Affiliate.

I agree with the second group of people in saying that Affiliates shouldn’t be cut from a program because of inactivity. Rather, segment your affiliates into different groups, and manage each group accordingly. Three possible groups could be “Super Affiliates”, “Active Affiliates”, and “Inactive Affiliates”. Try and appeal to all three groups and continue to grow your program. In my opinion, there is no such thing as an unmanageable program. Even if you are a small company, there is no reason that your Affiliate manager can’t spend the time to separate your Affiliates into groups and reach out and market and support them.

E-consultancy is an online publisher of best practice internet marketing reports, research and how-to guides. E-consultancy, named Publisher of the Year at the 2006 AOP Awards, also publishes buyer’s guides and has a directory of 100,000+ third party internet marketing white papers. More than 700 E-consultancy users responded to the research email.

The merchants that responded to the email came from a wide variety of industries, including financial, retail, and travel. The findings of this survey address Affiliate Marketing conditions in the UK, and while there may be some differences between Affiliate Marketing in the U.S. and the UK, but this report does give a picture of the Affiliate Marketing industry in the US and the UK. But do keep in mind these numbers portrayed are in respect to the UK.

• 67% of responding merchants have increased sales from 2 years ago.
• 78% of responding merchants are spending more money on their Affiliate Marketing campaigns then they were 2 years ago.
• 78% of responding merchants also said they will spend more money on Affiliate Marketing in the future.
• 50% of responding merchants will add to their Affiliate management team
• 95% of Merchants say that Affiliate Marketing is the most cost-effective way to attract new customers … Email marketing and Paid Search Marketing trailed in this respect. (more…)

Companies oftentimes find it difficult to design, implement and maintain their Affiliate Programs.  There are many instances where you will see companies outsourcing their Affiliate Program to consultants and Outsourced Project Managers (OPM’s).

This is an area of Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Management that interests me greatly.  Many of Outsourced Project Managers work remotely and take on a number of Affiliate Programs acting as their Affiliate Manager.  OPM’s don’t always design programs from the ground up, in many cases the Affiliate Program has already been started by a company, but for one reason or another they can’t handle the program and they hire consultants or Outsourced Program Managers.

I think it would be a lot of fun and very rewarding to start my own Outsourced Project Management firm and to have it grow and be successful.  Not only do I think it would be fun, but I know I would do a good job managing other programs.   If your company has an Affiliate Program and you feel it is not operating as well as it should, let me know and I will give you a free consultation.  If you like what I have to say and have to offer than we could work out an arrangement where I would become your Affiliate Manager.  You can find more information on Consulting and OPM’s here.

Affiliates who want to make money during the busy holiday season had better get an action plan in place because time is of the essence.

By now you should have an idea of what you want to market and to who you are looking to market towards. Site design and site optimization should be your number one priority. To prepare your holiday/Christmas site for the Search Engines you must begin immediately. Start building links and developing your on-page SEO.

Reading up on consumer trends for this year and years past will give you an idea of what will be the most profitable products to market. And if you are smart, you will develop a site for niche products to avoid heavy competition.

If you are looking for some Christmas themes there are a number of them out on the web. Here are 9 WordPress Christmas themes from BloggerHolic.

Whatever your Affiliate plans for this holiday season, think ahead and do your research and you will have a Happy Holidays, Ho Ho Ho’ing all the way to the bank.

Affiliate Managers generally don’t have too many problems with their Affiliates as long as their Affiliate program’s rules and regulations are spelled out clearly. The exception to this rule is when an Affiliate program is registered through two or more networks, causing double Affiliate commissions. In my opinion it is not advisable for an Affiliate Program to join more than one network unless they need to extend their reach and they can handle the conflicts that arise from this action.

For most Affiliate Managers, chances of conflict are reduced greatly if you provide Affiliates with your Program rules, regulations and restrictions. In my experience the main problems that Affiliate Managers have to deal with is different forms of fraud. Whether it be an Affiliate spamming or an Affiliate bidding on restricted keywords or trademarks. The best way to handle it is to contact the Affiliate directly, give them a warning and a second chance. If they continue to operate in a false manner, then they should be dropped like a rock. Terminate the Affiliate from your Program and contact the Affiliate Network and let them know what happened. By contacting the Affiliate Network you are giving them a head’s up on the Affiliate with unsavory practices and if any other programs have the same troubles with that Affiliate, then the network can ban them permanently.

Each major Affiliate Network has something different to offer both Merchants and Affiliates. In this article I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of three of the major four Affiliate Networks: Commission Junction, LinkShare, and Share a Sale.

Commission Junction (Merchants)

Merchant Pros

• Ease of Recruiting – large number of Affiliates associated with CJ makes the recruiting process slightly easier for an Affiliate Manager.
• CJ is a trusted and well-known network.
• Strong tracking of Affiliate stats.
• Fast Account Service.
• Excellent for mid-larger companies.
• They offer Search Marketing Solutions.
• CJ will run your program for your company.

Merchant Cons

• High visibility of your program leads to a lot of Affiliates applying to your program that don’t really belong.
• Fraud is a major problem for CJ’s Merchants.
• Website downtimes happen too often, frustrating Affiliates and Merchants alike.
• Since there are so many merchants on CJ, it makes the competition stiffer within like industries.
• Monthly and overall costs.
• Datafeeds are expensive.

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