SpeedieAffiliates

If you are serious about running an affiliate marketing campaign, it is a great idea to build them a dedicated centre for your affiliates, here are a few tools that we think you should consider adding your resource.  Don’t forget you can also add in product news and articles and general advice for promoting your products.

Banner Links

Yes you heard, Banners! You may think they are dead, lots of people do to but there are still some great performing banners out there.

You need to offer a range of different banner sizes. Remember, every site will use different sized banners to run advertisements so you need to provide choice.

To get an idea of what banners you should look at building then the best place to look is the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) who have a useful guide of “Official” Sizes.

Most sites will be able to use one of multiple of these sizes. I would suggest using a minimum of 6 different sizes and for the right affiliate be prepared to build bespoke banners of a different size.

Also look to refresh banners of offer new creative on a regular basis. Maybe use the Promotional Calendar to give you ideas of new themed creative – Valentine’s Day, Christmas, you know the drill.

Text Links

The second important thing to include is Text links. But don’t just give affiliates a link that says:

My Product

Yes, standard text links are good and should be given but try to incorporate them within a paragraph of text, you know advertorials…. This gives the link context and allows the affiliate to use sprinkled across the site.

For the text section of the site you will also need to offer Classified Ad text (Yes, there are guys out there still earning good money), Product reviews (Get these written for you if need be), Ezine Ads and Solo Ads. There are lots of different methods here to produce lots of text.

I would recommend

• three or four Advertorial type text links (up to 25 words of text)
• three Classified Ad texts ( 20 words, 30 words and 50 words)
• Product Reviews (One per Product or on a selection of products)
• three Ezine Ads ( 20 words, 30 words and 50 words)
• one Solo Ad

So as you can see, providing your affiliates with this amount of sales material will set you apart from others in your space and in fact most affiliate programmes.

If you really want to kick some butt, you could try some of these ideas:

Offline Marketing Materials

Produce Flyers, Posters, Postcards and Door Drops using VistaPrint and including your affiliates ID. Give Affiliates access to the Templates. Failing that, you can allow users to fill in fields in Adobe Acrobat files thus creating customised posters or postcards.

Scripts

Give you affiliates code for popups, popunders, squeeze pages, opt-in forms. Some of the tools available to buy cost $80. Give this technology to your affiliates for free and they will love you for it!

Giveaways

Can you offer your affiliates free samples with their affiliate ID’s in them? Sample chapters of your e-book product or a free report. If you have a PDF product you can easily do this is VIRALPDF.

Even if you don’t you can create a PDF report on your service or industry and allow your affiliates to add there links and then give it away.

Audio Downloads

Why not offer the ability for affiliates to download and offer an audio interview in exchange for an email address so affiliates can start building an opt-in mailing list.

Video Downloads

The same can be used for Video Downloads. Maybe you can run a video on how to do a particular thing with your product or something quirky and viral.

Autoresponder Courses

Do you have an email course for new signups? What about a beginners guide to …..? If so, turn it into a 5 or 7 days course, offer it to affiliates in a text format so they can upload it to their autoresponder service and give it away to their site visitors.

Provide a whole range of graphics and copy with this service so affiliates can promote it in its own right!

If they don’t have an autoresponder service, recommend to them the one that you use (Just make sure you do use it!) You can offer it to them directly or via your own affiliate link.

Other Content Options

Why not try using testimonials, articles, independently written reviews? If you think about it, there can be a huge amount of content you can let your affiliates have to promote your products.

Pay Per Click Advertising

If you are happy for affiliates to run Pay-Per-Click campaigns, give them Keyword lists you know best fit your product. And even for some Super Affiliates you may want to build a separate landing page or even give them separate landing pages on different URLs so they can compete with each other.

Link Exchange Networks

If you trade links yourself for your site why not give away a monthly spreadsheet to your affiliates with all the text link exchanges you carried out. This advice could help boost their Search Engine rankings.

There are lots of things to do to build an affiliate marketing centre. It is worth spending the time to build it properly and keep it up to date. Constantly refresh creative. Having a great affiliate tool area will drive more sales to you and in the long run build your affiliate numbers.

In closing, I would paraphrase Jerry MacGuire “Help them to help you!” Give them as much creative and guidance as they can handle and then some more….

Build it as a seperate website

It may be advantageous to run your affiliate marketing centre on a separate URL. This means you can promote the affiliate programme in its own right.

If you are currently running an affiliate programme, there are several things that you need to include in order for affiliates to sell your products.

Imagine for a minute you have just signed up as an affiliate to a new programme that you want to promote on your site. Imagine if you logged in to the affiliate management centre and found a single text link to use.

You’d be pretty disappointed to say the least.

Now imagine, you logged in a found a huge resource centre.

You have banners, buttons, text, copy, articles, guides, and much, much more….

Who do you think wants to help you make more money?

Yes you got it, you’d want to go with the affiliate programme that gives you EVERYTHING you need and more.

This could be a good way to attract affiliates. You could even steal affiliates from your competitors if you have an affiliate marketing centre worth a damn. You could even steal some Super Affiliates who need a variety of different tools to market your products.

Remember, treat affiliates like members of your own sales team – you wouldn’t expect them to go out and sell your products without the proper sales tools and training.

So why do it with affiliates!

There are many reasons why a company chooses to run affiliate marketing campaigns. Here are a few of my favourites:

It is a Low Cost Option
Affiliate marketing is relatively low cost to start if you already have e-commerce store.  Some shopping carts will already have affiliate programmes built in or as upgrades. This software will then manage all sales tracking, affiliate signups and much, much more….

Low Risk Option
Depending on what your commission payment model is, affiliate marketing removes the risk in paid offline advertising as you are only paying the affiliate when the sales has been made.

Acquire a Large Multi-Skilled Sales Force
If you join a large affiliate network to use as your affiliate management programme, you will have access to a ready made army of affiliates. Some of these networks have over 100,000 affiliates. Imagine  just 10% of these all working to promote your products.

I have mentioned that these people are also skilled. Affiliate marketers are some of the smartest people around and know all the best ways to promote a product online. They will also have diverse skills, some will have huge Lists to mail offers too, others will be Pay-Per-Click (PPC) experts, others SEO experts. An affiliate programme allows you to tap into that market.

Free Branding Exercise
Having your banners, text links, product logos etc all over these affiliate sites, you are getting your business some great free exposure and this should not be overlooked. While you should benefit from this, do not exploit your affiliates. Do not add direct urls or phone numbers to your banners or landing pages. This will cause lots of affiliates to leave your programme and also damage your brand name in the industry.

Expansion
Your affiliate programme can truly turn your local business into an international sales machine very quickly. Larger affiliate networks have affiliates around the world and not just English speaking parts. An affiliate programme will also be able to soft launch your product into Asia, or into Europe.

As you can see, there are many really good reasons to look into affiliate marketing as part of your online marketing mix

Adding affiliate deals to your main website can be something of a turn off for some clients. After all, the idea is to drive and sell their own product and services – not someone elses. Yet that said, there are several places you can utilise affiliate deals to add addition revenue streams to your bottom line without impacting on your core business.

Here are a couple of ideas:

Email Lists
If you have a client list, you can add affiliate offers on your client newsletters or send out specific mailings to them offering affiliate deals.

Exit Window
You may feel that there are a number of pages on your site where you lose traffic. This traffic stops by only to leave again. By delivering an exit window or pop under when they leave, you could be adding a last chance effort to monetise that traffic by offering an affiliate offer. Just make sure it is relevant to the page they left. Don’t like popunders – well these visitors are leaving anyways and going somewhere else, might as well help them along and monetise them if you can.

Microsites
You could find that there is an affiliate deal that is worth investing some time into but again, you feel that you don’t want it to water down the main focus of your own website. Building simple microsites or using hosted services such as Squidoo / Hubpages / Wetpaint / Weebly could be an easy way to promote affiliate offers.

As you can see there are a number of ways of exploiting and using Affiliate deals without impactig on your core business, yet can add a second or even multiple revenue stream. If you are looking for affiliate deals to promote in the finance or insurance space, then drop us a line.

Are you new to affiliate marketing?  Not sure what it is and how it can benefit you and your business?  We have created a brief slideshow to give you a, hopefully, easy to use  overview of affiliate marketing and how it can help your business.

Overview:

Affiliate Marketing – What is it?
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Size of Affiliate Marketing Opportunity
Types of Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing Management
Affiliate Marketing Strategy
Affiliate Program Setup Options
In-House Affiliate Program Management – advantages
In-House Affiliate Program Management – disadvantages
Outsourced Affiliate Program Management – advantages
Outsourced Affiliate Program Management – disadvantages
How we can help?
Contact Us

I write to introduce the www.CaravanQuoter.co.uk affiliate scheme, which we are very pleased to announce is now live!

Owners of an insurance related  or caravan website can earn £0.25p for each unique visitor that clicks through to us! So your earnings are not dependent upon us generating sales, a simple click and you get paid!

Payment runs are the 3rd of each month and you can chose to be paid by Paypal or by cheque. Payment threshold is £25.00.

(If you are VAT registered please make sure you supply your VAT number to us.)

So sign up at the link below, pick up your banner and add it to your site to begin earning money now.

http://www.tracknisem.co.uk/idevaffiliate/signup.php

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Online marketing specialists Speedie Consultants have launched a new, dedicated website aimed at helping insurance and finance companies leverage the power of affiliate marketing as part of their online marketing strategy.

Jason Hulott, Director of Speedie Consulting says: “Affiliate marketing has always been a part of larger companies’ online strategies. With barriers of entry coming down, the small to mid-sized businesses can now take advantage of the low risk methods of attracting business that affiliate marketing can offer.”

Our new site (SpeedieAffiliates) aims to help both companies and affiliates connect with each other in order to refer business and build a profitable online income. The site is aimed at companies looking to start a new programme; companies that have a programme that may have stalled; and also affiliates that can be sat on lots of potential business without a home for it.

Hulott concludes: “We have been in this game a long time at each level. Since the beginning of the year, we have been approached more and more by companies that require a low risk solution to increase their own business without a costly dependence on search engine marketing.”

The site currently has a range of tools and guides to help maximise programmes. There is also a broadcast tool to allow programme managers to spread the word about the programmes.

For more information about SpeedieAffiliates visit: http://www.speedieaffiliates.com

For more information about Speedie Consultants please visit: http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk