SpeedieAffiliates

If you are looking at your affiliate programme performance and thinking it could be better, then this article is for you. Here are a few tips to help you boost performance:

1. Consistent Communication
When was the last time you spoke to affiliates and told them about new product details or features. Make it a point to contact them once a month – keep them up to date as they are your virtual sales force.

2. Creative Update
When was the last time you updated your promotional materials to make sure they were up to date. Just check to make sure they are still relevant. Also make sure you have all the relevant sizes and types for your affiliates. This includes HTML Email and possibly even content.

3. Are you recruiting?
Are you actively recruiting affiliates? Do you look for them online and have a link or page on your affiliate programme on your website? Using Google you can find possible affiliate recruits quickly, and contact them via email or phone.

4. Are you contactable?
Do you tell affiliates you are contactable by phone and email? Sharing these details can go a long way in building rapport with affiliates.

5. Revise Commissions
Could you reward volume players? – It might be time to revise your commission structure.

Whatever way you operate your affiliate programme, be it in-house or via an affiliate network, there are things an affiliate manager car do to boost the effectiveness of your programme. These 5 tips can make a big difference in your programmes performance.

With the recent news of another affiliate network going to administration, it is sometimes hard for companies to see the benefits of affiliate marketing if the networks are struggling.

That said, affiliate marketing is still a growing industry and can hugely effect your online profits in a very good way.   One advantage of using an affiliate network is that you a get access to a large number of affiliates from day one, but as we are seeing, that advantage can turn into a nightmare if the network collapses as you have no way backup plan to take the affiliates anywhere else or even bring them direct without reinvesting in an standalone in house program that could take some time to develop.

One option we are suggesting to clients is that they look at a direct platform in conjunction with a network option, as then if the worse does happen, you have a backup plan so you can port affiliates fairly quickly to a new system.  It is also a good way to attract the larger affiliates who we are finding prefer to work directly if they can get access to real time stats.

If you would like to have a conversation about our service and how we can help give you that added “insurance” policy in the event of a network collapse then please get in touch. The costs to setup a direct network are coming down all the time.

There is a great affiliate survey run out of the US that has just released the 2010 version. The survey received feedback from over 1,000 affiliates. While you can read and download the full report here: www.affstat.com.

I thought it would be good idea to share some of the interesting highlights.

Over 50% of Affiliates maintain an email optin list – Do you offer email creative?

44% of affiliates use PPC to promote affiliate offers? – Do you have a PPC affiliate strategy?

90% of affiliates promote more than one affiliate programme – Are you keeping in touch with your affiliates regularly so they do not forget about you?

36% of affiliates want to hear from their affiliate manager once a week. – Are you?

18% find your programme advertised in an affiliate directory and 18% use Google.  – Are you actively marketing your affiliate programme?

64% of affiliates want to communicate with their affiliate managers via email – Do you have a dedicated email for affiliates?

Nearly 70% of affiliates use Social networks to promote affiliate offers – Do you have any social marketing messages affiliates can use?

Just these few survey questions give affiliate managers a whole heap of ideas to improve their affiliate programme. Don’t just take my word for it though, download the full report and start looking at ways to get more out of your affiliate programme.

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!

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