The platform allows affiliates to send traffic to the various Towergate businesses including Insurance4Carhire, Your Insurance and AssureUK in return for payment of commission on business underwritten.

The platform allows affiliates to view their activity in real time, something that up and until now has not been available across multiple Towergate businesses.

Simon Vella, Towergate eInsurance Director said “The single platform offered by Towergateaffiliates.com allows us to attract affiliates to a range of offers and simply bolt on new offers as they become web enabled. The system allows us to track in a single place, all the affiliate activity carried out on behalf.

“It also allows us to strictly control creative and the way in which we are promoted which is vital to make sure our programme works within the compliance framework.”

Currently the programme is offering four innovative insurance products that affiliates can earn commission on, with many more specialist insurance products available soon:

• Business insurance via Your Insurance Group
• SME and niche business insurance via Assure UK
• Car hire excess insurance via Insurance4carhire.com
• Excess Protection via Insure4 Excess

Towergate Affiliates is provided and managed by Speedie Consultants Limited. Affiliates signing up to the platform will have a direct relationship with Towergate.

The site also has a range of useful tips and articles to help affiliates attract and drive more business.

For more information about Towergate Affiliates – please visit www.towergateaffiliates.com

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.

These plugins allow you to:

• provide access to affiliates for real time tracking of sales or leads;
• allow you to easily manage and approve affiliates from anywhere;
• pay your affiliates via Paypal;

So they are both ideal for running an affiliate programme without the large signup costs to go with a network. That said you still have to do or outsource the affiliate recruitment but at least you can prove it works before taking the plunge on a big scale.

Plugin #1 Affiliate Platform Plugin

This plugin has a great number of features but the main ones that we like is that it can be a two tier programme. The plugin works with lots of other plugins such as shopping carts and membership site plugins. You can also integrate this plugin to run a pay per lead campaign – which is great for finance and insurance sites.

Find out more here

Plugin #2 Magic Affiliate Plugin

This is a newer finding and looks just as good. In fact, it does have the edge if you wanted to start running a multi level affiliate programme as this pays down to 5 levels. It is easy to integrate with other wordpress plugins such as Ecommerce Cart and Membership plugins. it can also integrate with Getresponse and Aweber autoresponders.

Find out more here

Either of these two plugins will work fantastically well if you are running a wordpress site and both offer a good low cost solution to allow most site owners start to look at affiliate marketing more seriously.

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.

You can set up all of your advertising as affiliates, so for example if you advertised on a given website, you can set them up as an affiliate and give them that code to send traffic to your site. In this way, you can easily see what online traffic is working and what isn’t.

You can also use affiliate links within your emails and autoresponders so you can set each email up as an affiliate or an autoresponder series as an affiliate and track the results.

In addition to this, you can set up affiliates for your PPC campaigns and any social media that you do.

In this way you can track every thing you do online from one screen.

You can then compare all conversions against each other to find the most profitable activity for your business. While trying out different ad types is great, it is only with consistent tracking and conversion data will you be able to figure out what is working and what isn’t.

So not only can you add and manage affiliates, a great way to increase your business, but you can also use the same platform to track all of your own online activity.

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.

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!

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

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.

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?
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