Archives for September 2006

Q: There are many companies out there with offers – how do I know which merchants with affiliate programs are best for my readers, as well as the top money making opportunities? Are they telling me everything I need to know?

A: One easy method is to identify the top sites in your vertical that run affiliate offers and study which affiliate programs they are promoting.

This is certainly not a scientific approach, but it’s a quick way to get things started.

I’d advise against the lazy route for the long term, but it’s ok while you’re getting your feet wet. During this time, identify the relevant affiliate programs for your audience.

Try looking through affiliate program directories and searching on the search engines for keywords tied to affiliate programs in your area of concentration.

For instance, if your focus is real estate, search for “real estate affiliate program.”

After you’ve compiled a list of affiliate programs that could be good for you, do some research on each one. Check out things like how long the company has been around, and search on affiliate forums for information on the affiliate programs. Any complaints or praise?

As far as whether the affiliate programs are telling you everything you need to know, you have to be armed with the questions that matter to extract that information from the affiliate programs.

Don’t expect them to spoon feed it to you. Ask them their EPC, conversion rate, average order size, and target demographic. Also, find out if their site is more popular during certain times.

All of this should get you started in the right direction. Even then, keep an eye on the performance of the offers you are running. Test, test, and test some more until you find what works best for you.

Q: What is the best way to manage 300 affiliate relationships in one interface? Some are not part of CJ and ClickBank and others.

A: I’d say if you have 300 affiliate relationships that are making you money, you ought to focus on the marketing side of things and hire somebody to crunch the numbers for you and put them in a pretty format.

But assuming only a portion of the 300 affiliate programs are actually bringing in any commissions to you, the first step should be to conduct an audit and dump any affiliate programs that are not panning out.

As far as aggregating your affiliate data in one place, I think your best bet may be to manually input your data into Excel to slice and dice it, which is obviously rather laborious.

Otherwise, consider having somebody build a custom application to suit your needs. Personally, I often go to Rent a Coder to get things created on the cheap.

Years ago, this would have been a no brainer. I would have said to go with AffTrack. They enabled affiliates to track all data from affiliate programs, whether in the networks or independent affiliate programs.

Unfortunately, they are no longer able to pull in LinkShare data. If that’s not an issue for you, check them out.

I also came across a new solution recently called Affmeter. The Affmeter site for this software boasts that it “covers the following major affiliate networks: Commission Junction, Reporting.net, Performics, Affiliate Window, Affiliate Future, Tradedoubler, Webgains, Buy.at, Google Adsense, PaidonResults and Linkshare.”

I don’t see anything on there about whether you can track indie programs.

Also, I don’t really know anything about this product, the people behind it, etc. So if you are going to try it out, I’d suggest doing a little homework to be sure it’s safe. After all, you’ll be sharing your affiliate network login information.

And check your affiliate network agreements to be sure use of such a program doesn’t violate their terms and conditions. The last thing you want is to have your affiliate account suspended over the use of some third party product that’s meant to help you manage that account.

Q: What is the best service to use to promote a new affiliate program?

A: The best thing is to design a multi-faceted marketing campaign for your affiliate program that is unique to your company.

I would suggest submitting your affiliate program to the top 5-10 listings that come up when you search for affiliate program directory on Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Don’t bother with the sites that offer to submit your affiliate program to 100+ affiliate program directories. There are maybe a half dozen that are updated, maintained and can actually drive any affiliates to you – those “services” are not worth your cash.

Instead, try testing a variety of keywords in the PPC search engines to promote your affiliate program.

Also, make an effort to attend affiliate marketing conferences to meet affiliates face to face.

In my biased opinion, nothing meets persona interactions with affiliates at events.

Of course, you should endeavor to optimize your affiliate program and make it the best in your category to best sell it.

And when you’re communicating with affiliates you should be sure to know the numbers for your affiliate program and company, such as average order size, conversion rate and aggregate EPC for your affiliates.

Q: Just what is Affiliate Marketing?

A: I’ve been answering questions via the Ask Shawn Collins site for a couple years now, and I am surprised it’s taken this long for somebody to ask this question.

As far as a sort of sterile definition, affiliate marketing is an arrangement between an affiliate (sometimes known as a publisher) and merchant (sometimes known as an advertiser) where the merchant offers the affiliate a commission fee structure for referring clicks, leads or sales to the merchant.

In the beginning, affiliates were often smaller content Web sites. They would put up a banner and cross their fingers.

The affiliate marketing space has greatly matured from the state of the industry in the late 1990’s. While there are still lots of affiliates that send traffic to merchants from small content sites, affiliates come in all sizes and shapes these days.

No longer is affiliate marketing just for one person operations – there are many multi-million dollar operations where affiliate marketing is a core revenue generator.

In addition to driving traffic from banners, affiliates use a variety of techniques these days, including but not limited to data feeds, e-mail lists, SEO, rewards programs, message boards, PPC search engines, blogs, domain parking pages and coupon directories.

An example of affiliate marketing in action can be seen at affiliatemanager.net/book.shtml – this is part of the site for my book on affiliate marketing, “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.”

The text link and book cover image on that page link to Amazon where the book can be purchased. So if somebody clicks one of my links and buys the book, I get a percentage of that sale.

Check out Affilipedia for more on affiliate marketing. This is a wiki I created for the affiliate marketing industry with the goal of defining all of the terms, issues, etc. in the industry.