Archives for June 2007

I was out sick for this show (it was taped last week, since Lisa Picarille and myself were at LinkShare Symposium yesterday), and Sam Harrelson filled in for me.

Sam and Lisa welcomed blogging and video maverick, Jim Kukral.

Topics discussed included affiliates using video to get noticed, Jim and his video experience with RackSpace, how affiliates can get started with video, how to blog in an entertaining way, and bringing the fun back to online marketing.

More Affiliate Thing shows at GeekCast.fm.

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This is chapter 5, Affiliate Manager Guide to Creative, of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.

This chapter was originally called “Choosing Your Program Model.” I wrote this book a long time ago, and I don’t recall why I would have used that title, but I’d say it should more correctly be called something along the lines of Affiliate Manager Guide to Creative.

Anyhow, affiliate program creative can come in all shapes and sizes. As far as the types of creative to provide to your affiliates, I would suggest polling your affiliates on what they want and need.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) provides guidelines on ad units. You should consult with this list of ad sizes to be sure you are conforming to the standards.

One complaint I hear frequently from affiliates is that there are only animated banners available through an affiliate program. Be sure to make static options available, too.

In addition to providing banners and text links to your affiliates, there are a number of other creative types that may apply to your affiliate program.

If you have a line of products, you should have a data feed. The various affiliate networks have their own formats for data feeds, but there is not a universal format.

Video as affiliate creative is gaining in popularity. If you’re running an affiliate program for a brick and mortar company and have some existing commercials, you might want to make those available to affiliates.

Otherwise, you might consider investing some funds into creating some video for your affiliates. One vendor to take a look at is WebVideoZone. They enable you to create a branded video viewer and to make the video clickable with affiliate links.

As we get more progressive with smart phones as marketing vehicles, mobile affiliate creative will an area worth focusing some attention.

A few years ago, CAN-SPAM had a significant impact on the number of affiliate programs offering solo e-mail creative, but this is an area that’s bouncing back. Companies such as LashBack and UnsubCentral enable advertisers to control and safeguard the process.

You should also have policies in place for search engine optimization and affiliate bidding practices on pay per click search engines. State whether affiliates can bid on trademark terms, as well as if you permit them to use trademark terms in title and meta tags.

Content can be a great type of creative, which affiliates can use in newsletters. Generally, you will want to warn affiliates off of putting up content from an affiliate program on their site, in order to avoid duplicate content issues with the search engines.

Earlier, I mentioned the guidelines for ad units from the IAB. These apply to “traditional” sites, but won’t necessarily work for blogs. The format for some blog templates or themes is suited for ad sizes unique to blogs. Don’t wait for affiliates to ask for these odd sizes – ask them if there are sizes they want that you don’t current offer.

Lastly, let your affiliates know how to create redirect files, such as meta tag or .htaccess redirects. This is helpful for your affiliates to be able to create short versions of affiliate links for text newsletters.

Videos of other chapters of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants are available for free at http://www.affiliatemanager.net/videos.shtml.

The June 2007 issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine is all about SEO; the ins and outs and how search engine optimization can help your business.

The article, “Essential On-Page Optimization” outlines how on-page SEO techniques can make your site sufficiently presentable for the search engines to take notice.

Tips include cleaning your HTML code and properly distributing your keywords throughout the site.

Another piece, “Going Off-Page with Your SEO”, explains how to establish outside links to your site from various sources. According to the article, reciprocal links are still an option, but authority websites and social bookmarking can be even more promising methods to increase your search engine ranking.

There is also a section on the language of SEO called “Learn the SEO Lingo”. this is helpful for newbies to get a feel for terms you’ll come across when working in search engine marketing.

Check out the new issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine.

This is chapter 4, Planning Your Affiliate Program, of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.

As the old adage goes, businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.

I’ve got a number of items you should take into consideration when putting your affiliate program together.

One thing is that you have to identify who you are selling to; who are the affiliates you are trying to reach? Make it a point to know what they want and need. If you don’t know, just ask them. And if at all possible, give it to them.

How are you going to track the affiliate program? Are you going to build it yourself, buy software off the shelf, or go with an affiliate network?

How much are you going to pay your affiliates? Take a look at your margins and what your competitors are doing to ascertain what would be the appropriate commission rate.

Determine the terms for your affiliate program. Will you permit pay per click search engine bidding on trademark names? Will you be providing solo e-mail creative?

A key to your affiliate program with be the setup. As Declan Dunn, one of the forefathers of affiliate marketing, once said, “Affiliate marketing is about partnerships, not technology.”

That is important to remember, because some folks have this perception that affiliate marketing is a channel where you can just throw money down and watch it perform on auto-pilot.

It’s about people. While technology and creative are important components to an affiliate program, the central focus should be on the people and the relationships.

Some major points when setting up your affiliate program:

• Think like your customer. I would urge every affiliate manager to become an affiliate themselves (if they are not already), so they can walk in the shoes of affiliates and get a 360 degree understanding of the business. This will enable affiliate managers to look at their affiliate program from a different view and identify areas that need improvement.
• Staffing of the affiliate program is of paramount importance. You’ve got to determine if your affiliate program will be managed in-house, outsourced to an agency, or turned over to an affiliate network.
• The affiliate program model you go by will be significant. Will you focus on pay per click, pay per sale, pay per lead, or some sort of hybrid?
• If you’re going with an affiliate network, which one and why? There are a number of choices out there, so check out the landscape and take a number of them for a test drive.
• You’ll need a marketing plan to reach potential affiliates and sell them your affiliate program.
• Activate and educate. Recruiting affiliates isn’t the end of it. You should have a program in place to activate and educate the affiliates after they are in the door.

If you decide you want to outsource the management of your affiliate program, you’ll find that management services typically range anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000+ per month. Levels of service and experience will vary wildly, so be sure to get references and call them.

In order to create the optimum affiliate program, you need to know what affiliates want. Here is a list of minimum requirements:

• Provide a true partnership. If the deal is skewed in your favor, don’t expect affiliates to knock down your door. They’re already promoting you on a leap of faith, so make things as reciprocal as possible.
• Run a credible affiliate program. Affiliates want to work with affiliate programs that pay them on time and provide reliable tracking. It’s simple, do right by your affiliates or they’re going to walk.
• Have offers that sell. I’ve seen all too often that companies roll out their affiliate program in tandem with the launch of their site. Bugs, poorly planned landing pages, tracking issues converge to undermine the work of the affiliates.
• Offer a fair affiliate program. This goes back to the true partnership and beyond. Fair terms are essential.
• don’t complicate things. This won’t generally be an issue if you go with one of the major affiliate networks. But some homegrown affiliate systems are a convoluted mess.

Next up, I’ll cover why some affiliate programs fail. The reality here is that affiliate programs don’t fail, affiliate managers fail, and it happens for a number of reasons.

• Failure to activate the affiliates. Don’t settle for the 80/20 rule. That’s the rule of the lazy affiliate manager that doesn’t have an activation plan.
• No education for the affiliates. Provide your affiliates with the tools they need to succeed. Let them know your target demographic and best sellers. Create a sales guide that gives a road map to promoting your company. Give them some degree of training, no matter how informal it may be.
• Lack of support. Some make themselves available 7 days a week. I’m not saying you have to do that, but be there for business hours in a number of ways: phone, e-mail, IM, Skype, or whatever. Be there for affiliates when they need you, or risk missing out on big promotional opportunities.
• Ignoring the competition. You’ve got to know your competition, know who they are, what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and who they’re doing it with. Take a look at all aspects of their affiliate programs. Know them inside out. the better you know your competition, the better you can create a best of breed affiliate program.

There are a lot of items there for planning an affiliate program – do your best to follow all of them.

Videos of other chapters of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants are available for free.