Affiliate Program Management and Social Media Marketing

Two areas that you might not think have any relation to each other, but actually skills to excel in each very much compliment each other.

I believe that an absolutely critical quality in managing a successful affiliate program relies on social management. It’s all about staying socially engaged with the affiliates. Delivering them updates, interacting and responding to questions and issues, and also crafting the program to “catch” an affiliates interest.

Of course product, site design and conversion, merchant reputation and market are all critical as well however these aspects are also of critical important to the overall sales effort for a merchant (direct sales). These things need to be tip-top before the affiliates even get involved.

So provided, that the above features (product, site, etc.) are all above grade or unique in relation to your competitors, the advantage that can be gained through your affiliates will be achieved through the management of the program. I’ll go into exactly how a program can set you apart and be your competitive advantage in a later post, but my intent here is to discuss how important “social” is to managing and succeeding with affiliates.

You will probably be in competition with other merchants for high quality affiliates just the same as you’re in competition with those merchants for customers. By proactive social management of the affiliate program, you can set your program apart from your competitors and give yourself a significant edge.

In addition to the above mentioned overall value propositions for sales, affiliates must be engaged with your program and motivated to put in the work to drive customers. The groundwork exists, laid prior to program promotion, by setting up the terms and tracking for the program, and providing tools to use such as banners, links and a value proposition to work with.

Now the affiliate must be motivated to actually build your links into their site, and start a campaign to drive visitors to their links. This is one of the hardest parts of affiliate program management.

It’s much easier for an affiliate to click a button, “Apply to Program” than it is to get an affiliate to decide to put in the effort and put up some links. A few qualities help:

1. Staying actively engaged in the program by putting out updates, creative and program news. Affiliates love to see an actively managed program rather than one “coasting” along. It’s easy to see when a program is managed in an “after thought” kind of way.
2. Responding quickly to any affiliate inquiries.
3. Designing interesting creative or copy that affiliates will feel confident to put on their own sites.

All of these aspects, with their corresponding similar aspects in customer social media management, can help break you out from the pack. A good affiliate manager lives and breathes this stuff. It’s a natural progression for someone with affiliate program management skills to also be adept and engaged in social media marketing.

Affiliate Program Health Pt. 2

Last post I offered that an affiliate program would be a healthier overall program if the affiliate program manager was able to attract and focus on a number of smaller sale volume affiliates rather than just focus on “heavy hitter” super affiliates. It’s true that the best “bang for the buck” is to get these high volume producers into your program, there are a few reasons why it could hurt the program in the long term.
Consider-

• The super affiliate decides for some reason they no longer want to focus on or even work with your program. The reasons this could happen are too numerous to count. Perhaps they received an offer from a competitor to be exclusive (an offer the program manger is not able to match. Or perhaps they decide not to work in the merchant vertical any longer. Or perhaps they’ve decided to give up affiliate marketing and follow Lady Gaga around the world!
• The affiliate site in question gets an SEO penalty, wiping out their rankings for your vertical and all the traffic they were getting.
• The affiliate sells his or her site, and the new owner does not want to adhere to program policies.

Now, for any of the above reasons, the program big earner leave the program and no longer contributes. Program sales and stats take a walloping. Other affiliates notice (through stats like EPC dropping) the drop-off and decide to start staying away from the program to wait and see what happens.

Not a good situation, and definitely something a good experienced affiliate manager can avoid. How can this be avoided? By bringing on smaller affiliates, getting them up and active (with links up and traffic), and earning sales.

A few tools in the arsenal to accomplish this:

• Rather than just focus bonuses and higher commissions on a sales number, offer an option for a higher/bonus level commission for high quality / content created to promote your program.
• Actively recruiting non-typical affiliates in searching for blogs, forums and/or social networks for people writing about or interested in the area of the product.
• Being prepared to actively help these non-typical affiliates understand the value proposition of affiliate marketing and also step-by-step guidance in getting started.
• Being diligent to check each coupon transaction to make sure the site being credited with the sale is adhering to policies.

The extra work that’s needed to bring in these extra affiliates might only contribute an additional 20–30% of sales, but it’s still a much better situation that having 90% of sales dominated by just a couple of publishers.

The great thing is, AMWSO has been in the outsourced affiliate program management business for 10 years! And we’ve been able to build relationships with a staggering number of publishers across all the major networks and many independent affiliates. Check out the affiliate marketing services we offer if you need help growing and expanding your affiliate program, and getting it healthy and contributing value added sales to your bottom line.

Affiliate Program Health Pt. 1

The fastest method to jump starting sales for most affiliate managers relies heavily on big coupon, loyalty and search affiliates known for often time delivering 90% of sales in typical programs. In the affiliate marketing industry, a good rule of thumb states that 10% of affiliates often contribute 90% or greater sales in a given program. The 10% big earners typically include big coupon/deal sites, loyalty/cash-back sites, and expert PPC search marketers. Note that a great number of those coupon/deal sites are also expert PPC search marketers, and are driving traffic to their coupon sites via ppc ads.

This is the situation in most affiliate programs, where a heavy reliance exists on a few affiliates at the top to really drive high sales numbers. A more ideal program scenario can exist though with 50 affiliates bringing in 1 sale a piece per month rather than 2 affiliates bringing in 35 and 15 sales respectively.

To find, activate and manage 50 affiliates bringing in 1 sale a piece however, can be a long process. To be successful, affiliate managers have to be dedicated to the task and merchants must be patient for long-tail results. Granted, it’s much easier and quicker to make a noticeable impact in the short-term (but also risky) by focusing on relationships with a few affiliates rather than work and nurture 50 affiliates.

It is the path of least resistance, when merchants push for sales NOW with short-term rapid sales gains. Who can blame them? They’ve made an investment in the affiliate program and want to see sales results to judge whether or not the investment was and will be viable.

Once those top affiliates that find the shortest route to the sale keep generating high results, they are rewarded with higher commission levels. With the higher commissions, they can start bidding higher on keywords, its starts a virtuous cycle for the fast moving/quick-sale generating affiliate and soon there are just a few affiliates dominating all of the program’s affiliate channel sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to criticize these top performing affiliates. They are doing their “job” and they’re doing it well. They are professionals and are generating the best returns they can for their efforts.

It’s up to the diligent affiliate program manager to guard against getting locked into this scenario. Along with supporting those high performance / high impact affiliates, the affiliate manager must take time and effort to bring on board smaller affiliates to broaden the base and overall health of the program.

Next post I’ll discuss the main reasons why this is so critical, and how a good affiliate manager can accomplish this.

The Future of Affiliate Marketing Pt.2

The age of anonymity and privacy are done. Facebook, Google+ and social media have pretty much seen to that. It’s easy now to track down who and what a person is all about. This can be an advantage for business and for affiliates.

Now is the time for publishers to really focus on building quality content for their visitors, and building a community with their visitors. This was the TRUE purpose that affiliate marketing was developed for. Building content/community and sharing products or services with that community and giving them a means to support a publisher’s endeavor.

Consider:

• People love to get recommendations. Despite how much advertising you throw at someone, a recommendation will always trump brand / advertising / anything else.
• We support each other. If your audience believes in your content / product / service, they WILL want to support you. Look at the rabid fanbase Apple or even Google has been able to built. Go to a Nascar race and you’ll see dedicated Ford, or Chevy supporters (and customers). 

If a Publisher builds community through valuable content, people WILL support that publisher and value the publisher’s recommendations on products. However, this is doubly difficult if you are “anonymous” or generic. I believe publishers must build a personality and personal connection with their readership. Trust is critical on the web, and especially in regard to transactions. Knowing who you are allows contributes to building trust.

Google punishes outright paid links. In the past there have been services that have reached a modicum of success where a site/merchant could pay a blogger or publisher for a link or a post. How effective were these services? Well, they are mainly used for SEO and “link juice” purposes, and very rarely used for generating real sales and attention. These service seem most attractive to the decreasing sub-set of folks that still believe “page rank” is important. However most of the publishers grabbing these paid link opportunities generally had very thin content sites, and very little community built up around them.

There’s a gap here just waiting for “affiliate marketing” to step in. Publishers producing valued content that pick and chose products to promote (if they have an affiliate program). Publishers can recommend the products THEY use or they believe in to their audience. If an honest relationship has been built, and the publishers let’s his or her audience know this is how they are able to support themselves to keep producing content, distrust, pettiness and hesitation over clicking a referral link evaporates.

Bam! Win-win! So, how can we get there? It’ll take commitment to the program from the merchant and dedication and a “long tail view” from the affiliate program manager. We at AMWSO take very seriously this commitment to quality Affiliate Program Management.

In a couple days I’ll discuss more why we as an industry sometimes have trouble reaching this ideal.

The Future for Affiliate Marketing Pt.1

We are approaching the beginning of a huge potential disruption in performance/affiliate marketing. Now, as with any disruption, there is tremendous opportunity for those that recognize the shift early, and are able to react and adapt to it.

Consider that more and more people are shifting to online/digital means to get their content, be it video content, audio content (podcasts), or written content. Advertising spending and revenue is growing for digital, but perhaps not as fast as it could be growing.

People dislike advertising. There are far too many scams and also we've persisted far too long with low quality, spammy "shotgun" style tactics. If you read the pundits, you'll frequently see discussions about how to make advertising more interesting and engaging. Sounds challenging and sounds like we have to come up with really creative and innovate ways now to get ads in front of people. Bologne! It really doesn't need to be very challenging or difficult.

The future problem faced by display advertisers, and we're just seeing hints of it now, are services like Flipboard, Instapaper, Adblock, etc., stripping out advertising from sites. People are able to easily consume content without enduring a bombardement from online ads. The display advertising world hasn't really started panicking about this yet, since these anti-ad/pro-reader services haven't hit a point of wide adoption....but these services are growing.

Of course, this doesn't even touch the point that people just don't like to click banner advertising. Here's a nice info-graphic illustrating this phenomena: http://www.getelastic.com/why-web-users-don%e2%80%99t-click-on-banner-ads-infographic/

This provides a platinum opportunity for performance marketing to provide salvation for publishers. How? Discussion, engagement, embedding. Well, I'll leave you to consider it, and I'll offer details on my ideas in a couple days.