Advertising with a Local Connection - Affiliate Tips

If given the option, most people would prefer to make a purchase from a business they believe has a local connection to the community. People shop online for convenience, for the ability to research and view many different options, and for lower prices and deals.

With the plethora of online advertising choices businesses have today, there’s no reason an online business in Petaluma, California can’t create a local connection to Flatbush, North Carolina. Let’s consider some ideas on how to build that connection.

Suppose you are reading the news, and you come across a story where a particular city, let’s say Austin, Tx. is having a big festival, or won a big award, or perhaps a local team won a sports championship. (It can be something big like the Superbowl, or it can be small like a Double-A Minor League Division win, or a University NCAA title in 2nd tier sport). With ad targeting on Google or Bing (and even Facebook now allows you to specify location), you can title your ad to directly address that even in that locality.

“Tea for AA Eastern Champs”

Now these aren’t keywords for the ad, this is the actual ad heading text. Your keywords would be your typical keywords you use in a campaign, and the ad would geo-targeted to the specific area. Set-up a quick landing page on your site with the heading text directed to your target audience. Point that ad at your landing page, and voila! You have built an instant local connection. You should definitely be able to catch the eye of anyone searching for Tea from that local area, and your local hook should bring them in.

The cost would be nominal, as you’re targeting a very specific audience, but conversions will be high (provided your keyword text is still targeting interested buyers). Anyone interested in Tea and from that locale would have that extra incentive tugging at them of, “hey, this company is recognizing my town!”

Consider all the huge number of local newspapers, dailies and classified ads that are available out there for another local tactic. Typically the cost to put an add in a local paper is relatively low, but the response could have a definite impact on your business. (By the way, if the affiliate program offers pay-per-call, this is a tremendous way to promote). Even without pay per call, just make a very easy to remember URL, or use a Q-Code that they can easily scan with their mobile phone. Another option could be to offer an email address. The message being: send us an email, and we’ll send you back a coupon and offer details. This tactic is also easy to do from a mobile phone, and you’ll be able to capture their email address and send them the direct offer with your affiliate link.

Local, geo-targeted advertising is a powerful tool, if you take the time and effort to localize the ad. Don’t be overwhelmed with the idea you have to localize hundreds of ads. Experiment, try a few different locations on different days. Learn for yourself locations respond best to what kind of offers. But consider the impact on your business if you’re able to get 5–10% increase in sales coming from one specific area just because you put in a little bit of time and effort in creating a local headline and tweaked a landing page with a local message.

To check out some other additional affiliate tips and help feel free to friends us on the AMWSO Facebook page, or circle us on Google+ for affiliate marketing.

Outsourced Affiliate Program Management vs.Digital Marketing Generalists

Often times companies dump setting up and running an affiliate program into the lap of their other digital marketing staff. Regardless if that staff members expertise lies with SEO, or paid search or CPM ad-buying, they are left with the task of creating an effective affiliate program.

In this article I discuss hiring an outsourced affiliate program manager as an option, and the pros and cons associated with outsourced affiliate program management.

Response to a Forbes Piece of Marketing Tactics That Are "Free"

I caught this article an couple days ago in Forbes {http://www.forbes.com/sites/kateharrison/2012/07/17/5-marketing-tactics-that-cost-almost-nothing/} mentioning affiliate marketing and also Pinterest (I just wrote a post discussing affiliate marketing strategies and tactics for Pinterest. The article touches on affiliate marketing as a marketing tactic that costs almost nothing to pursue. I felt it necessary to respond in a post of my own on the idea that starting and managing a successful affiliate program is free and easy.

Please take a look at my full post with more realistic thoughts on the potential costs associated with starting an affiliate program.

Performance Marketing and Travel in 2012

Two articles, one about the Thailand Tourism Department spending money to promote Thailand for weddings and honeymoons, medical tourism and golfing, the other a Forrester Research report for Rakutan that had a section about the potential in the travel space for affilaites, spurred me to write my own thoughts on Travel and Affiliates in 2012.

There is a ton of opportunity for an affiliate, despite the big guys spending gobs of money, if you can move on certain niches. I discuss my throught here: Travel and Performance Marketing in 2012.

Merchant Affiliate Programs, Affiliate Program Managers and FTC Endorsement Compliance

A couple of years ago there was a huge firestorm of activity and buzz within the affiliate industry about renewed FTC guidelines regarding compliance for disclosing endorsements. In a nutshell, the FTC stated that anyone who endorsed a product/service through media (be in TV, radio, print, or online), and received some kind of compensation for that endorsement should disclose the relationship the endorser has with the product seller (or merchant).

This article seeks to give a quick review of if and when a disclosure statement is needed by affiliates, and what the potential impact is for a merchant who doesn't require their affiliates to disclose: Affiliate Program Managers, FTC Endorsement Compliance and Merchant Affiliate Programs

Coupon Strategies - Types of Discounts and Coupons for your Affiliate Program

In my previous post on Why to Use Coupons With Your Affiliate Program we looked at the reasons coupons could be a win-win-win strategy for merchants, affiliates and shoppers. Now let’s take a look at discount and coupon tactics to employ when creating and distributing coupons.

When coming up with coupons, it’s important to keep in mind the tactical goal you wish to achieve. Let’s take a look at a few possible goals.

This is an excerpt. To read the full article please visit: Affiliate Program Management Coupon Strategies - Types of Discounts and Coupons for your Affiliate Program

The Affiliate Program Welcome Letter

A critical component to affiliate program success will be getting your affiliates off the ground and running quickly after joining the program. I don’t have stats to back this up, but intuition tells me that affiliates who join and get links up right away are much more likely to become active earners down the road. Whereas, those affiliates that join, and put the program on the back-burner, well that’s just where the program might stay for the foreseeable future.

The best tool that an affiliate manager has in their arsenal for getting an affiliate up and running is the affiliate program welcome letter. So often a manager wastes this great opportunity with a simple letter providing only basic information and a few pleasantries.

The following components need to be in the welcome letter to truly make it an effective tool in the arsenal:

• Review the value proposition of the merchant.
• Links and banners with the affiliates (if possible) code.
• Full contact information for the affiliate manager.
• Highlighted links to other key tools and information.
• Review of critical information in the affiliate agreement.

First let’s talk about the value proposition for the merchant. I like to devote a few paragraphs in the letter to talk about how to position the merchant’s products. What are people using the products for, who’s needs are they serving. This can be valuable information for an affiliate in deciding if they want to write some extra content around the links and also perhaps position your links near other complimentary products on their affiliate site.

Next, include the actual links / banners that the affiliate will use. Now of course the affiliate (once accepted into the program) can log into the affiliate interface and get banners and text links. However, why not simply make it as easy as possible and hand them the links right there in the letter. No need to log in, no reason to “put it off till later”, the links are right there for them to copy and paste onto their html/page editor or their ad manager.

Some affiliate managers don’t like to give full contact information (like phone number) for fear of being flooded with inquiries. I relish the opportunity to have contact with my affiliates. Affiliates are bombarded with hundreds of program offers weekly, and they have a multitude of choices for programs to promote. They’ve chosen your program, and they are highly motivated in reaching out to the manager. Don’t let that opportunity slide by to build a relationship with the affiliate. Solid business has always been built on relationships.

If your program utilizes any other key tools, such as a downloadable keyword list, article content, data feed or is listed on data feed aggregation sites, make sure to link to each of those tools and to highlight that link.

Last but not least, just to cover all the basics, I find it useful to cover important points in the affiliate agreement. Much of an affiliate agreement is boilerplate and standard, but the critical parts such as:

• PPC Rules
• Trademark Usage
• Email Restrictions

These are the points that probably differ from program to program, and are important for the affiliate to be fully aware of. Don’t assume an affiliate agreement is always read fully. Keep in mind that sticking in the whole affiliate agreement will probably ensure the newsletter does not get read. However perhaps just covering the key points in concise bullets will help.

A thorough and concise affiliate program welcome letter can be one of the strongest “arrows” in your affiliate program management quiver. We make sure to feature this important task in the launch service of our affiliate program management services for merchants.

An Affiliate Program Can Be A Competitive Advantage

A well-crafted and managed affiliate program will spread your brand to people who WILL be shopping for your product (or type of product) and are not familiar with your company. One of the largest categories of affiliate sites include coupon and deal sites. It’s an important strategic decision for an merchant to decide whether or not to offer coupons. Let’s address a couple of pro-coupon site points that can lead to a competitive advantage.

A potential customer surveying a coupon site for a deal on product XYZ could see your offering side by side with a competitor and decide to visit your site and perhaps check out additional products offered. Affiliates often times help close the sale with a dithering or indecisive customers through a coupon or deal.

Search affiliates (relying on paid search ads) also comprise a huge category of successful and popular affiliates. Again, this is a strategic decision a merchant must make, whether or not to allow search affiliates in the program (and if allowed what restrictions should be included in the affiliate program terms).

Allowing search affiliates can create a competitive advantage for your business. Who would refuse to have multiple points of contact with a customer and brand reinforcement for that customer? Searching for a product or information, and seeing your brand on several search listings (paid and natural), or on several different websites visited simply reinforces the “acceptance” and popularity or your offering.

A couple other affiliate categories include cash-back affiliates and review / content sites. Both of these sites can help expose your offerings to customers that are already shopping for your product and specifically looking for deals. Perhaps they’ve already joined a cash-back site from a previous purchase, so now this cash-back site is their first access point when shopping for something new.

Review / content sites are the holy grail of affiliate sites. Probably with the least on any “con” side for these affiliates, they generally don’t contribute the top sales in a program, but they are absolutely stellar for spreading the word about your brand and just promoting general content and “discussion” about your products and brand. Both of which I believe do help improve search results. After all if Google “sees” your business mentioned frequently, that should be adding the the importance of your search page ranking.

It’s important to understand the pros and cons for different affiliates, and fully understand how each can add to your competitive advantage. Working with an experienced affiliate manager that understands and aligns themselves with your strategic objectives is crucial. Consider getting in touch with an outsourced affiliate program management company when considering your options.

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.

Art of Tea Video Presentation

Dave has put together a great presentation of the Art of Tea affiliate program in a video, check it out here :

Affiliate Marketing and Appealing to Different World Views

Everything a person looks at, experiences or examines gets filtered through a specific world view. Seth Godin, in his book All Marketers are Liars emphasizes this issue (among other things) as a key point in crafting stories or messages that will appeal to potential customers. One of the key themes in the book, is that merchants should not try and appeal to a multitude of world views, or else they risk their message becoming too diluted, unfocused and generic.

Affiliate marketing can be a valuable tool in expanding a merchants reach to different types of customers with different world views. Just on the surface, consider that couponers know their visitors are hunting for discounts and deals, forums know their customers have in-depth interest in particular niches', and content/blog sites will of course appeal to various niche interests.  Recruiting different types of quality affiliates to an affiliate program allows a merchant to touch these potential customers, through the affiliate partners that they might not never have been able to reach when focusing on their core customer's world view.

For example, consider a trendy woman's fashion merchant. Logic would dictate they this merchant would craft their message to their core customer segment, woman interested in trendy fashions. Now, suppose we have a webmaster who runs a blog with a community of married men who are computer enthusiasts (aka nerds) (note: I would definitely be a member of this community). Right before Christmas time, these men are desperate and searching for advice and tips on gifts to buy their wives/significant others. The blog owner signs up for the woman's trendy fashion affiliate program, and offers this merchant up to his community. Just like that, the trendy woman's fashion site gets exposed to a group of men who wouldn't ordinarily be visiting this site, and who are looking for things to purchase.

Among the advantages of CPA marketing; measurable and clear ROI, it's important not to neglect the huge advantage of expanding the merchant reach to customers not ordinarily exposed to a merchant. Good affiliate managers will be on the look out for these types of affiliates and will be actively recruiting them into a program.

Affiliate Marketing: Outsourcing (OPMs) is More Cost Effective Than Hiring In-House

According to Shawn Collin's Affstat Report the average salary for an in-house manager is $50,000 a year and up. Now, factor in health and other benefits, desk space, infrastructure, those costs rise significantly. To support an in-house affiliate manager, a business must plan to spend at least $70,000 - $90,000 in overhead. If the in-house manager decides to leave the company, all of the knowledge and the relationship history usually walks out the door with the manager.

Additionally, it may be difficult to find an experienced affiliate manager within a specific geographical area. Some larger organizations leave the affiliate program in the care of a junior level marketing staffer. This can be a mistake with lasting consequences. A well run affiliate program can be responsible for 10-20% or more of overall company revenue. Likewise, with the advantages of added revenue and reach, there are dangers in not carefully managing an affiliate program. Brand messages may be damaged and revenue from other channels pillaged via malware and parasiteware.

Most OPM firms charge either a flat fee plus revenue share, or at least a monthly minimum revenue share. Generally the monthly minimum of flat fee is between $2000-$5000 a month.

Now also consider the other benefits an OPM brings: experience, relationships, knowledge, and stability. An OPM has established working relationships with many if not all of the top performing affiliates. They've built a history of performance, and generally an affiliate will know the style of any certain OPM such as does the OPM have a stance against parasiteware, or are they accessible?

In relation to the experience benefits, the cost savings strongly favor an advantage to outsourcing an affiliate program. Focus on the business, do what you do best, and leave the success and growth of a well-managed experience program to experts who are focused on growing your business.

2007 AMWSO Year in Review

2007 was a year of innovation and evolution for AMWSO, and especially toward the end of the year, the door was opened for some exciting developments and opportunities in 2008.

In 2007 we launched over 10 new programs, including Baghaus, Ecampus, Sonoma Diet, Jillian Michaels, along with several more. We had great success with these launches along with the affiliates who joined up and started promoting them. We helped Ecampus have their best year ever during the back to school season, and we helped Baghaus spread their brand and become a premier handbag focused merchant. Diet season is starting right now, and we have primed our diet and fitness programs for affiliate to reap the whirlwind in January and February.

We had tremendous success in regard to innovations using affiliate videos with the Gaiam program. Our client Gaiam won the prestigious 2007 LinkShare Golden Link "Innovative Merchant Of The Year" Award due to affiliate trackable video files that we helped introduce.

We also met with some challenges in 2007. One particular program that we launched for an air filtration and water filtration system proved very challenging. We learned that having an outstanding product was not enough to make a program successful. Brand marketing support is needed along with an affiliate program, so that not only the public learns about a product, but the affiliates become more familiar as well. All of the cogs connect when building a successful affiliate program, including paid search initiatives, natural search and media buying.

In recognition of this, we introduced new services to offer our merchant partners in 2007.  Services including PPC Management, Social Media Marketing and SEO Services. We're especially excited about our Social Media Marketing service, as there are few companies out there that can do this as well and as effectively as AMWSO. When compared to CPM banner advertising, Social Media marketing can achieve volumes more "bang for the buck." This effectiveness should not only be measured in terms of raw traffic numbers, but targeted and engaged traffic.

Toward the end of the year, AMWSO announced it's affiliation with Syntryx. Syntyx is a powerful tool allowing AMWSO to delve deeper into the web to find great affiliate partners and to help our merchant partners better understand where their traffic comes from and use this as a competitive advantage. I'll be writing much more about Syntryx in a blog entry in January.

The core team at AMWSO remained unchanged throughout the year, and we're excited and motivated going into 2008. We have new ideas that we'll be working on to grow our partners businesses, and we'll be bringing on some great new partners in the coming months.  Definitely stay tuned to this blog for some great stuff in 2008!

Commission Junction Damaging the Future of Affiliate Marketing!

If you're an affiliate marketer or read affiliate blogs, then you must have heard that Spybot Search and Destroy is now immunizing it's users against CJ links. Any Spybot user using this immunization feature will be lead to an error page after clicking a CJ link. No chance for a sale to be made for the affiliate, no affiliate cookie is ever set.

CPA-Affiliates wrote a blog article breaking this story and Shoemoney also wrote a nice follow-up. In the comments many people call on CJ to "fight against the Spybot program" or address / correct this issue with Spybot. I suggest CJ would do much better to address the root reason why these spyware protection programs block CJ/affiliate cookies.

Anyone in the industry knows that CJ permits too many shady practice affiliates to operate on their network. Much of an affiliate manager's daily activity with a program on CJ revolves around weeding out bad affiliates. Bad affiliates that are using shady practices such as browser hijacking through toolbars, cookie stuffing, forced redirects and forced clicks. Lip-service is paid to the CJ terms of service written against these practices, but true enforcement is passive and minimal at best. The short-term benefit from the added commission revenue just seems too tempting on a broad network-wide scale. However, short-term shady profit acquisition will damage the long-term health of the affiliate industry. Affiliate marketing's reputation will further slip toward the perception of shady/bad business.

Affiliate networks need to follow the Shareasale example, and clean up their act. Networks are making a few extra dollars now, but what happens when Google / Yahoo / Firefox / Spybot etc., start using this justification to block affiliate links and cookies on a much wider scale? What happens when merchants start taking a hard look at the bottom line and realize that shady affiliates are cannibalizing other sales channels and start bailing out of their programs in droves? Poor perceptions can quickly outweigh the perception of value found from hard-working, true value adding affiliates.

Clean up your act CJ, and gain further leverage with Spybot and other spyware programs to stop blocking affiliate links. Even a small step such as providing full click source data to merchants to view and audit could carry a long way toward cleaning things up.

If you have a program on CJ that is infested with bad affiliates and poor performance / ROI, consider seeking the services of an outsourced affiliate program manager before terminating your program.

OPM Firms as a stabilizing force..

The thought of "Corporate Stability via OPM Firms" had never crossed my mind, but the other day one of the AMWSO team came to me and said: "My contact at the clients end is leaving for a new job, he introduced me to his replacement last night, 4th one in three years."

And that's when it struck me: I looked over all our corporate clients and sure enough, every one has had at least three changes in staff and management in the time we've worked with them! So that's three chances for:

• Knowledge to be lost.
• Down-time for training up new staff.
• Lost continuity with affiliates.
• Lost contacts and relationships.
  
• And more I am sure.
  

I never really saw OPMs as a "stability" factor in large firms before, but looking at their high turn over rate of staff, it becomes obvious that many firms rely on their outsourced partners (of any kind really) for stability, just as much as they do for their professional skills. An OPM firm can provide continuity in the area of expertise, like for example, AMWSO does for the affiliate channel. It’s a very solid value-add factor which I hadn’t really thought about until now.