Affiliate Marketing Programs

Affiliate marketing programs can add a substantial amount of traffic to your site. They can also be a huge headache. 

Over the years we have created a number of custom and packaged affiliate programs for our customers. The most basic of these programs measured nothing more than the number of visitors. Others tracked visits, registrations, initial sales or sales over time. The technology is not overly difficult to implement. Management, however, can be a nightmare.

Basically an affiliate program is a set of incentives and rewards you offer to web sites, businesses or individuals to send traffic to your site or generate orders from your site. The incentives can be in goods, services or cold, hard cash.

The good news is that Affiliate Programs can work well. The bad news is that you have very little control over what your affiliates do to drive traffic to your site. For instance, with today's attitude about SPAM email, many hosting companies will, with no recourse, cancel your hosting account for using SPAM marketing. It will not matter to them that it was your Affiliate that did the spamming. It's still your site that gets busted.

Control of your Affiliates actions and processes for creating visitors is absolutely necessary. The success of your Affiliate Marketing Program will be based on the controls and guidelines you have in place. The technology you use can help track their actions but the primary controls will be in the way you set up your affiliate marketing program.

When you begin to develop your Affiliate Program you need to understand that you are offering value (services, products, or money) to entice people to find ways of producing traffic (or sales) for your site. In psychological terms "The behavior you reward will increase." If your affiliates are rewarded for "visitors" they will find ways to increase the number of visitors to your site. They will generally not be concerned with generating qualified visitors. Nor will they generally be concerned with how the visitors are generated. What they will be concerned with is the compensation they receive for the work they do.

This means that you have to be very careful about the directions (Affiliate Rules) you provide. Following are a few things you should consider.

• Visitor Generation: Visitors generated by affiliates generally come from either a web page or an email newsletter. If you allow visitors generated from email newsletters you open yourself to potential SPAM problems. There is no way to control where the newsletter email list comes from so you could find your web site listed by SPAM COP or one of the other blacklist companies. If you are not already aware, blacklists are lists of sites that have been accused of spamming. Many ISPs and companies do not allow incoming email from web sites listed on these blacklists. Your best bet is to not allow any email marketing for your site. 
• Any program where the exchange of money is involved has legal ramifications. Make sure that you cover the legal bases thoroughly.
• Control the Links: Your business image is important. Don't leave it in the hands of your Affiliates. You should provide your affiliates with all of the necessary logos, banners, artwork, and copy to use when creating links to your site. If your affiliate site is a newsletter or information site you may want to give them some freedom to create articles about your site, services or products. Otherwise, keep as much control as possible.
• Follow up on complaints: If you receive a complaint about an Affiliate follow up immediately. Follow up with the Affiliate and the person doing the complaining.
• You will need a training program and a good support program. You will be surprised at the number of affiliates that will have problems setting up your links.
• You will need an easy to maintain accounting system to track sales or link commissions. To reduce your effort your system will need a self-reporting process that will allow the affiliate to track their commissions.
• You should have a weekly or monthly newsletter which includes the commission report and proven techniques for helping your affiliates generate higher commissions.
• You will need to figure out a way to screen applicants and have an easy way to weed out troublesome, poor performing or potentially embarrassing affiliates. These processes need to be clearly stated in your affiliate contract.

Creating and maintaining an Affiliate Program is a time consuming process. Before you go into it you need to understand the limitations, potential rewards and risks. You also need to be willing to put in the time and effort necessary to effectively manage the program.

An effectively run Affiliate Program can be a great benefit to your business if it is well designed and maintained.

Once you have made the decision to invest in an affiliate program we can provide technology customized to fit your needs exactly. We can also provide ongoing technical support to you and your affiliates.