Marketing Affiliate Program

One very effective way to increase the number of visitors to your site is through the use of an affiliate program. LetMeShop gives you a very simple to use, effective, built-in marketing affiliate program management. This affiliate and advertising tracking and management program does a lot of the work for you but it will not replace good planning.

LetMeShop's affiliate / ad tracking program is multifunctional. It allows you to track sales and site registrations from any link that you control. For instance, if you are running a pay-per-click program you can customize the links to your site to include a tracking code to see how effective your pay-per-click campaign is. It also provides the basic infrastructure to set up and track affiliates including being able to publish banner, flash and java script links for the affiliates to use. It also allows your affiliates to automatically generate code that can add live product listings to their site. For the purpose of this article, however, we are going to stick to the pros and cons of having and managing an affiliate program. 

Affiliate Program Pros...

The obvious advantage of an affiliate program is the increased traffic. Traffic is the key to a successful e-commerce website...but not just any traffic. A million visits from elementary school children are of little use if you sell cars. You want highly targeted traffic...traffic from people who are likely prospects for the products you sell.

A well designed and managed affiliate program can bring you that type of traffic. 

Affiliate Program Cons...

The disadvantages of an affiliate program can easily outweigh the advantages. Below are just a couple of the biggest potential problems.

1. SPAM EMAIL - SPAM email has become the blight of the Internet. The response has been a virtual war against Spammers. Uncontrolled affiliates that use SPAM to advertise your site can result in your email server being blacklisted. Basically this means that ALL email from your website is deleted as SPAM ...even purchase and shipping notifications.
2. SPAM MARKETING - Over zealous affiliates may use spamming techniques to spread links to your site through FFA sites and link farms. This can result in your website being ousted from some search engine indexes.

Managing your affiliate program requires a great deal of time and energy. The potential harm that can be caused by your affiliates require that you maintain constant vigilance. 

Each of the affiliates in your affiliate program are, in one way or another, representing your business. Their actions reflect on you and your e-commerce site.

Managing your affiliate program...

If you decide that the pros outweigh the cons here are a few guidelines to help you manage the process.

1. Review all affiliates before approving them. Look at their websites and do a review of all sites that link to their website. Make sure they are sites that you want representing your website.
2. Carefully design and create ALL approved banners, ads, flash ads and text links for your affiliates.
3. Create a set of guidelines for your affiliates that is easy to understand. Make sure there are consequences for failing to meet the guidelines.
4. Create a weekly / bi-weekly newsletter to all of your affiliates with suggestions and special promotions that could help the affiliate create more interest and more revenue for both of you.
5. At least once a quarter do a search for links from each affiliate in the three major search engines and a create a report from your site statistics on the number of referrals from each affiliate. Use that information to create a custom email to that affiliate with the statistics and suggestions on how they might improve their performance.
6. Get rid of affiliates that are not providing a return. Every affiliate costs you some time. If they are not producing, eliminate them or help them improve.

To have an affiliate program that produces you have to invest the time in setting up and managing the program. The program will only be worth what you are willing to invest.