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. |
