Control all the aspects of your Affiliate Program!
(Merchants point of view.)

Your approach and your knowledge can make or break your affiliate program. Get armed with these new insights and you will have better control and improved affiliate program.

Consider this GOLDEN approach and make your program a win-win one for you, for your affiliates, your customers and everybody involved.

a) Define your best performing affiliates:

You need to understand…….

Who is your affiliate’s target audience?

What value addition your affiliate is doing?

What is their focus?

What is their business model?

Identify measurable attributes to define your affiliates and make it very clear what type of affiliates can add best value to your program.

b) Increase their number:

Affiliate network definitely do a great job of recruiting affiliates but one should take a proactive approach and depending on the ideal profile that you have identified you should reach and educate affiliates about your offers to your affiliates, why they should start promoting you? There are many affiliates who would be very interested in your offer. Various avenues you can use to reach affiliates are affiliate forums, Alexa’s related sites, Google’s related links and so on.

c) Increase affiliates participation:

On an average not more than 10 to 15% of the affiliates are active (giving atleast one click daily) in an affiliate program. This does not mean others are not interested in the program, some might not have got the time, insufficient number of promotional tools or some might be waiting just for that extra push (Incentive). You need to be in constant touch with them, keep following up with them; keep them informed about your company’s development. Slowly things will start looking up.

d) Optimize affiliates efforts to get better click through rate:

Analyze Analyze and Analyze….

Analyze your affiliate's site,

Look for the location of your links; try to think if there is a better location where your links should be placed, home page is not always the best location, theme of the page is more important.

Analyze the theme of the page.

Analyze the theme of the banner and the links that have been placed.

Analyze the harmony between the affiliates page and the landing page, which this page leads to.

All should complement each other, if you think there could be a better fit then suggest it to the affiliate.

e) Incorporate calls to all section of the market:

If you have clearly defined your target market then you will not have any difficulty in implementing this step. Identify how, the segment of your target market, perceives your product and based on this understanding incorporate an attractive call to that segment of the market. Remember promise only, what you can fulfill.

f) Improve conversion:

No other incentive or promotion can motivate an affiliates like good conversion can do, so keep an extra eye on this. A website is like a funnel which is broad at the top and narrow at the bottom similarly your home page should have a broad appeal and subsequent pages should lead to the goal you want to achieve. Conversion is a big topic and needs separate session.

Affiliate Manager's Perspective

Affiliate Manager's perspective is the biggest factor in exploring full potential of an Affiliate Program. Therefore it becomes mandatory for an Affiliate Manager to broaden their perspective. Here are a few potential parameters which will help you refresh your concepts.

Product Features :
It is the feature of the product which will determine whom it is meant for and how it is to be used and from Affiliate Managers point of view this will determine when the product should come in front of the eyes of potential customer. This will also help in identifying the state of mind of a potential customer when he is most ready to consider the product.

Brand Image & Popularity :
Brand image & popularity is the level of knowledge a customer possess about the product as well as the organization as a whole. This will help an Affiliate Manager in preparing banners and other media products for their affiliates.

Target Market:
This is the first parameter that an Affiliate Manager should consider when he enters from conceptualization to implementation phase. This will give a face or a name to your target market and will help in understanding your customer better. Also you will be able to estimate the potential and possible areas you want to reach through Affiliate Marketing.

Consumer Behaviour :
Understanding consumer behaviour is another key to success because it is this behaviour which will tell an Affiliate Manager what a potential customer would search on the web when he is in a ready to purchase state of mind and now when you know where to place the product it becomes easy to reach the potential customers.

Related Products :
Identification of related products would help in cross selling Related products are the products which are satisfying similar emotions what your product is meant for, and probably you may get a total new niche where there is no competition for your product.

Tracking Competition :
It is very necessary to understand the competition, their offers, commission levels, target market, etc. Once you understand this you can design offers and commission levels accordingly.