Affiliate Managers: Your Top Five Biggest Affiliate Program Mistakes

In this article I will show affiliate managers the mistakes they should avoid if they want to build a successful affiliate program.

I felt compelled to write this article after seeing the same mistakes made by most of the hundreds of affiliate programs I have joined since I started promoting them in 1997. I have made a nice living from affiliate programs over the years, so I know a thing or two about them. I would dearly love to make more money with affiliate programs, but affiliate managers don’t make it easy for us affiliates. So hopefully this article will do a bit for the cause.

Here are my top five biggest affiliate program mistakes that I find today:

1. Competing With Your Affiliates.

This is by far the worst mistake made by companies that offer affiliate programs. I often see companies for products I am trying to promote compete with me in the search engine rankings and pay per click advertising programs.

Why companies invest money and resources in competing with their affiliates is beyond me. By competing with me, you’re trying to put me out of business. Have marketing directors ever thought of it in that way? Because if you succeed, you will no longer have an affiliate network to speak of.

The money would be better spent on supporting your affiliate network by creating a better product, providing more referral statistics, higher commission payouts, faster support, and more, fresh promotional creatives.

So if you’re an affiliate manager reading this article, tell your affiliate director at your next meeting to STOP competing with your affiliates, and support them instead!

2. Not Providing Your Affiliates With Useful, Real-Time Statistics.

All marketers rely on statistics to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Yet most affiliate programs only provide their affiliates with basic statistics such as number of visitors sent, number of sales, and commission earned. These statistics aren’t much help to affiliates who want to measure the effectiveness of a particular pay per click campaign.

Affiliate managers - please consider providing these useful statistics so that I can market your products effectively:

• Archive of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly statistics and by date range.
• Commission earned, broken down by product or service, and how the customer was referred to the site.
• Daily email update of all affiliate statistics.
• Instant email notification of a new affiliate.
• Instant email notification of a new free trial sign up.
• Instant email notification of a new sale and all relevant statistics. I love getting new sales notification emails!
• Number of free trial downloads or subscriptions.
• Number of returns and all relevant statistics.
• Affiliate links with trackable IDs, so that affiliates can tell exactly which site, or ad campaign is sending the referrals and sales.
• Unique clicks - which refers to the unique number of visitors referred - in addition to raw clicks - which refers to the total number of click throughs.
• A list of top performing affiliate statistics, so that affiliates can compare how they’re doing and which areas they can improve on.
• Include the most important statistics at the top of the email and subject line. There’s nothing worse than having to scroll down to see what the referral purchased or how much commission I have made.

The following only apply if the affiliate program offers more than one level of commissions.

• Commission earned as a result of referrals sent by 2nd-tier affiliates.
• Commission earned, broken down by commission level.
• Number of 2nd-tier affiliates referred.

I’ve been promoting products and services via affiliate programs since 1997 and I have yet to come across an affiliate program that provides anything close to these statistics.

3. Not Compensating Your Affiliates Fairly For Their Hard Work.

The #1 incentive for any affiliate is cold hard cash. Money sells! So tell your marketing director to fire the search engine optimization firm and advertising department, and redirect the resources to paying your affiliates a higher commission rate.

Another thing I hate is seeing my commissions go down the drain because someone I had referred signs up to the affiliate program and purchases the product via their affiliate link. It almost feels like I’m being robbed blind! I highly recommend affiliate managers deter this practice by making it harder for affiliates to pocket the commission from their own purchases, at least the initial one.

4. Not Providing Enough Fresh Promotional Creatives.

Most affiliate managers seem to give their promotional creatives little thought. All they offer is a handful of 468×60 banners, buttons and text links. What happens is that affiliates end up using the same ads on hundreds, even thousands of web sites.

Affiliate managers - what about these promotional creatives?

• Articles and tips with embedded affiliate links
• Classified ads
• Customer testimonials
• Direct email ads
• Email signatures
• Newsletter ads
• pay per click ads
• Pop-up/under ads
• Product photographs
• Product reviews
• Product screenshots
• Rich-media ads
• Skyscrapers
• Staff interviews

Listen up! Different ads perform better on different sites. And ads generally have a life span of a carton of milk. So offer your affiliates a greater variety of ads, more often.

5. Not Providing Fast, Quality Support For Your Affiliates.

This is the 21st century. Don’t make your affiliates wait longer for an email reply than it takes to send a letter by snail-mail post.

Don’t outsource your affiliate support work. If you have to, then at least train your support staff so that they understand the ins and outs of your products and affiliate program. I’m often dumbfounded by affiliate support staff who can’t give me answers to simple questions.

Well there you have it - my five biggest complaints about affiliate programs today. I hope affiliate managers take note and take strides to better support their affiliates, because if you don’t, affiliates will find other ways to make money on their site.

Affiliate marketers - if you agree with what I’ve said, send this article to your affiliate program managers!

About The Author: Michael Wong is the editor of GoDefy.com - the world’s first online marketing comparison shopping search engine and Mike’s Marketing Tools. Michael is also the author of the leading Search Engine Optimization Guide and numerous marketing tips. Publishing Rights: You may republish this article in your web site, newsletter, or ebook, on the condition that you agree to leave the article, author’s signature and photograph, and all links completely intact. Full instructions on how to copy and upload my photo to your server.

[tags]affiliate marketing, affiliate program managers, affiliate programs, commission, michael wong, affiliate managers, marketing campaign, affiliates[/tags]

Nope, I haven’t died.  I’m currently on temporary duty here at Fort Dix New Jersey for a 6 week long Combat Skills Training before my deployment to Iraq.  I’ll be back by mid Decemeber before I head out to the AOR.  Take care!

[tags]combat skills training[/tags]

Only a few months ago we were all promoting this widget like crazy to our fellow bloggers hoping to get tons of referral bloggers before our competition gobbled them up.  Today, the pulse of BlogRush is faint at best these on the NET.  With exceptionally low CTR’s of the social marketing widget reported by high traffic blogs such as problogger.com, doshdosh.com, etc. and general negative feedback from the marketing community this may be the death of BlogRush as we know it.

You’ll notice I’ve also removed the BlogRush widget from my page.  During the 1.5 months I had it posted, it produced less than a .01 CTR.  You don’t have to be a mathematician to know that blows. 

I placed the widget about halfway down my blog just below the fold…probably like 99% of the rest of BlogRusher’s because revenue ads will always trump widgets.  In this location your CTR will be pretty darn low already and your blog posts, when shown on other relevant blogs, will be competing with five (5) other blog posts thereby reducing your CTR by another 20%. 

Sorry, but if you’ve placed the widget at the top of your blog you’re really just bleeding traffic and revenue.

We’d all like a fancy shmancy widget to magically bring us loads of laser targeted, high quality traffic but in "the real world" widgets are more form/fun then function.  BlogRush, SmartLinks and even MyBlogLog widgets are nothing more than ads that do not benefit the blogger.

[tags]Blogrush, SmartLinks, MyBlogLog, widgets, social marketing, traffic, bloggers[/tags]

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites.  With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

This is slick…So what’s the hold up Facebook?  I bet you buckle like a belt soon under the pressure.  =)

[tags] Orkut, MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, OpenSocial, Facebook, Google, social API, social applications[/tags]

• 95% of brands say affiliate marketing is ‘very cost-effective’ or ‘quite cost effective’
• An average of 18 per cent of the online marketing budget is spent in the channel
• Travel companies using affiliate marketing most effectively

The affiliate marketing report is jam packed with some very helpful marketing numbers and figures.  Take a quick minute and check out  the E-consultancy snippet for more information at:

http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/364296/affiliate-marketing-delivers-the-most-cost–effective-customer-acquisition.html. 

The full results of the research will be released at ad:tech where buy.at will have copies of the sample report at stand number 471.

The research report is also available to E-consultancy subscribers, or on a pay-per-view basis, at:

http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/affiliate-marketing-merchants-report-2007/

[tags]affiliate marketing, ad:tech, e-consultancy, affiliate marketing, online marketing, customer acquisition, cost effective[/tags]

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

I’ve been a big fan of SEO elite for quite some time now and use it almost exclusively across my network of sites for search engine optimization.  However, I’m very interested in trying out SEO Spyglass 2.

SEO Spyglass 2, much like SEO Elite, allows you to analyze your competitors success by seeing who links to them, how they’re doing it and most importantly how those links are affecting the search engine rankings.  It also allows you to identify competitors from a keyword research too.

Price?  A meager $87.00.  Compare that to SEO Elites pricetag of $167.00 and it looks like a pretty good deal to me.  It becomes an even better deal when you take into consideration SEO Spyglass 2 also enables you to:

• Receive And Organize Emails From Your Link Partners
• Generate Link Pages That Are Fully Customizable
• Display The Status Of A Link Partner And Manage Statuses
• Update Multiple Link Partners’ Properties At Once
• View Websites And Generated Links Pages With A Built-In Browser
• Find And Autocomple Link Submission Forms (LinkMachine.net, LinksManager.com, AutoLinksPro.com, LinkMetro.com, etc) 
• Customize Your Workspace
• Make Your Links Page Available Online via FTP

Ohh yeah, did I mention there is a FREE version of SEO Spyglass 2 as well?!  I’ll be testing SEO SpyGlass 2 out in the immediate future and will post my feedback on its performance.  

In addition, be on the lookout for another slick little tool that looks like it will rock the online marketing community on 25 Jul 07.  You can find out more about this SECRET WEAPON on Heather Paulsons blog.  VERY COOL STUFF HERE FOLKS for all of you die hard PPC marketers.

Take care and God Bless!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]seo elite, seo spyglass 2, seo, search engine rankings, search engine optimization, keyword research, link partners, generated link pages, ppc marketers, ppc, online marketing, secret weapon, marketers, search engine, rankings[/tags]

Did I miss something?  Was there a recent "upgrade" to MyBlogLog?

I didn’t realize they now automatically add you to communities THEY feel you frequent often.  It’s kind of funny because they just added me to THEIR community.  I thought that was a little odd since I’ve probably ony visited their blog twice since I joined. 

Hmmm…are you community spamming me MyBlogLog?  I got my eye on you……

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]mybloglog[/tags]

Affiliate marketing is all about seperating yourself from the pack and dominating a niche.  Static web sites can still pull in good revenue but rich media sites are far more aesthetically pleasing to your potential customers..just don’t overdo it.

Check out what these web technologies can do for your business and brainstorm some ideas on how you can uniquely implement them into your web real estate.

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]web technologies, affiliate marketer, programming, design, online business, rich media, web real estate, apollo, codeigniter, dojo toolkit, expression web, firebug, flash, flex 2.0, ruby on rails, swfIR, wordpress[/tags]

Back in April Google made a massive online wave when they acquired the DoubleClick advertising network.  This was a well placed boot in the backside of Microsoft…and Microsoft is still rubbing their behind and rightfully so.

With the aquisition of DoubleClick for a meager $3.1 billion Google has secured a huge claim in the banner advertising market.  No longer is Google purely the reigning champ in contextual advertising. 

Microsofts legal counsel, Brad Smith, claims that the combined Google/DoubleClick networks will handle more than 80% of all online advertising.  So, who wants to play monopoly!    

LOL.  In my opinion though there is still a vast untapped market for Microsoft to regain some market ground.  With millions of online publishers selling as much ad space as they possibly can the market is still wide open.  Cheer up Microsoft!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]Google, Microsoft, DoubleClick, advertising, advertising network, banner advertising, contextual advertising, online advertising, untapped market, online publishers[/tags]

Hi Stephen,

I need to warn you up front about 2 things:

1 - This subject matter is very controversial.

2 - This course has already been banned from
Clickbank. It might been get banned from its
current location.

If you’re interested in this, you need to
grab it while it’s still available.
It seems like some people don’t want you
to have this because - frankly - they’re
scared of the competition.

So it’s probably going to be banned from
everywhere pretty quickly.

You are a disgrace and I’m getting off your list.  Gimme a break.  I expect more professionalism and a basic understanding of business ethics from you in order to do business with you.

Am I alone here? 

Is anyone else tired of all the junk floating down the pipe?  

Maybe I’ll just post a list of all the lame marketers that sent this promo out.

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags] sal the site stealer[/tags]