Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. (WIKIPEDIA)
Before you attempt to start your own affiliate program consider these questions.. 1. How will you choose and negotiate network set up fees with the more the 350 plus US based affiliate networks?… 2. How will you recruit affiliates to your program?….3. How will you monitor thousands of affiliates and communicate and enforce your brand guidelines?…. 4. How will you determine the proper monetization and compensation levels for your affiliates?
Affiliate Program Monetization Structures
CPA (Cost per acquisition)
CPS (Cost per sale)
PPC (Pay per call)
PPD (Pay per download)
PPI (Pay per install)
CPC or PPC (Cost per click or Pay per click)
CPL (Cost per lead)
CPM (Cost per impression)
Affiliate program management is vital to sustaining active affiliates as well as recruiting new affiliates into an affiliate program. Affiliate managers should be trained in recruiting and building affiliate partnerships as well as being able to get affiliate partners in their varying marketing styles active within the affiliate program, the constant growth of an affiliate program happens over time. Some affiliate programs take more then 4 to 6 months to scale to a performance level where they are profitable, other affiliate programs can take off right away depending on the popularity of the product and brand as well as the merchants vertical. Choosing the right affiliate management company and choosing the right affiliate network can make a BIG impact in how quickly this Pareto scale occurs within your affiliate program.
Some of the KPI’S (Key performance indicators) that can help you determine how on “track” your affiliate program is concerning achieving the right growth scale can be derived by creating strategies that help you to accumulate or to complete specific goal sets. These key performance indicators can help you forecast potential growth for your affiliate program as well as to assist in determining how much more affiliate recruiting and affiliate activation needs to occur to achieve your KPI’s.
Affiliate Program Key Performance Indicators
CTR – Click through rate
CONV – Conversion rate
CPM – Number of impressions
ROAS – Return on advertising spend
Recruiting – Numerical goals
Activity - Number of active affiliates
EPC – earnings per click
Pro active affiliate management companies such as PaulsonManagementGroup.com have a team of people who work on affiliate program accounts to work towards the goals set for the affiliate programs under our care. Many strategic factors go into pre- planning an affiliate program including the strategies a merchant allows affiliates to use to market the brand. Some of the planning considerations before launching an affiliate program are as follows.
PRE Affiliate Launch Planning
Product Promotion, Placement and Price
Identify Competitors and prepare SWOTT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and trends)
Identify your strengths – weaknesses – opportunities (Media, offer, coupons, product pricing, affiliate bonuses, network strength)
Develop Management team or hire OPM
Develop Network relationship(s) and tracking (Pixel vs., Batch)
Create 5 Week Action Plan (Media lifecycle, communications, strategies, recruitment, incentive plan)
Define and acquire tools and tool sets (Brand monitoring, affiliate monitoring, affiliate recruiting)
Develop 3 month KPI Goal Seats: (Recruiting goals; CTR, CONV, Active, #Recruited, EPC, IMP, ROAS)
Launch – and manage – gather data – make adjustments
Ways Affiliates Will Market Your Brand
It is important to consider the TIME that goes into the proper management and monitoring of your affiliates to ensure your brand is protected and your affiliate terms of agreements (Rules) are enforced in all of the online and offline marketing channels that affiliates will be marketing your brand in. Some of the channels that affiliates will market your brand or product in include;
* Paid search engine’s
* Textual and contextual placement
* Writing and developing blog’s and blog content
* Building landing pages that gain natural search exposure
* Sending emails to their opt in lists
* Purchasing remnant ad buys on major networks
* Displaying your banners, affiliate videos, and text links on their websites or content properties
* Developing social media presences and gaining social media traffic
* Advertising your coupons or discounts
* Working with your datafeed to develop storefronts
* There are also offline affiliates who might potentially take you to mass media, newspapers, radio ads, or promote your with Pay per call or other means.
Types of Affiliate Marketers
* Coupon Affiliates
* Paid Search Affiliates
* Domainers
* Natural Search Affiliates
* Niche Affiliates
* Blog Affiliates
* Email Affiliates
* Video Affiliates
* Data feed Affiliates
* Webmaster Affiliates
* Media Buying Affiliates
* International affiliates
PaulsonManagementGroup.com can place 3-4 team members on your account to help you launch and manage your affiliate program no matter what vertical your brand resides within. We use an online client services management application so you can see the PMG team actively manage and recruit your affiliates on a daily basis. Our client services section will host a program calendar of events as well as all of our reports, and files. You can engage all PMG team members through our client services section and can post messages as well as receive updates via RSS as they happen! Check out our team member profiles and contact PMG if you are interested in launching a successful affiliate program!
Interested in seeing the affiliate programs the PMG team currently manages? Click here!
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