Your Top Five Biggest Affiliate Program

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 avenues
of income, such as the new Google AdSense program.

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