Affiliate Management 101 |

Affiliate Management 101

Affiliate Management Beginner, Affiliate Marketing Training October 4th, 2008

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Good old affiliate promotion, the lifeblood of many businesses: underestimated or ignored by many more. In these next few posts, I want to take you on a journey through the inner workings of a well-oiled affiliate program. We’ll talk about everything from the importance of running such a system, through to getting affiliates promoting when you want them to, and some stats for you to have a look at that will squash any doubt that this is one of the most profitable aspects of online business, and I’ll make sure to get at least one interactive quiz in there to make things more interesting read, and to test your knowledge.

Even if you don’t have an affiliate program set up for your own business yet, give it a shot. Skim over it at least. It’s not hard to understand or set up once you have the facts, not to mention the mighty profit potential it puts at your disposal.

So, grab a cup of your favorite drink, sink into your most comfortable chair, and let’s get started.

Overview of Affiliate Management

● To give you up front knowledge about how to effectively and profitably maintain your business’ affiliate system before the first affiliate even lands on your doorstep.

● To demonstrate how powerful affiliate marketing is, and why no marketer should be without it.

● To look at some figures of product sales and profit both with and without affiliate programs functioning. How effective is this? You decide.

● To open your mind when it comes to setting your commissions and understand the concept of reaping resources being far more powerful than any small percentage you can keep from your affiliates.

● To discuss the inner workings of affiliate sales through commission level setting for your business, taking into account the money making power you’re going to build for yourself.

● To show you how to overcome the problem of affiliates not promoting your products for you.

Effective Affiliate Program Management

I wrote this for one reason, and one reason only, and that’s to show you how to maintain both your affiliate system, the affiliates contained within it, the offers you send them, and how to get the most out of all of the above. Also, I’ll be talking to you about what not do to with them, why they’re so important and some of the reasons that affiliates and affiliate systems are often underestimated or seen in a negative light from the perspective of program owners looking solely at their short to medium term profit.

One thing I will say is that It’s important to acquire and consume this knowledge at the earliest stage possible for reasons we’ll discuss shortly. Even it isn’t your top priority at this particular moment, you’ll be able to see just how powerful affiliate marketing is and why you should start planning before even launching your products.

What You Won’t Find Here

What you won’t find here is any technical talk on how to install scripts, which scripts to use, coding, how to make them look pretty or anything like that, because if you haven’t already guessed, we’re a purely practical marketing theory based guide (proven and tested theory that is), and not a techy guide, or a dressed up marketing guide that overlaps into these categories to make the manual look bigger.

Setting the Scene - Displaying the Power

Lets take it from the top. First up, how do you define an affiliate program, or affiliate system?

A system in which an owner or licensee of a product allows people outside of his or her own company to promote for them for a percentage of the commissions.

Pretty much everyone online uses this resource to their advantage, because lets face it, it’s far easier for 100 people to sell 1000 units of a product than it is to have one person sell a thousand units of a product. I’m sure it’s possible, but we don’t have all the time in the world, so affiliates are generally the answer, and should make up a large amount of your business’ revenue if you’re promoting your own products.

In case you’re kind of underestimating the situation, don’t have any affiliate system in place, or haven’t decided to fully utilize this type of system within your business, let me put a scene to you to make this all crystal clear. Here’s the situation…

You’re a business owner, you’ve just launched your shiny new site, which just happens to sell the same product as Mrs. X here. Both yours and Mrs. X’s product is priced at $500. The difference is you’ve built yourself up a relatively modest 150 affiliates, and Mrs. X is doing all the promotion alone.

Now imagine you each make ten sales in the first month through personal promotion. You both make $5000. Great, but when your affiliates come in, it’s easy to see how this figure can double. Now of course not all of your affiliates are going to be heavy hitters, great promoters or even make any sales at all, ever. But lets say just 10% of your affiliates, just 15 of them, make a measly three sales each in that same month at 60% commissions, which I’ll set higher than average right now for a reason I’ll reveal in a moment.

Pulling out my handy calculator, I can tell you that through those three sales from a small percentage of your affiliates, you’ve just made an extra $9000, bringing your total to $14000 for that month. You’re laughing, and poor Mrs. X. She was one of the many marketers out there that didn’t take this type of affiliate marketing seriously, or didn’t see any real profit in it. Meanwhile, you’ve just pocketed in a month what it takes most of my friends in regular jobs to earn in four or five months, often longer. Cool huh?

WHY DON’T YOU SET ONE UP?? We’ll discuss this and more tomorrow…