You can run your affiliate marketing program yourself using a software program, design one for your own use, or join an affiliate marketing program. There are several programs you can join and which one you choose depends a lot on your personality and what you expect to get out of your affiliate manager. Whether you are looking for an affiliate marketing program to join so that you can find products and services to recommend or you want a program to run your company’s affiliate marketing program, these program managers can make or break your affiliate marketing efforts:

• Commission Junction - Some of the largest businesses online use Commission Junction. While that’s no reason to rush right over to CJ, you shouldn’t discount it either. They clearly know what they’re doing. Website: http://www.cj.com/

• ClixGalore - ClixGalore has quite a selection of affiliate programs to take advantage of. If you want to start an affiliate marketing program for your company, they can help you with that too. Website: http://www.clixgalore.com/

• LinkShare - One of the leading pay-per-action marketing programs online. Wal-Mart, Lego, and other recognized brands use LinkShare. Not a bad pick. Website: http://www.linkshare.com/

• ShareASale - A custom program that operates to bring affiliates and products together. Great program. Website: http://www.shareasale.com/

• Clickbank - Clickbank specializes in digital products: E-books, podcasts, videos, downloads, etc. One of the first affiliate programs to come online, Clickbank pretty much wrote the rules on affiliate marketing and just about every program now online owes a debt to Clickbank for paving the way. If you specialize in retailing digital products, you just might do well at Clickbank. Website: http://www.clickbank.com/

When you’re ready to start your affiliate marketing program or you are looking for a product to sell as an affiliate, try one of these programs

According to SEO Book, eBay has officially dropped CJ and ValueClick as part of their affiliate program. Giovanna over at SEO Book informed us of this tidbit:

This will start on April 1st and run with CJ for another month. With a company as big as eBay, I often wondered why they used a 3rd party platform in the first place.

It is surprising that such a large company that could have one of the most successful affiliate programs would have even chosen to go with a 3rd party affiliate network. Since they have announced those plans, they have also stated that they will be doing their own affiliate program from there on out.

According to eBay’s affiliate website:

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we’ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience. eBay will continue its partnership with ValueClick’s technology division, Mediaplex, for ad serving, tracking and other custom projects.

Apparently ValueClick isn’t getting fully left in the dust but it certainly doesn’t bode well for both networks to have such a large internet power no longer fully working with them. What does this say for the future of such affiliate sites? Smaller websites and businesses will need to utilize these platforms but will more companies go in house? Time will only tell!

Affiliate newsletter writers are always trying to stay ahead of different trends, and using dedicated RSS feeds is starting to become more popular. We are not yet at a stage that it would be feasible to put out an affiliate newsletter solely through RSS, but we are getting there and the technology is definitely worth implementing. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, it stands for Really Simply Syndication and over the last few years, it has changed the way information is published on the Internet.

These days, very little needs to be done to establish an RSS feed. All you need is a blog or CMS, RSS comes ready to roll with most of the major flavors of these programs. For an affiliate newsletter, simplicity is the order of the day, and it does not get much simpler than publishing in WordPress. The added bonus of publishing an affiliate newsletter this way is the fact that it creates an online repository for your affiliate newsletter archive. RSS allows your affiliates to receive your articles as they are published, without actually checking your website manually. This can be done through a standalone newsreader or in an email client.

I don’t think that the time is yet right to do away completely with email, but if you are going to go the RSS route, you can cut down on a lot of your email work. Rather than publish a full email newsletter, post snippets and a set of links to the online articles. You could include an explanation of how RSS works in each affiliate newsletter if you want to give your affiliates the hint.

One question that keeps being raised is, “Is affiliate site verification is necessary in affiliate network management? Another is, “How closely do I need to monitor sites in my affiliate network?” These seem to be about different topics, but are actually somewhat different issues of affiliate network management.

Should those in affiliate network management be verifying the sites of affiliates, absolutely, but it does not necessarily need to be a manual job. You do not need to physically go through every page on the potential affiliate site. It is much more important that they inform you of their intentions. How do they intend to market your product? What URLs will be associated with your business? What, if any, other affiliate programs are they involved in? There is a very good possibility that your potential affiliate does not have a website set up yet, but you at least want to be sure that they have a URL that is active. Beyond that, it is not really necessary to do too much. Affiliate network management really comes later, as you do not want to discourage new signups.

When it comes to monitoring affiliate websites, it is something that you do want to be doing a lot of. This is the part of affiliate network management that can become a bit of a chore. You want to make periodic checks of the sites that are in your affiliate network. You should be looking for any gross violations of your terms of service and or anything that can reflect badly upon your company. How you choose to enforce your terms of service is up to you, but remember that your affiliates are your representatives. If they look bad, you look bad; this is why affiliate network management is such an important responsibility and is worth every hour of your week that it eats up.

When you are running your own affiliate marketing network, a decent payment solution is definitely worth considering. As you are no doubt in the e-commerce field in some way, you will probably be aware of the different payment systems that are around. Chances are that you accept credit card payments directly and if you don’t, you almost certainly accept PayPal. If you are running your own affiliate marketing network, then you have the luxury of being able to decide how you will pay your affiliates. There are essentially three options open to you.

Bank Transfers
If you have a bank that allows Internet banking, then bank transfers can be a simple option. They are beset with a significant drawback, however, and that is the fees that are involved. While it is often possible to pay someone in the same country as you for free, if you are paying an affiliate marketing network member that lives internationally, the fees are extremely high. Not to mention the fact that bank transfers can take a great deal of time to clear. Domestic transfers are great, international transfers are not worth the trouble.

Checks
Checks are a cheaper option than bank transfers for most situations. You send your affiliate marketing network member a check which they can cash in their own time. It is simple enough for affiliate marketing network members in western countries. In some Asian countries, however, it can be a problem. People in Japan have little to no contact with checks and the bank fees involved in cashing them are steep, to the tune of about $40 per check. You can bet any amount of money that if your affiliate marketing network has members in Japan, they will not want to be getting paid by check.

PayPal
PayPal has a lot going for it when it comes to paying members of your affiliate marketing network. Fees are relatively low, payments are instant and for moderate amounts of money, it is a better option for your offshore members than a bank transfer.

If you are setting up a payment system for your affiliate marketing network, why not offer a full range of choices? Your bigger marketers might be happy with bank transfers. If they are receiving thousands of dollars, those PayPal fees add up. PayPal is great for the average marketer, and there are still some people that like checks. Being flexible with your affiliate marketing network payment system is a great way to keep morale up; everyone likes getting paid.

Nothing is more disheartening than an affiliate marketing campaign that has lost its focus. What can you do if you find that your affiliates are no longer turning over the same amount of sales as before? What can you do if you have more people leaving your program than you have signing up? These are the two questions that we are going to look at today on the Affiliate Marketing Journals.

First, let’s take a look at why some affiliate marketing campaigns flounder. There are all kinds of reasons that your affiliates might stop selling. You need to put your affiliate marketing program under a magnifying glass and attempt to locate the source of failure. Some common problems are:

• Dated inventory - If people can find a newer or better model somewhere else, they are going to be hesitant to buy yours.
• Lack of incentive - If your rates are too low, your affiliates might not want to expend too much energy marketing your products.
• Lack of product awareness - Your affiliates might be having a tough time knowing how to market your products.
• Lack of marketing experience - You might have a disproportionate number of beginners to affiliate marketing in your membership base.
• Failure to capture interest and motivate - You simply are not going out there and pushing your affiliates to sell.

The good news is that any one of these problems can be swiftly remedied. The first step is to start watching your competitors and see what they are doing. You will need to match their offers or even one up them. Make sure that your product line is up to date and if need be restock. Give your affiliate marketing network members an incentive to sell for you. Promote your product with a campaign, offer boosted rates for a period of time or sales competitions. Your affiliate newsletter can really come into play here, especially when it comes to educating your affiliate marketers about products, motivating your affiliates and sharing affiliate marketing tips. If you are unable to accomplish this with an affiliate newsletter, you might want to consider outsourcing the writing tasks. Firing up your affiliate marketing campaign is surprisingly easy when you set your mind to it; why not give it a try?

Affiliate newsletters are something that many affiliate program managers would rather do without. They can be a lot of work, finding time to produce affiliate newsletters when you are already busy with a thousand and one other things can be trying at the best of times. What makes matters worse is that it is hard to know for certain whether affiliate newsletters have any tangible benefit at all. We believe that affiliate newsletters are an integral part of the affiliate marketing experience and we are prepared to tell you why.

• Affiliate newsletters build communities. An email in someone’s inbox is a far more personal thing than a post on a blog which they may or may not read. Affiliate newsletters help people to feel a part of a team.
• Affiliate newsletters can motivate. If a person is not having much success selling your products, they might start to think that it is not worth it. Sometimes getting that regular email is what it takes to keep them in the program.
• Affiliate newsletters educate. If you want to get better results from your affiliate network, you can do so by teaching marketing techniques through your affiliate newsletters.
• Affiliate newsletters are discreet. Let’s face it, there are things that you might wish to share with your affiliates that you don’t necessarily want posted on your website. We are not talking about company secrets here as we should always assume that everything that we send will be made public, but if you want to share some statistics or sales figures, you can do so.

There are plenty of reasons why affiliate newsletters make sense. Do you need one? All affiliate networks need affiliate newsletters.

If you are doing the bulk of your writing for your affiliate marketing materials, then there are a few things that can really improve your writing technique and get you a much better response. The following advice comes courtesy of Site Pro News, but follows along similar lines to many of the recommendations that we have made right here on Affiliate Marketing Journals. Often, press releases form the core of your affiliate marketing materials, producing high quality press releases (even if they don’t actually go to journalists) will give your marketers something good to link to.

Writing Better Leads for your Affiliate Marketing Press Releases
The very first paragraph of your press release is the most important. It is what will make or break the rest of the article. Here Site Pro News gives some very good advice:

Bad lead:
The new Acme X100 is drawing raves from customers, who call it the best thing to happen to the flanging industry since the X99.

Good lead:
Philadelphia, August 15, 2007– Calling it a “milestone day for our industry”, the Acme Company unveiled the first flanger capable of creating widgets using only solar power. According to Acme President Joe Blow, the X100 is expected to find wide use in the developing world, where access to traditional electric power is unreliable.

The Five W’s are answered! Who: the Acme Company. What: the introduction of the solar-powered X100. Where: in Philadelphia (the headquarters for our fictional company). When: August 15. And, most important, Why: for use in the developing world.

You should note that the why can also be a how. All of your affiliate marketing press releases should have all of this information. The goal is to write quotable material that can be used by your affiliates and to generate interest in your products.

Writing in the Third Person
Want to know a bad example of press release writing? Take a look anywhere on this blog. Blogs are written in a conversational tone, the idea of a blog is to engage your reader as if you are speaking to them. When you do this, it is quite often done in the first person, as if it is coming from me to you. Your press release should never stray from third person. The reasons for this are given in the same article on Site Pro News:

Perhaps it’s a silly convention, but press releases really should be written as if they’re coming from an objective outsider to your company, not from within your business. Of course, the journalist knows better, but nonetheless, they expect releases to be written in the third person. In short, here’s the difference between first person and third person:

=> First person: We’ve developed the Acme X100.It’s our most advanced model ever.

=> Third person: Acme Industries has developed the X100, which a company spokesperson called its “most advanced ever”

Anyone that gets your press release, whether they are in affiliate marketing or not, will know that it is coming from your company. It is, however, convention that you write it in the third person. It seems more professional and is much easier for people to quote. The goal of these affiliate marketing press releases is to give your affiliates “text bytes”, as opposed to sound bytes, that they can use in their promotions.

There are plenty of other things that you can do to tweak your writing, but take one step at a time. If you start producing better leads and writing in the third person, you will be well on the way to writing infinitely more quotable affiliate marketing press releases.

There is a trap that many writers of affiliate newsletters are drawn into if they lack experience. Many writers that are new to newsletter writing have a tendency to overwrite and many others have a tendency to waffle, some do both which is really unpleasant. Simplicity should be embraced as a writer of affiliate newsletters. Don’t use affiliate newsletters as a forum to show off your writing technique. Your readers will be much more impressed if they can sit down with your affiliate newsletters without needing to interpret what you are saying or falling asleep. Tone it down, but don’t dumb it down; no one likes to be condescended to.

Keeping affiliate newsletters simple has another benefit. That is it encourages people that might not be very confident with their English ability to read your work. Affiliates come from all walks of life and from all different countries. If you keep it simple, they just might be able to follow what you have to say and get some benefit from the affiliate newsletters that you write each month.

The other thing that you do not want to do with affiliate newsletters is to overstate the point. If you can say something in a hundred words, say it in a hundred words. Don’t try to fill space, pictures and if you are so inclined, advertisements, can be used for that purpose. Don’t get too caught up in your word count. You want the articles in your affiliate newsletters to be just long enough to give them the punch that they need.

Recently we did a piece on the Link Connector affiliate network and mentioned an interesting alternative affiliate payout type that they offer, Pay Per Call. In case you missed the post, you can find it here.

The article was a more general look at the two Advanced Events on the Link Connector site; today we are going to look more closely at the application of the Pay Per Call affiliate payout type. First of all, a quick rehash, what is it?

A Pay Per Call event enables merchants to reward their affiliates on a per call basis each time a user, which arrived from an affiliate site, places a call to a merchant. By driving leads from the web to the phone, merchants are better able to close sales and assist customers.

It sounds simple, but there is a bit more involved in order for affiliates to be paid, which is sure to make it less popular than other types of promotion. For now, the web and phone don’t really mix, but don’t underestimate the power of technology to change things. Skype is becoming more popular and a large number of people are now making Net to Phone calls. When such technology is more widespread, it will be possible to automate the Pay per Call affiliate payout type and that could see it really take off.

There are some industries where phone calls are the be all and end all and Link Connector has recognized this fact. A conventional affiliate payout type does not really work with things like hotel reservations, airline bookings and the like. If your prices vary widely depending on dates and times as well as the desires of your customers, it can be hard to apply a straight percentage. Things are further complicated by the fact that your profit margins might change wildly from day to day or month to month. This is where pay per call really comes into its own. There are some people that need an alternative affiliate payout type and this really is a very good one for some people.