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?

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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.

Advertising is not just for making website sales, it can be a great way to boost your affiliate recruiting effort. If your website is not getting the traffic that you need, then it can be very difficult to promote your affiliate program from within. In fact one of the biggest reasons why businesses build affiliate networks to begin with is to gain the extra traffic that comes from a large mobile sales force. You cannot build an affiliate network if people are not getting to your site, so why not use advertising for affiliate recruiting?

Targeted advertising will bring people to any part of your website that you want them to visit. You will of course have to pay a little for the privilege of their visit, but you have to say that someone is more likely to join an affiliate site based through a click through than they are going to purchase a product. Joining an affiliate website costs nothing. It does not take much to sell people on something that can make them money. If you are offering a no-risk proposition, there will be takers. The trick is to get your affiliate recruiting ads to hit the right targets.

Do you sell your product or sell your affiliate program? Let’s face it, a good portion of website affiliates probably do not really care a great deal about the products or services they are selling. They sell because there is profit in it. Your affiliate recruiting ads should reflect the cold, hard facts of your affiliate program and anything that sets your program apart from the thousands of similar programs. Play around with the wording and find something that works. Plenty of businesses use advertising for their affiliate recruiting because it gets the job done and makes sense.

Affiliate marketing networks and social networks have a great deal in common. They are both social activities that rely on word of mouth and communication to grow. A good way to look at an affiliate marketing network is to compare it to something as simple as a Facebook account. Someone that is active in their Facebook account, that updates it, communicates with people and attempts to make “friends” from outside his or her social circle will find that his or her list of friends grows quite rapidly. Everyone else will be limited to people that they actually know which in most cases is not going to amount to very much. Building your social network, just like building your affiliate marketing network, requires effort and some aggressive self promotion.

Social networks present a range of challenges for web marketers, but it is my belief that they actually hold a few advantages for affiliate marketing networks. The larger social networks have an almost inexhaustible number of potential new recruits for affiliate marketing networks. Through a combination of passive and active means, it should be possible to successfully promote affiliate marketing networks within any of the larger social networks.

Website branding can help in affiliate marketing as much as it can in any type of online business. If you are running your own affiliate program, think very carefully about your branding. Is it best to establish your affiliate marketing program as a brand in its own right? That is the question that we are going to try to answer today.

How to Build a Distinct Affiliate Marketing Brand
I have seen affiliate marketing sites that look nothing like their parent sites and I have seen others that mimic them in every way conceivable; others have subtle variations along the same theme. If I were to choose a way to establish an affiliate brand, nine times out of ten I would choose to make it a subtle variation on the theme of the parent site brand.

You want people to know they are on your affiliate pages, but at the same time feel that these pages are a part of your site. There are a few ways that this can be accomplished.

• Make use of the same logo. There is no sense changing your logos for your affiliate marketing site, this just takes time and costs money. If you can modify a logo, great, but if not it does not really matter.
• Alter the color scheme. This is a great way to show people visibly that something different is going on in your affiliate marketing pages. It grabs their attention.
• Keep the same site layout. If you are changing up the color scheme, keep the layout the same, this keeps with the same site feel.
• Use a subdomain. I have seen some bigger sites run their affiliate programs off top level domains. If you can afford a domain name that fits with your brand, great, but it will not hurt you to use a subdomain.

There are plenty of other ways to establish an affiliate marketing brand; these are just some surefire techniques that have been used time and time again to great effect. If you have any suggestions relating to affiliate marketing brand building, please feel free to add them.

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When it comes to building your affiliate marketing site, you are going to have to make a large number of decisions and no small number of compromises. We all have an idea of what we want our affiliate marketing site to look like, but often our goals are more than a little too ambitious. Suffice it to say that most of the time, near enough is good enough, just so long as you cover all of your bases, your affiliate marketing site can succeed.

What should an affiliate marketing website contain as an absolute minimum?
There is no clear cut answer to this question. Obviously you need all of the basic website components.

• 1. Index page
• 2. Contact page
• 3. Terms of service page
• 4. FAQ
• 5. A well designed landing page.

These pages should be complete before launch and as well optimized as you can make them. You want a fully functioning basic website. You can add to the five core pages if you like, it would be advisable to have a company information page, but many people include that kind of information on their contact page anyway. The more content that you include, the better. A big part of affiliate marketing, even from a managerial standpoint, is to bring in as much new talent as you can. You do that by optimizing your website as much as possible. Content can work wonders in this regard.

Can I Add Other Components Later?
Of course you can, that is the general idea behind most e-commerce websites these days, whether they are affiliate marketing websites or not. You can throw up fresh content any time you like. If you are planning on including a lot of content, then you might want to consider building your site around a Content Management System. Any site tweaks that you wish to make can be done later, as can purely superficial touches. If you want a Flash banner or something of the sort, it does not have to be there from day one. Get the website operational with the minimum that it needs to run and start updating it from there.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to sell or promote your products, but quite often new affiliate network managers find that they are dissatisfied with the results of their affiliate program. They have a great affiliate marketing network, but it does not see the results that it should get, simply because they do not gear their program for success. By now, you have probably heard about concepts like search engine optimization and social network marketing, how about applying them to your affiliate marketing program to build some market awareness. Here are five quick tips to get your affiliate marketing program functioning better and get more people into your program.

• Start an affiliate marketing blog - You no doubt already have some form of email newsletter, a blog is a great way to supplement this. Your blog should adhere to search engine optimization principals and be designed to bring traffic into your affiliate marketing page.
• Beg, borrow and buy links - The idea about this is to increase the relevance of your affiliate marketing pages. There is no quick way to do this, you will need to get to know people in the field, send emails chat on messenger, do whatever it takes to get your links out there.
• Optimize all of your pages - OK, you don’t need to optimize every single page, just the ones that you want to pull traffic to. You might even want to outsource some content writing, just to be sure.
• Start networking - Get into the more relevant social networks, make a large number of friends and start rating your pages. Del.icio.us is a great place to start, it is also worth using Stumble Upon. Both sites are really easy to post pages on. Promote your site and get your affiliate marketing pages seen.
• Build better landing pages - If you are not sure about how to make your own, outsource them. Landing pages are website pages that are designed to sell your affiliate marketing program to potential affiliates.

There you have it, five simple tips that any one can do to gear their affiliate marketing program for success.

Most affiliate marketers are constantly on the lookout for sound business intelligence. One interesting piece of news that I caught recently involved tech usage in the United States? How can news about tech usage be useful to affiliate marketers? Let’s take a look at the following excerpt from a Web Pro News article:

A new study that examines how countries use technology to improve their social and economic conditions has the United States, Sweden and Japan ranked at the top of the list.
Connectivity Scorecard developed by London Business School professor Leonard Waverman and released today, measured countries on 30 factors, including use of communications technology.

This tells us mainly that new technology sells well in the United States, Sweden and Japan. As we move further down the article we see a list of the top “innovation driven economies.”

Here are the ratings for “innovation-driven economies” measures in the study on a scale of 1 to 10.
United States 6.97
Sweden 6.83
Japan 6.80
Canada 6.50
Finland 6.10
Britain 6.10
Australia 5.93
Germany 5.52
France 5.07
South Korea 4.78
Hong Kong 4.46
Italy 3.85
Spain 3.56
Hungary 3.18
Czech Republic 3.11

Poland 2.18

If affiliate marketers are looking for the perfect tech market focus group, there they have it. The great thing is, with the exception of Japan most of the countries at the top of the list have a sound command of the English language.

For affiliate managers, this tells us that we need to be looking to recruit affiliate marketers from those regions. If we are missing out on Japan and South Korea, we are missing some enormous markets. Getting affiliate marketers marketing in their native languages is absolutely essential if you want to have an international program.

By now most of you should be very familiar with the major affiliate networks out there. They provide good value for money and are a great way to get instant access to a pool of experienced sales people. The other option, is to keep it all in house and do it yourself. DIY affiliate marketing has a place, but there is a lot that you need to be aware of before you get started.

Advantages of Existing Affiliate Marketing Networks
The biggest benefit of going with an existing network is that you are instantly plugged into a pool of marketers. Some of the networks have very competent marketers and having instant access, so to speak, will get your program off to the right kind of start. There are, however, a few other significant benefits to using an existing network. All of the major affiliate marketing networks provide Affiliate Program Tracking as part of their service. Furthermore, everything is done for you on the programming side of things. This can save a tremendous amount of time and money. You get an affiliate network that is ready to go from the moment you have signed your contracts.

Advantages of DIY Affiliate Marketing Networks
The biggest advantage of a DIY affiliate marketing network is that it gives you control over every aspect of your network. Paying affiliates, affiliate management, affiliate tracking and recruiting are all kept in-house. This can save a great deal of money. There is no middleman and the only fees that you encounter will be bank or payment processor fees. Keeping everything in house allows you to set up a program that is exactly the way you want it to be. There are, however, some significant drawbacks.

Drawbacks of DIY Affiliate Marketing Networks

• Legalities - One aspect that you will definitely need to consider is the legality of your Terms of Service agreement. The world can be a very litigious place; it is definitely advisable to sit down with a lawyer to come up with a bulletproof TOS.
• Time commitments - It can take a prodigious amount of time to run your own affiliate marketing network. If could rob you of time that you need to actually build your business
• Cost of setup - A good coder will be able to get the nuts and bolts of your affiliate system running relatively easily, especially if they have had some experience with affiliate programs in the past. You would be well advised to get a professional to take care of the setup process. You will need to weigh the costs involved with the setup with the ongoing cost of an established affiliate marketing network. The DIY version is an upfront, one time only cost. An established network will be an ongoing percentage.

Do it yourself affiliate marketing networks are not for everyone. With a little hard work and perseverance, however, they can offer some significant longterm benefits. If you have the time and money to set one up, it is definitely worth the hard work.