Affiliate management is tough at the best of times, but if your affiliates are of the overly communicative type, the job can be a nightmare. What can you do if your affiliates are taking up too much of your precious time?

Outsourcing your Affiliate Management Communications
Marketing Pilgrim reports that more online retailers are using call centers than ever before. It therefore follows quite naturally that some businesses will piggyback their affiliate communications onto their online retail communications system. It can work, but there are a few things that you need to ensure before outsourcing any aspect of your affiliate management communication.

In general, affiliate management communications are suitable for offloading because they do not occur too frequently. As long as any call center agents are well briefed on your affiliate management procedures, there is no reason why you cannot offload the work onto your call center.

• Shop around and don’t just settle on the first call center that you come across. Some people look for the cheapest call centers that they can find. These are usually located offshore and have quality levels that vary. While you can get great service from these companies, it is a hit and miss affair. Do your research if you wish to take that route with your affiliate management communications.
• Get to know the call center company and get to know your agents. If they are dealing with the added responsibility of handling phone calls that would normally be the responsibility of those in affiliate management, you want to be sure that they are up to the task.
• Test your call center. You should be doing this anyway if they are running your business communications. Ask them a few affiliate management related questions from time to time and ensure that their responses are appropriate. Remember, if they are off course, your reputation suffers.
• Don’t be complacent. You never know when your call center is going to change staff. Stay on your toes and make sure that they are doing their job to your satisfaction.

Greg Howlett offers this final thought in an article appearing on Marketing Pilgrim:

In general, call centers are a necessary part of growing for most internet retailers. The key is simply this–you cannot hire one and forget about them. You have to remember that those people whom you have little control over have the ability to make or break your business. That is scary thought.

Affiliate management can be quite a responsibility and it can be hard to keep up with phone calls when a business operates 24/7. Outsourcing your affiliate management communications responsibilities does work; just make sure that you pick the right company to help you with this task.

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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.

What lies ahead this week for The Affiliate Marketing Journal? We have a few plans in store. Last week we took a look at some alternative payout types. We are going to take a closer look at the Pay Per Call affiliate payout type and examine some ways that you can bolster that with a call center. It has been a long time since we featured any affiliate newsletter writing techniques here at Affiliate Marketing Journal, so we will focus on that topic a little bit more. In addition, you can expect to see some affiliate recruiting tips.

Our goal here at Affiliate Marketing Journal is to help affiliate managers to build bigger, stronger and more sustainable affiliate marketing programs. Our company, Brick Marketing, has been involved in affiliate marketing and various other aspects of e-commerce for some time now and we hope that we are able to share some of what we have learned with you. Affiliate marketing is an area that can be difficult to research. Information that you find is so often tied to one program or another that it can be difficult to know what you can trust. At Affiliate Marketing Journal, we try to present as broad a picture as possible, so that you get a real feel for what affiliate marketing is about.

Do you have any questions comments or suggestions? If you would be interested in us covering a particular topic, please drop a comment in the comment box of this or any other article on the site. We can’t look into every request that we get, but if you have something that we feel that people might benefit from, you just might see it become an article here on Affiliate Marketing Journal.

Link Connector is an affiliate network that is well worth joining for many reasons, but one of the things that I like most about their program is that they are committed to providing options that other affiliate networks just do not have. The Advanced Events on Link Connector are not for everyone, but they do have a place. Today we are going to take a brief look at the two additional payout types on the LinkConnector network.

Link Connector: Advanced Events
The two additional payout types on LinkConnector are Pay Per Go and Pay Per Call. These are not offered at the other major affiliate networks, mainly for the reason that their interest groups are a fairly narrow focus. We are including them here today because they are of use for some affiliate networks and are therefore worth discussing.

Pay Per Call on LinkConnector
Pay Per Call is based around phone calls rather than the Internet. If you ask me, it is a little tedious, as customers must fill out a form to confirm a phone call has taken place. Assuming the customer fills out the form, the affiliate will be paid. This has a place in any sort of business where a large number of sales are made by phone.

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.

Pay Per Go on LinkConnector
Pay Per Go is sort of like Pay Per Click in reverse. Instead of paying your affiliates for clicks that take traffic to your website, you pay them for clicks that your traffic makes from your website. This is great if you are marketing other people’s products and actually earning commissions yourself. You give up a percentage of earnings to your affiliates and in turn get a bit of help in marketing. Pay Per Go is an interesting concept that LinkConnector.

A Pay Per Go event is similar to a traditional Pay Per Click event; however, instead of rewarding affiliates for each inbound click to the merchant’s site, merchants set an amount to pay for each click outbound from their site. The Go event allows merchants to reward their affiliates for outbound traffic from their site to a partner’s site, or to other pages within their own website.

Advanced Events on LinkConnector do have a place. While it is a fairly narrow niche that they are aiming for, the niche does exist. That they have found it is to me, one of the most impressive things about the LinkConnector affiliate network.

When is it time to pull the plug on affiliate promotions? The answer to that question depends largely on the types of affiliate promotions that you are making are making use of and what you hope to accomplish from each one. While the simple answer would be that affiliate promotions should stop when their goals are met, this is not the case. Affiliate promotions should stop before they cease to be profitable. You do not want to lose money on affiliate promotions; here are a few tips to avoid making costly mistakes.

• Watch your affiliate network closely. As soon as growth rates start to taper off, scale back on your affiliate promotions. If your affiliate network is large enough to provide you with consistent sales, your money might be better spent on educating your affiliates than promoting your network.
• Check your sales figures. If you are getting massive amounts of new affiliates but nothing to show for it, the money that you are spending on affiliate promotions is probably being wasted.

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.

The Shareasale affiliate network http://shareasale.com is a great place to look for information about how the different affiliate payout types. It is worth noting that some merchants run multiple affiliate payout types and do not exclusively rely upon one the less popular options.

Pay-Per-Sale: 2152 Merchants
No surprises here, this is the most popular of all affiliate payout types wherever you go for quite obvious reasons. Pay-per-sale is easy to calculate and easy to price for, especially if you are using it to pay for low cost items. Pay-per-lead and pay-per-click don’t really work when you are selling $30 software programs or $10 e-books, a percentage can be applied to any size of sale quickly and effectively. Pay-per-sale dominates all affiliate networks, not just Shareasale.

Pay-Per-Lead: 243 Merchants
I have to admit that this figure was a little higher than I had anticipated. It could be that more of these merchants are drawn to Shareasale than elsewhere. Of all affiliate payout types, this is most suited to high cost transactions. There is no surprise that the top merchants offer financial services where a percentage can not be so easily applied. Some of the merchants on the list for pay-per-lead also made use of pay-per-sale.

Pay-Per-Click: 8 Merchants
While seeing a figure as low as eight was surprising to some, one could be equally surprised that Shareasale had any pay-per-click merchants at all. When it comes to PPC, most merchants opt for advertising networks these days. Using an affiliate network for PPC does not give you the same coverage as any of the major advertising networks do. This is the least popular of the three affiliate payout types for obvious reasons.

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.

Not all of your affiliate promotions need to cost money. Some affiliate promotions can be done for next to nothing or nothing at all. Affiliate promotions are about promoting your affiliate program; they can be about building awareness or encouraging your existing members to perform better. The costs of affiliate promotions are quite often lower than you would think, especially if you generate enough public awareness. If you are interested in some affiliate promotions techniques that can have a very low cost, read on.

Update your Materials
How can your materials act as affiliate promotions? It is simple, bring out some new site banners and your affiliates will be checking them out in droves. This can be either cheap or free, depending on your image editing skills. If you outsource the task, it should not cost a great deal. It might seem a small thing, but sometimes that is all it takes to breath a bit of fresh life into a program.

In addition to updating your images, why not take the extra step of updating your literature. Providing fresh content is one of the more powerful forms of affiliate promotions. Not only does it help your affiliates sell better, it can help with search engine optimization as well. This can be time consuming, but if you are able to do it in house, it does not really cost a lot of money.

Tweak your Rates
Increasing your percentages is one of the many affiliate promotions that does cost a little bit of money, but it is possible to minimize the impact to your bottom line. If you are going to pay your affiliates more, you can offset some of the costs by raising your prices. Requiring a minimum amount to cash out is also a great way to save. $100 is a fairly common figure these days. This does more than dramatically reduce the amount that you have to pay out, it minimizes the amount that you have to pay. A large number of affiliates in your network are probably unlikely to ever sell more than $100. You can save a bundle in nickels and dimes. If you would like to offset the cost of a rate increase, introducing reasonable payment limitations is one way to do it.

Bars have happy hours, why not offer a happy month? Your rate increases do not have to be permanent, simply make the announcement that one month from now all affiliates will be paid at a higher rate. This will really get the affiliates selling and has the potential to pay for itself. Remember, spending money does not necessarily cost you money. Affiliate promotions only cost if your bottom line is affected.