When it comes to affiliate marketing networks, Commission Junction is big, really big and that has a great many advantages for businesses that choose to use them for their affiliate network. It also has advantages for sellers which is what we are going to look at today.

• 1. Membership gives you instant access to a large range of products. Some affiliate networks require that you sign up separately for each service that you wish to sell; not Commission Junction. With Commission Junction, you do not sign up with the retailer, you sign up with the network and thus get access to all of the retailers that are with them.
• 2. You get access to a range of niche products. This is great if you have a web store that targets a particular niche. It is possible to source different products for the same niche market through the network. You get a more complete product line.
• 3. There are some great marketing materials. The people behind Commission Junction know a thing or two about marketing and the materials reflect that.
• 4. It has a great software backbone. You will know how much you have earned and where you have earned it. The tracking software on Commission Junction is top notch and very easy to understand.
• 5. Get tips from marketing pros. The Commission Junction newsletters are a great source of useful information that you can use to improve your marketing techniques.
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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.

In Affiliate Marketing Journal, we make an effort to stay up to date with all of the latest trends in affiliate marketing. Over the next few weeks we will be taking an in depth look at some different Affiliate Payout types and the types of program that they tend to benefit most. We will also take a look at some simple software tools that will help you produce better affiliate marketing materials. With a little bit of time, and the right software, you will be able to achieve very professional results and save on designer’s fees.

As always, we will be looking at affiliate newsletter writing techniques. We spend a great deal of time on newsletter writing in the Affiliate Marketing Journal, because we believe that it is a very easy way to encourage affiliates to produce better results. A good affiliate newsletter can be produced in house and does not need to take up a great deal of time. The expense involved in producing an affiliate newsletter is minimal.

Finally, we will be covering any breaking news that comes up. Affiliate marketing is one area where we seldom hear much news. When news does break, you can be sure to hear it from us here at Affiliate Marketing Journal. We here at Brick Marketing hope that you enjoy the Affiliate Marketing Journal. If you have any queries or suggestions they are always welcome. Feel free to post a comment regarding any Affiliate Marketing Journal article that you read - Happy Affiliate Marketing!

Producing your own affiliate marketing materials is a great way to save money. If you already have a good set of affiliate marketing materials, they can provide a great template for you to work with when it comes time to produce your next set. There are a few expenses involved, the biggest being the software package that you will need. One of the best programs for graphic design is Adobe Illustrator, it is also possible to achieve a great deal with Adobe Photoshop. If you have one or the other program work with it, there is a scaled down version available that will be up to the task.

Once you have decided on your choice of program, you can get to work on producing your own materials. If you used a professional the first time around (and they were kind enough to give you the PSD or AI files, your job is really easy. It is just a matter of tweaking the image to include any new product or new information. Text can be altered simply and it is easy enough to replace an image. The Internet has a wealth of information on all kinds of Photoshop and Illustrator techniques. You do not need to be a design guru to make a few little edits to your affiliate marketing materials.

If you don’t have any good templates to work with then you will have a longer process ahead of you. It would pay to spend some time browsing your competitor’s sites and checking things like color schemes and font sizes. As in all things, there are trends and fashions that should be observed. You shouldn’t copy the materials, but there is no reason why you cannot get some good ideas. Check the sizes in particular, this is something that you do want to emulate. Banners and skyscrapers tend to be fairly uniform in size.

It is definitely worth spending some time to get to know the design programs that you have purchased. It can take a while, but once you have learned them and polished your techniques a little, you will be able to produce professional looking affiliate marketing materials. Affiliate marketing materials are quite low on the difficulty scale of design related tasks. Both Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop have trial versions. You can download them and use them free of charge for a limited period of time. The trial period should be long enough for you to determine whether or not producing your own affiliate marketing materials is something that you want to do.

Affiliate network management can encompass any number of management decisions affecting your affiliates that you make as a program owner. Some affiliate network managers will just let their program go and allow their affiliates free reign. We do not believe that is the best policy, as it can have an adverse effect on the reputation of your business.

For most people running an affiliate network, it is a means to promote their business and thus allow them to earn better profits. It is the business that must always come first. One unruly affiliate can cause tremendous damage to the reputation of a business. For this reason, it is sometimes necessary to be proactive with your affiliate network management decisions.

Know your Affiliates
It is a good idea to take some time to check out the affiliates that are working for you. There are some gambling sites that perform a thorough review of each affiliate application. They even go as far as telephoning or emailing additional questions if they have them. While most businesses do not need to go that far, it does pay to check out your affiliates and the techniques that they are using to promote your site. If your business is too big to check every site, do some random checks and do send out the occasional personal email.

Do not Tolerate SPAM
I cannot voice this strongly enough. SPAM sells, we all know that, but it also tarnishes reputations. If you have an affiliate that is promoting your business with SPAM, you will need to make a serious affiliate management decision. You will need to weigh the benefits that the affiliate is producing with the damage that it is doing to your reputation. SPAM tends not to convey any long term benefit on a program. It does not encourage customer loyalty. For the short term gains that you get from SPAM, there are a lot of long term drawbacks. To avoid any awkward affiliate management situations, you can check to ensure that any new affiliates actually have websites.

Provide Quality Materials
Poor quality affiliate materials can cause untold damage to the reputation of a business. Some materials make false or misleading claims. Remember any affiliate is an ambassador of your company. If an affiliate makes false or misleading claims and a customer is dissatisfied with your product, it is you that will have to deal with it. In such situations an appropriate course of action for those in affiliate network management would be to warn said affiliate. For outrageous violations, it might be worth terminating the affiliate contract. This can of course all be avoided by providing quality marketing materials to begin with. Ensure that materials are available and that affiliates are made aware of any updates.

Affiliate network management can be challenging at times, but it is possible to avoid most of the potential stresses through some smart management techniques.

Of the affiliate payout types, cost per sale is probably the most underused. Cost per sale is a great way to cap the earnings of an affiliate for any particular sale. Affiliates might not like the CPS affiliate payout type as much as a percentage of sale, but there are times that it really makes sense. The best reason for using an affiliate payout type that limits the amount an affiliate can earn is if you are selling a high cost item.

With high cost items, the rate of profit can be quite low. Consider a piece of platinum or gold jewelry:

With precious metals the profit margin can be quite low compared to general consumer goods. With general low value consumer goods, the profit margin can be very high, but the amount of profit per item is relatively low. A ballpoint pen might have a markup of several hundred percent on the wholesale value, that amount, however, is for the most part insignificant. It might be as low as one or two dollars. A piece of jewelry, however, might sell for several hundred or even several thousand dollars more than the wholesale value. As the cost of the item is much higher, lower percentages of profit are required to make a sale worthwhile.

If you are selling something that costs a great deal of money, it makes sense to use the CPS affiliate payout type. Low percentages do not look that attractive to most potential affiliates and percentages can make it difficult to such delicate profit margins. Having a flat cost per sale allows the business owner a little bit more flexibility when it comes to pricing their inventory and it is a more attractive option than the cost per lead affiliate payout type because it does allow for repeat business.

There is no easy answer to the question, “what is a suitable length for an affiliate newsletter?” An affiliate newsletter that is too short does not really accomplish much, while there is little chance that anyone will read all of the way through an affiliate newsletter that is too long. There are a few things that ought to be considered when you are planning your writing.

• How long have your newsletters been in the past? If you have been writing affiliate newsletters that are between 1,000 and 3,000 words in length, you are probably producing a document of appropriate size. If they have been well received, chances are you have found the right format.
• How much time do you have to put into writing? If you don’t have a lot of time, you might want to consider keeping your publications a little shorter.
• How effective is your affiliate sales force? The key purpose of an affiliate newsletter is to motivate your sales force. If they are already doing their job, you could go with a shorter publication.

Points to Consider
As a general rule it would be best to produce at least one A4 page of text. 500 Words fit onto an A4 page, which is not really a great deal of space to work with. It would be better to aim for a 1,000 to 2,000 words would tend to be a more comfortable length for an affiliate newspaper. That would be between two and four single spaced A4 pages.

While it is possible to vary your newsletter size each time you publish, it is much nicer to have a set format. You do not need to follow the exact same format every time, but if you stick to it as closely as possible, you will find that the planning process becomes much easier. If you know that you need to produce x number of articles every two weeks, you will be subconsciously preparing articles constantly. When you sit down to write it will be a lot easier.

There are no hard and fast rules about suitable lengths for affiliate newsletters. The goal of your affiliate newsletter is to reach as many people in your affiliate network as possible. Their are people there with different marketing skill levels. An affiliate newsletter should have something for everyone. To do that you are probably going to need to have at least three or four articles. If you add on an article for news or promotions, you will be sitting fairly close to the 1,000 word mark already. As long as the affiliate newsletter is long enough to cover everyone, it is long enough.

What can you do if your affiliate program seems to be stuck in a rut? Poor affiliate performance can indicate a number of different problems with your company or with the program itself. In many cases, affiliate promotions can be a way to get the program performing again. Before you start thinking about affiliate promotions, however, you do need to locate the source of your problem.

There is a very simple way to determine the cause of poor performance in an affiliate program; compare your sales. Take a long hard look at your website sales and compare those to your affiliate sales. Have your website sales diminished in recent times? If they have, your problems could run more deeply than your affiliate program. Maybe your product is out of date and no longer desirable. Perhaps your site is just not selling it well enough anymore. Another competitor might be offering the same thing for less money. Get back on top of your business intelligence and don’t worry about affiliate promotions.

If your website sales have been healthy then it is clear that you do not have a marketing problem and your problems are indeed affiliate related. You need to motivate your sales force, how about some affiliate promotions? Depending on how flat the program has come, you may wish to work some permanent changes into your program. Raising the percentage that affiliates can earn is a great way to motivate them again. A good promotion would be to increase that amount even further for a limited period of time or to offer a prize to the person that is responsible for the most sales.

Affiliate promotions are an excellent way to get an affiliate network heading back in the right direction. Use your affiliate newsletter to make the announcement.

HitsLink, in case you are unaware, is a particularly useful website analysis tool. It is widely used by many website marketers, but can be just as useful in affiliate marketing, especially if you are worried that people are not finding their way to your affiliate pages.

HitsLink effectively maps the path that your website’s visitors take through your site. Along with giving you vital information about which pages of your site or sites are getting hit consistently and which are not. This information lead many people to redesign their sites.

• Eliminate dead-ends – By examining your HitsLink statistics you will be able to find if there are any pages on your site that cause people to switch off. You can interpret the results and determine the likely causes.
• Identify more successful web pages – Using HitsLink, you be able to identify the pages on your site that are most successful in terms of click through traffic and sales. Some pages are designed to be a final destination, whereas others are portals. HitsLink will let you know if they are performing as they should.
• Enable smoother surfing – Are your visitors taking a circuitous route to crucial pages? If so, you might want to consider remapping your site or perhaps adding a few extra links here or there. The data provided by HitsLink can help you to make an informed decision.

Affiliate pages tend to get less hits than other pages, however, if they are under-performing, there is a very good chance that there is something amiss in relation to website design. HitsLink can help you to identify these weaknesses and plan better affiliate marketing sites.

Why would you need Quote Catcher?
Your website says a great deal about your image. What are you is the company image that you are trying to convey to your affiliates? A sloppy looking website might give the impression that you lack professionalism, while a well designed website does the opposite. Professional web design is an art form that most people struggle with. While just about anyone can agree on what looks good, when it comes to making something look good, for most people that can do it, it takes a lot of time. For the great many that can’t it is just plain impossible. If you want a good website, Quote Catcher is a great place to start.

Quote Catcher is a source for website design quotes. You go to Quote Catcher, list your specifications, outline your budget and wait. If the terms look good, you will start to receive quotes from different website designers. Quote Catcher allows you to receive up to five quotes per job. Once you have your quotes, you can compare them and choose a designer that will do a good job for your website design project.

Quote Catcher is very easy to use and entirely form based. You will find that order process very easy to work through. Quote Catcher gives you some great ideas with regard to pricing, so you will have a ballpark figure of what you should be offering for the job. If you need a new affiliate website designed, you don’t really need a lot of bells and whistles, and are likely to find many competitive quotes.