Guest Post By: Brian Hawkins
Affiliate partnerships need to be a win-win alliance. Merchants sometimes want to take all the benefit of the sales without any of the risk. As an affiliate manager, my job is to support my partners marketing efforts. Which is why I wrote an article in FeedFront Magazine that gave some solid ideas for how to help support your publishers. Because affiliates are extremely busy, just look at Ian’s quick response back to my guest post request “go for it! need some content on the blog haven’t been on there much so busy! wish I can ctrl copy myself!”. Here is a few ways that merchants should be proactive to help support its affiliate partners.
10 Ways to Invest in your Affiliates
- Advice
Give as much advice as you possible can. It cost you nothing but the information can be priceless. - Design
Provide custom banners & creative support - Content
Have ghostwriters available to help produce quality content. - Landing Pages
Provide a proven tested template or custom landing page to your partners that maximizes conversion rates. You don’t always have to have the highest payout, if you have the best EPC rate with a proven affiliate sales funnel. - Keyword List
Share your best converting terms to your select PPC affiliates. - Stats
Share your stats to outline what’s happening on your site. Stat’s don’t lie in making a performance based marketing decision. - Plan
If you know what works, share it! Why not have 5 to 10 other partners applying the same plan that worked for you internally. You’re gaining additional online real estate and exposure with 5x to 10x the sales growth. - Video Production
Video has bin a huge traffic driver & conversion rate booster. So create some video’s and have a video producer on hand to provide some custom videos for your partners. - Prizes
Giveaways help build buzz, so consider sponsoring a prize. It will get you additional exposure on a publisher site while building a viral marketing campaign together. - $$ Capital $$
Affiliates are only going to test your offer with a few hundred dollars. So why not invest with some additional capital to let them really test your offer with a new creative idea. It’s kind of like an advanced commission check to help someone start an affiliate marketing business.
Since money talks, Pingo set up the $20k contest in April for the top three marketing plan finalist. First Prize gets $10,000 and 2nd to 3rd Prize gets $5,000 each. So we hope to use this investment strategy to recruit three solid affiliates to test out a new ethnic targeted marketing plan to promote Pingo.
These are just a few ways to support your affiliates. Please comment to share your wish list of what you would like from an affiliate program?
About the author:
Brian Hawkins is an affiliate marketing manager for a virtual prepaid calling card
service that pays up to $35.00 CPA for each referral. Brian blogs 140 characters a day on twitter @BrianHawkins & @TelecomAgents. Plus is an assistant organizer to the Boston SEO & Affiliate Marketing Meetup at BostonSEO.org. RSVP for the next event on May 4rth with guest speaker, super affiliate Amit Mehta from SuperAffiliateMindset.com & PPC Coach.
