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5 tips to ensure your Affiliate Program is promoted by Affiliates

1. There is nothing wrong with promoting new programs on forums such as the A4U Forum, in fact I encourage it as its a great way for us affiliates to learn about new programs. But, the MOST important thing we want to know about your program is how much money we can make. Each and every single month there is at least 1 or 2 posts telling us about a great new affiliate program, but failing to tell us just how much moolah we can make. Its all well and good giving us back history of the company etc but I need to know if I can make enough money from it to retire or maybe just enough to buy a few Peronis from Sainsburys.

2. Discount codes are great but it REALLY helps us if you tell us who the discount code is for. Here is a real email I received from an affiliate network last week:

Generic Discount Codes:

start date: 03/09/2007 Monday
end date: 23/09/2007 Sunday

awin070905 Save £50 with the code awin070905 when you spend £1500 and more
awin070904 Save £30 with the code awin070904 when you spend £1000 and more
awin070903 Save £20 with the code awin070903 when you spend £650 and more
awin070902 Save £11 with the code awin070902 when you spend £400 and more
awin070901 Save £5 with the code awin070901 when you spend £200 and more

Watch this space for the product specific codes on coming on Monday 3rd September.

Kind Regards,

Name removed, as I’m in a forgiving mood

The email gave no mention of any merchant in the email header, footer, subject title or anywhere. I emailed back and asked who it was for but didn’t get a reply. I also sometimes receive discount code emails from networks that don’t mention the company at all in the title or anywhere, but they sometimes contain an affiliate link, so I have to click on my own link to see who it is.

I think this problem stems from network affiliate managers perhaps being solely responsible for a handful of clients so they kind of “forget” that the outside world doesn’t know who the merchant is that they are working for. So they maybe send emails out on autopilot thinking that because they are the account manager for xyz merchant then everybody else just knows that. So a tip for future guys, when sending out discount code emails to affiliates please put something like this in the title

“10% discount codes for XYZMerchant - September 2007″

That would really help us all

3. Emails containing information about specific promotions. This is another bugbear of mine. Every week I get emails from merchants/networks telling us about a special offer or a price cut on a certain product. Now if you want us to feature this promotion please please give us a deep link. Better still, give us some creative that clearly shows the promotion. A couple of weeks ago I had an email from a merchant offering a really, really cheap holiday deal. It was something like a holiday for £5 or something. Great offer but they didn’t send any creatives or deep links. I looked at the site but alas it was for a merchant who doesn’t allows (I mean how ridiculous?) deep links unless they were made by the network. So the result? I didn’t promote them.

4. This ties in with number 1. Again, if you are promoting affiliate programs on a forum then make sure you follow up with any queries that affiliates have. Take this thread for example. I mean what a wasted opportunity. If I was an Affiliate Manager (and am thinking that I really should be after writing about all this) then wouldn’t you just jump at every opportunity to talk about your program? If people asked me a question then I’d answer it as quick as humanly possible because it means me getting closer to signing up more affiliates, who will generate more commission which means I can earn my bonus and buy a Lamborghini. Why doesn’t everyone think like this? I just don’t understand some people at all.

5. Creative sizes, text links and deep links. As an absolute minimum you should offer affiliates creatives in these sizes. If you miss even 1 size off then you could lose that affiliate who maybe only uses that certain size of creatives. Also, as an affiliate I want to be able to link to your program using the words of my choice, i.e. “click here” or “save money now” or whatever so please give me a BASIC text link, and not some javascript. By a basic text link this is what I mean: http://www.thisisabasictextlink.com. If your affiliate network won’t allow this then bin them. Likewise to make the most out of your program I need to be able to deep link to any page (of my choosing) in your site so please give me the ability to do so. Thats it, those things are really simple, if you can meet the above criteria then you can make 99.99% (.01% will moan no matter what) of all affiliates happy.

Of course I could go on and on about how to make a great affiliate program, but each and every week I see a new merchant launch an affiliate program and break at least 1 of the 5 “Cardinal Rules” as outlined above. This is such a shame as it means I will never promote your program if you can’t at least get the basics right.

What I’m listening to right now: Kanye West - “Graduation”

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Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.