Tips for Managing Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Tips for managing your affiliate marketing program

If you’re managing an affiliate marketing program on a low budget – or outsourcing the task out to someone else – you may be left with ineffective strategies, sluggish growth or dissatisfied clients.

Affiliate marketing should be a measurable way to boost sales. But how do you ensure your program has the potential to take your brand awareness to the next level? Does your program provide constant recruitment of new affiliates? Does it align with your clients’ strategies, as well as your own? American City Business Journals urges you to first be sure affiliate marketing fits into your company’s overall marketing and brand strategy before diving in. For this to happen, you’ll need to devote attention to all of your affiliate programs or find someone who can.

Some marketers get so bogged down in the weeds they end up actually wasting company resources, rather than addressing the nature of the challenges to their program. Digital marketers in particular should review their management techniques for new ways to grow strategically. With the potential to represent 5 to 15 percent of online sales and performance based payout structure, affiliate marketing is a necessary part of the digital marketing portfolio for retailers looking to grow their online sales, Multichannel Merchant reported.

Affiliate Marketing

Why Use Affiliate Management for Pay-Per-Call

PayPerCall_Affiliate_Management_PrestigeMarketing

Setting Up Your Pay-Per-Call Marketing

If you are preparing or have a budget for Pay-Per-Call marketing, this means you are taking investment into marketing strategy seriously. You have come to see that Pay-Per-Call is a great way to get people genuinely interested in your products or services to contact you. It’s a form of marketing that stirs action, and hopefully leads to conversion. Now, when it comes to running Pay-Per-Call, you can go directly to a network that already has an extensive range of affiliate partnerships. Partnering with another company to work as your Affiliate Manager is adding another step in the process and another point of payment.

What’s the Difference Between Affiliate Management and a Network?

A network offers you exposure and volume, for sure, and that’s what you want. However, while quantity is definitely a goal, so is quality. It is important that the calls that come in from your Pay-Per-Call campaigns and your marketing output elicits valuable responses, rather than mass response. With a high volume of calls, you may be paying for incoming calls that do not yield a high conversion rate. The priority of a network is to bring in the calls for you. The core difference between a network and an Affiliate Manager is that an Affiliate Manager prioritizes quality calls. A network fulfills call traffic, while an Affiliate Manager strategizes for call success rate.

Pay Per Call

Affiliate Marketing 101: Establishing Your Commission Payout

How To Calculate Affiliate Marketing Commission

If you’ve decided to build a strong affiliate team and program for your business, one of the first things you will have to figure out before approaching potential affiliates is your commission payout. Determining your commission payout is critical in developing a strong affiliate program; go too low and you will not attract affiliates or go too high and you’ll be spending your finances ineffectively.

I recommend joining affiliate networks and look at a variety of programs related to yours. Sites like Commission Junction, Share A Sale and LinkShare all provide affiliate management services (more on that in a future post). These sites list affiliate programs by industry or you can do a keyword search to find similar business and services to yours. You will be able to find information on the payout rate and the success of the affiliate program to get an idea of what commission your competitors are setting.

Now that you know what range your commission needs to be you need to determine if you can afford to deliver a competitive commission. Do you have the profit margin to give up 10-25% of each sale? Can you afford to pay $10 a lead? These and the following are important questions you need answers to before moving forward.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing 101 – What is an Affiliate?

Affiliates may be somewhat of a mystery to many businesses as they are not often talked about when devising a marketing plan. But having a team of great affiliates can be a major asset when trying to grow your business.

Affiliates are like a commission-only sales force; you only compensate them when they generate a pre-determined desired action. For example, the action is typically when a new lead is generated or when a sale is made. This relationship is simple: you need new customers and affiliates can deliver them. You do not need to have a huge marketing budget to be successful when you have great affiliates doing the work for you.

Affiliate Marketing

6 Content Marketing Strategies That Convert

6 content marketing strategies that convertMost marketers have heard the expression “content is king” by this point. It isn’t just a rumor: Content is one of the most important components of a lead generation strategy or affiliate marketing programs. However, many companies are still struggling to take full advantage of content marketing. Whether it’s not dedicating enough resources, not having enough time or having difficulty choosing the right tactics, content is not always the easiest strategy to implement.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways marketers can make their content more successful. Here are some tips to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns:

1. Connect content and LinkedIn

Much has been made about the effectiveness of using social media to share content marketing materials. For business-to-business marketing in particular, LinkedIn was rated the best network for linking to blog posts and sharing articles in a Content Marketing Institute study, according to Business 2 Community. You can even use this platform to post original content and participate in group discussions.

Content Marketing

Affiliate Marketing for Lead Generation – Myths

3 Myths About Affiliate Marketing

3 myths about Affiliate MarketingThere are a number of myths surrounding the affiliate marketing industry. Digital lead generation has grown in popularity and effectiveness, thanks in part to the rise of Web-based outreach campaigns, but a number of myths surround affiliate marketing – some of which cause businesses to avoid affiliate initiatives.

Decision-makers and business owners alike need to understand these myths to make the best choices they can for the growth of their respective companies. Affiliate partners have a lot to gain by implementing some type of digital lead generation campaign. Listed below are three myths about affiliate marketing:

Lead Generation