Optimizing Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing can be a powerful tool. It allows marketers to generate desired actions from their customers without taking on the risk of investing a budget before these actions are taken.

The premise is simple but the execution is hard work that can take up a lot of time. That being said, I have seen programs where folks just put up their links in an affiliate network like CJ, and
let publishers take the program and run with it. This is a good place to start, but to really see results, you need someone dedicated to making each of those publisher's successful. Nobody knows your product better than you, and you will be starting off in a hole if you do not share your best practices with your publishers.

Not only will it increase their efficiency when promoting your product or service, but you will establish a relationship with your business partners. This is very much a business development effort, and as we all know, it is all about nurturing relationships.

Once you get to know your publishers, you can get creative with how you can help each other. I have spoken to some publishers who are promoting companies via PPC in Google, Yahoo, & MSN. These publishers have such a good relationship with their advertisers that they were able to get their conversion tracking pixels placed in the advertisers "thank you" pages.

This allows the publisher to run a highly efficient program, builds trust between the advertiser and publisher, and has increased conversions from this publisher by 150%.

You will be surprised to see how the smallest tweaks can increase your publishers conversions. I have spoken to a publisher just about placement of a banner. They tried out a new placement and saw an increase of 50% overnight.

Promotions also need to be refreshed and campaigned out to your existing publisher group. Give people a 10% off coupon to promote. Increase commissions to everyone in your program for 1 month. Give bonus incentives for sending you more traffic. The bottom line is you need to get people exited about being a part of your program and promoting your product/service.

Unlocking the power of Google Analytics – Tracking leads & Sales

Google Analytics gets a lot of attention these days. Most people in the space realize that having a solid analytics solution is important and that they should be tracking their web traffic. But do they know what to look for? Setting up an account is easy. All you need to do is create your account and add a piece of code to every page you want to track. Then just sit back and watch all the wonderful stats start to poor in. Simple enough right?

But then what?

Analytics users need to understand what they are looking for within the reports and in order to do that they need to ask the right questions. For instance, if you wanted to know what % of your website’s visitors sign up for your newsletter, and then what % of those subscribers purchase from you as a result of your e-mail marketing efforts, would you know where to look? Would you know how to set that up?

These are the business questions you need to be asking, because once answered, you can start to take action. Having an analytics package is useless if you are not going to take action based on your findings.

In the above newsletter example you need to do the following to answer your question.

Step 1: You MUST have goals set up for your newsletter lead generation funnel & a separate goal for your sales funnel. Use the “thank you for subscribing to our news letter page” & the “sale confirmation” page as your respective goal pages. (see the settings link in your Google analytics console)

Once this is set up you will be able to see reports that show the number of newsletter sign ups and sales

Step2: Tag the links in your newsletter. This will allow you to see where your traffic is coming from in the traffic sources - referring sites reports. Use the Google analytics URL builder to set this up. http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en

Step 3: Access the traffic sources - referring sites reports, locate the tagged URLS (that indicate someone has visited your site via the links on the news letter) click on the goals tab at the top to view the source by goal conversion. This will tell you how many people from your newsletter converted into a sale.

Now you have baseline metrics that tell you how well your e-mail marketing campaign is doing.

Still unsure of what to do next?

TEST…. Try to beat your current performance. Do A/B testing for your e-mails and see if you can increase sales (remember to tag your B e-mail differently than you’re A e-mail)

Hope this helps