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.