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Monday, April 25, 2011

Getting Your Affiliate Campaign Off On The Right Foot

There are a lot of people out there who realize that recruiting affiliates is a great way to make more sales and more money from their product, but most people don't have any idea how to go about affiliate management. It's not enough to just get some people who say they are going to help you sell your product, you need to have some sort of affiliate structure or affiliate program management system to plug them easily into. Having some good idea of how to go about your affiliate management will both make the whole thing easier and less stressful for you, but it will also let you accrue far more profits, far quicker, than if you went into you affiliate program management blind.

To begin with, you should have a full marketing system and strategy already worked out before you start recruiting your affiliates. Recruiting affiliates should only be part of your marketing efforts, and good affiliates will want to know that you are making sales and growing your brand outside of just their work. They will also want to see that you already have marketing efforts underway that they can use and co-ordinate with.

Next, you're going to want to control the quality of affiliates that you work with. Instead of focusing on trying to gain as many affiliates as possible, you should focus on recruiting the highest quality affiliates that you can find. Affiliate management is always easier when you are dealing with less people of greater quality, rather than if you have to chase two thousand low quality affiliates who don't perform. One of the best way to attract and to keep your high quality affiliates is to offer plenty of incentives along the way, on top of their commissions, that reward great performance.

You also want to use affiliate program management software from the start. It's a little bit of an expense, especially since you might not be making much money for the first month or two, but it will help your affiliate program management proceed as quickly and smoothly as possible. A lot of times we're limited by our systems, so it's best to work with affiliate program management software that gives you an infinitely scalable system from day one.

Finally, you can always get in touch with other successful affiliate managers and get an idea of what they did that worked, and what they did that failed. This will give you the knowledge you need to make sure you don't repeat the most common affiliate management mistakes, which will give you a great head start in your efforts.