I'm interested in hearing from any of you who have or currently do affiliate program management for your clients.

I'm currently working on putting together an affiliate program for one of my clients and will basically be managing all of it from recruiting, to managing the commissions and payouts, communicating with affiliates, providing marketing tips and materials to affiliates, etc. I've been doing quite a bit of research on it and I'm pretty excited to get it up and running.

I'd love to hear what tasks you do as an affiliate manager, what tips you might have, what processes you've set up and basically other things to watch out for or any kind of "good to know" type of information.

Also, I'd be interested to hear what software, program or online service you or your client is using to manage their program and what your opinion of that it.

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Kimberly
Facebook Marketing Magic!

Hi Kim,

Is it too late to answer your question?

I've been managing an affiliate program on Commission Junction for the past year. It's easy to use but it's expensive. My client is not renewing her contract at the end of this month. She just doesn't have a strong enough Brand to make it worthwhile. Plus, the publishers have the option of not receiving emails from their advertisers. So, I'd send out an email campaign to all of our publishers (2000+) and maybe 100 would open the email. Of those, maybe we'd get 70 who would promote us. That is very frustrating.

I bought Alice Seba's Affiliate Manager Sweetie and it's very good. I tried to implement her suggestion to set up an affiliate training area as a way to keep in touch with our affiliates as well as provide tips to new affiliates to help them promote us. That didn't work well for me because our affiliates wouldn't open our emails. But, if you're running your own affiliate program it might be worth considering to provide guidance to your affiliates. Keep in frequent touch with them. Offer to help them if they are new and not sure how to promote you. This is really key. If your affiliates don't promote you properly then nobody makes money. Plus, you don't want your affiliates to become discouraged and stop promoting you. I highly recommend Alice Seba's book if you don't have it.

I also recommend you check out abestweb forum. It's a forum strictly for affiliates and affiliate managers. It's very helpful and chock full of great advice and suggestions.

Feel free to connect with me if you'd like to discuss further.

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Shari Sultana
Online Business Manager (marketing for retail ecommerce)

Thanks, Shari.

Yes, I've checked out abestweb forum and I agree, it is a great place to find out information about running an affiliate program. We are still working on getting the affiliate program up. We decided to buy and will install iDevAffiliate on my client's backend to run the program ourselves. We briefly considered ShareaSale but wanted to see if we could go with our own branded thing first. I've been working on putting together a list of potential affiliates in his target markets and I completely agree with you that it will be important to have good communication with affiliates as well as offer them ideas for how to promote us.

I will check out Alice Seba's book. I also downloaded a free e-book which had many of the same tips with specific ideas on how to implement them. I think my client has a good product that lends itself well to an affiliate program.

I appreciate your response to this and will certainly shoot you an email with any other questions I might have.

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Kimberly
Facebook Marketing Magic!