As an affiliate manager, the more successful your affiliates are, the more successful that you are. Keeping that in mind, the more you help your affiliates, the more you are helping yourself.
Let’s take a look at a few ways to help your affiliates help you.
Provide them Resources
Providing your affiliates resources to help them become more successful is an integral part of being a successful affiliate manager. Whether you are an outsourced affiliate management company or an internal affiliate manager, you want to provide as many resources as possible to your affiliates.
Updated Banners / Links
Resources can come in many forms, but the two primary ones that I am going to discuss here are new banners / links and education materials.
Not having updated affiliate banners can kill an affiliate program very quickly. It is important to upload new banners / links for every new sale or promotion that is being ran on the website.
For example, Mothers’ Day is quickly approaching. If you are running Mothers’ Day sales, then why would you use the same banners that you use on an every day basis? The answer is that, you would not.
Create banners that reflect the Mothers’ Day sale. Include the sale amount (20% Off) and also include the holiday or reason behind the sale (Mothers’ Day Sale).
Educational Material
Another resource that can help your affiliates become more successful, and ultimately helping your success, is educational material.
Provide your affiliates more information about your company and your products. For example, if you are selling diamonds online, it would be a great idea to provide an overview of diamonds, how people choose diamonds, what people are looking for, etc. These educational materials can help affiliates create content about your products.
Also, providing information to your affiliates about your target demographic can be a huge help to them. Without knowing the end demographic, they will not know who they need to be targeting with their content and promotions.
Seasonal Topics / Content Ideas
If your business is cyclical, then that is something that you will want to share with your affiliates. Let them know ahead of time of low and high seasons.
For example, if your product is purchased more during the summertime because kids are out of school, then providing this cyclical information to your affiliates will help them in their content and promotional planning efforts.
If you are in the swimwear industry and your data tells you that people start purchasing new swimwear in March and April, this is great information to pass along to your affiliates.
Why?
As an affiliate, they may not know the purchasing data that you know and they may think that swimwear needs to be part of their June or July content planning and they ultimately miss out on a huge opportunity.
Along with the seasonal purchasing information, sending potential topic ideas for content creation can be useful for affiliates.
Industry News
Sharing industry related news with your affiliate is a simple way to help your affiliates understand the industry and potential trends. Knowledge is power and in affiliate marketing, knowledge can set an affiliate out from the rest and help them become a much more successful affiliate.
Be Responsive and Proactive
This should not have to be a tip, but unfortunately, lack of communication is very common. It is crucial to be responsive to any affiliate requests and to be proactive by answering questions before they are even asked. Also, providing as much information as an affiliate may need before they even need to ask you for the information.
Respond to all affiliate communications as soon as possible. Reach out to them with new offers, deals, coupons, etc before they can even reach out to you.
These were just a few ways to help affiliates help you. Being a successful affiliate manager is much more than just recruiting as many new affiliates as possible. It is also about building great relationships with your current affiliates and ensuring that you are doing everything in your power to help them succeed.
To learn more about ways to get affiliates excited, produce more content, send traffic, etc. check out Geno Prussakov’s session from Affiliate Summit West 2016 “Affiliate Activiation: 20 Ways to Get Them Cranking”