Affiliate Program Management

Affiliate Program Software – Options to Consider

In my post on the affiliate program setup expenses to be aware of I have mentioned that not all affiliate programs are based on affiliate networks. Many are being run in house: on self- or remotely hosted (and sometimes even internally-developed) software. Amazon and eBay, for example, run their affiliate […]

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Affiliate Program Start / Setup Expenses

After receiving my pricing, a prospective client, who is looking for an outsourced affiliate program manager (OPM), wrote: I wanted to know whether there would be any other fees that I should be considering? I suppose the software companies like Linkshare and others, would charge a fee also. Are those

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Parasitic / Adware Affiliates Hinder Affiliate Program Growth

I have been thinking and discussing the issue of parasitic affiliates a lot over the past 40 hours (since the publication of this post, and the recording of this video), and there are 2 things that stand out to me as the main downsides of having a parasitic/adware adware affiliate

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Programs on Multiple Networks: Parasites Hurt All

Earlier this morning I published an article on Econsultancy.com where I talked about the problem of parasitism in affiliate marketing, and channel cannibalization, and how it should not be viewed as a problem for affiliate marketers only, but be tackled on a much wider scale. As I was adding more

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Google Suggest Now Helps Prevent Trademark Poaching

…at least to a degree (and this is good to see). Back in May of this year when Google Suggest got links to the main/official websites added to the lists of suggested search phrases, I am pretty positive they did not have affiliate marketing in mind. The feature was certainly

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Locking Periods and Lock Dates in Affiliate Marketing

With common regularity both affiliates, and merchants wonder what is a commission locking period. Let’s take ShareASale (SaS) for one example. On this affiliate network for every transaction in their reports merchants see a “lock date” (see example below): Affiliates, on the other hand, see both the “lock date”, and

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Affiliate Marketing Program is Like a Lawn Mower

Building a successful affiliate program is in many ways akin to lawn mowing. The mower symbolizes your affiliate program, whereas the lawn is the market. There are three integral elements without which the lawn cannot be mowed effectively, even with the presence of the mower. They are: (i) fuel, (ii)

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Newsletter Encourages Affiliate to Get Active

Some of you may remember my “Back to the Question of Affiliate Newsletters” post made earlier this month where I expressed my gratitude to an affiliate that called my newsletter “personal, intriguing, well written,” and one which she has never received from any other CJ-based merchant. Yesterday this same affiliate

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Cookie Retention Study Reveals Important Data

Really interesting results of a study on cookie retention have been published in one of the Sun Microsystems blogs yesterday. In his “Web Analytics Analyzed” blog Paul Strupp has revealed the following chart which demonstrates “what percent of users returning after X days on the same computer still have the

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