A frequent reader of my blog has e-mailed me a question which I would like to address today. He wrote: For an affiliate program to be deemed successful, what percentage of overall company sales should it be doing. From previous experiences and talks with other AM’s, it’s my understanding that […]
What Percentage of Sales Can An Affiliate Program Bring? Read More »
I was doing a competitive analysis of vertical-specific affiliate programs for a client, and had to read through some 25 affiliate program descriptions. Here are the 5 common problems that I have noticed being repeated by different merchants: 1) Missing Information Many merchants leave out such important information as (i)
5 Common Problems in Affiliate Program Descriptions Read More »
A few days ago a friend of mine was terminated from an affiliate program of a Fortune 100 merchant which is run on an affiliate network, and managed by the network itself. I do not want to focus on the names here (no matter how much I wish to do
Affiliate Terminated by Nameless "Affiliate Team" Read More »
Now that you know what banner sizes you want to cover, it is important to know what mistakes to avoid while creating the banners for your affiliate program. Apart from the lack of 88×31 buttons and seasonal banners (preferably dynamically renewing depending on what holiday is approaching), there are mistakes
10 Mistakes to Avoid While Creating Affiliate Banners Read More »
This is a very important question regardless of whether you are going to market products or services through the affiliate channel. If it is the former, you will pay a lot of attention to deep-linked text links, conveniently formatted and well-categorized data feed, but you will have to have both
What Size Banners Should an Affiliate Program Have? Read More »
Several days ago a merchant has contacted me with a good question. They have decided to build an in-house affiliate program, but they do not want to mess with payments, and would much rather outsource the payment part to a third party. So, if they manage their program in-house, track
Outsourced Affiliate Payment Solutions Read More »
Throughout my own affiliate program management practice, and examining other affiliate managers’ styles and techniques, I have noticed that all successful AMs and OPMs* exhibit the three characteristics that I believe to be the key components of success (not only in affiliate program management, but in any management/leadership). If you
Three R's of Affiliate Program Management Success Read More »
Double dipping — used in the classic context of a merchant running an affiliate program on two (or more) affiliate networks — is an instance when an affiliate receives their commission twice (or, figuratively speaking, dips his/her cracker into the commission sauce twice): on each of the two (or more)
Double Dipping in Affiliate Marketing Read More »
Today I’ve read an good article by Nigel Nicholson in the Harvard Business Review 81 (1) of 2003. In it, the author looks into the question of motivating “problem people.” Looking at manager-employee relationship in the traditional management context, he described his recipe for working with employees that are neither
Nicholson's Motivation Method & Affiliate Context Read More »
Amazon has announced earlier today that they starting from May 1 2009 they are prohibiting affiliates from engaging in direct-to-merchant (DTM) paid search campaigns. The exact wording of the letter is as follows: After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to
Amazon Prohibits Affiliates from DTM PPC Read More »