Performance Marketing News

I love to cook.  I don’t mean every day cooking like meatloaf and such.  I mean elaborate meals for all my friends.  4 or 5 course events with entirely home-made food that takes me days to put together.  Along with loving to cook, I love to watch cooking shows. My favorite isn’t so much a […]

So that is pretty much my brief run down of the networks I think you should get started with. I do recommend you working with all of them as they do have different merchants in each and each one offers something different than the other.

Overall, I hope this series has shown that you can't outright dismiss the importance of this group of affiliates. They drive an incredibly amount of sales, many are incredibly responsive, professional and really good people. Many of them I consider close friends and leaders in this field. Often times you can engage these affiliates in your couponing strategy and they can provide you with some great information and ideas. Afterall, they work with your competitors and they know what converts. They may prove to be very valuable partners.

It is becoming increasingly important to participate on these websites and take care of these partners. It's not so much about branding anymore, it's simply about sales. If you are where the consumers are, they will shop with you, if not, well then a better placed competitor will get the chance to close the sale.

Many of us in the affiliate community noticed that "affiliate marketing" was relatively new to this audience of bloggers. Some even said that 90% of the attendees had no idea what affiliate marketing is and how to get involved, let alone that they can use these relationships to monitize their blogs.

So, if you are not working with Zappos, let's get started today! Here is what you do, you can email me, with your CJ PID at jamie@jebcommerce.com. I'll extend an offer to you through CJ and Ned and I will do all we can to make sure you are successful this holiday season. If you have any questions or need any other help, just give me a call at 208-635-5164.

And there is the second benefit for affiliates, and merchants. Since the affiliate can use a direct link, they can then pass their link juice to the merchant. I have been told of affiliates that were able to acquire a few more points on commission in turn for using the ALE exclusively and direct linking to a specific merchant. More power to the affiliates here, and an added benefit for merchants.

Recently I had a discussion with my fellow panelists on our Pubcon panel and this issue was brought up. One thing we all agreed on, and I want to stress here is that our top producing affiliates, overwhelmingly, are those that we have long standing relationships with. Those that we know their phone numbers, their emails, their IM's. This is from a group of individuals that I would say have experience managing over 100 programs (total guess, I know I've managed over 35 myself).

That got me thinking about all the modifications the networks could make to the affiliate application process and approval queue. At the end of the day, the better and more efficient this process, the more likely the networks are to generate increased revenue. I'm sure they are missing out on commission just in Scott's case as I know he is top performer.

Along with the known affiliates applying to your program, there are hundreds and thousands of applications that come through that are either suspect, fraudulent or simply incomplete. If you are an affiliate manager reading this, you'll probably be nodding your head and maybe even have a chuckle. If you are an affiliate that seems to receive more denials than approvals when you apply to programs, this article is just for you. I'd like to highlight some of the things that managers see every day that you may be doing and need to avoid in order to get your applications approved.