Here is a method we use to run better affiliate promotions.

affiliate promotions planning worksheet.I’m a huge fan of planning, processes, systems and worksheets.  In your day to day life, especially at work, there are so many different tasks that you do over and over again, that having a system in place is only a logical thing to do.  We employ over 150 processes in our JEBCommerce Affiliate Management system to manage our clients’ programs.  Within those processes, we have several different worksheets, one of them being our affiliate promotion planning worksheet.

I love worksheets.  Partly because they give me a sense of organization, focus me on the important items to be done or information to be gathered, but more importantly, they ensure I don’t miss a step in a particular activity.  This is all true for our worksheet in affiliate promotion planning.

My personality is such that I am very good at starting things, getting them off the ground and bringing a good strategy together while bringing a lot of energy to a project.  Detail, as I’ve said before, is not among my top 5 personality characteristics.  But please don’t read that as I am unable to get the details, I am.  But it’s the tools we use here that ensure we hit those details, and a worksheet is among the most valuable tools I’ve seen.  Details are extremely important in all business endeavors.  Because affiliate marketing is truly about relationships, sometimes affiliate managers, maybe you, definitely me, can forget the importance of those details.  I use a worksheet, maybe this will help you too.

When developing our worksheet, we took our experience in this area and outlined all the important things we need, all the information we need to gather, and created a worksheet around that.  Things such as:

  • Start date and end date
  • Target affiliate audience
  • Goal of promotion
  • Description
  • Affiliate registration or qualification process or guidelines
  • The actual rewards outlined
  • How I plan to communicate and sign up affiliates
  • Whether I need support materialsor not
  • How this is going to be tracked
  • When the award is going to be givin

We actually provide our MyAffiliateCoach students with this worksheet to use.  On this worksheet we also, briefly, list out the major do’s and dont’s in affiliate promotions, so as I, or one of our staff, are creating an affiliate promotion, they see on that worksheet the problems to avoid and the items to be sure to include.

This worksheet forces me to always focus on the things we need for each promotion.  Some promotions, as we have covered in previous posts (Customized Promotions, Proper Alignment of Affiliate Promotions, Common Mistakes) are done so badly that affiliates can’t take part.  You should survey your affiliates to hear from them, or better yet, listen to this podcast – Both Sides of the Track – Eric Nagel and Jason Rubacky discuss affiliate promotions.  It’s a solid discussion and I recommend it.  Use those types of tools to create your worksheet and become more consistent and dependable.  Your affiliates will reward you and your program will grow.

What do you think?