Whether working for a network or an advertiser, affiliate managers spend a lot of their time trying to recruit quality affiliates for their programs. Since recruiting is a two-way street, they also spend a lot of time vetting affiliates who want to join their programs, making sure they don’t accept the less-than-desirable publishers.

If you are an affiliate manager, here are some simple steps you can follow to ensure you’re accepting quality publishers into your program.

1. Look at the email address. Does it look legitimate? If the affiliate site is www.companyx.com, you would expect an email address to look like soandso@companyx.com. Many affiliates use gmail for their email, though, since they often manage many domains. In that case, you would expect that an email address including part of their name would be more legitimate than something like 49grd36@gmail.com. If the email looks questionable, move onto the next step.
2. Call the phone number. If you reach a business directory corroborating the company name, you should be fine. If you reach the person, ask questions to confirm the information they provided on the sign-up form. If they have trouble answering them, don’t accept them. If you get sent to voice mail, what type of a message is it? Is it a business message or a personal message? If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. To confirm your suspicions, move to the next step.
3. Check out the business address on Google Maps. Using Street View, you’ll be able to see whether the business is a building, a home, or an empty field.

Although there are many publishers that like to work under the shroud of secrecy for fear other publishers will steal their money-making ideas, more legitimate publishers realize they have nothing to hide. And since your affiliates will essentially be your business partners, wouldn’t you rather know who you’re dealing with and err on the side of caution?

                          

Acronyms abound in the online-marketing world: CPA, CPS, CPM, CTR, SEO, PR, CRO, etc. They are straight forward, except for when they aren’t. And since nobody knows where they originated from, everybody adopts their usages, even if they aren’t particularly intuitive. The term EPC seems to be one of those. It means earnings per click, right? Everybody will tell you that. But then why, when you sit down and calculate it, does it mean earnings averaged over a hundred clicks? And why don’t we then refer to it as EPHC? Or EPH?

What if, instead, the “C” is supposed to represent the Latin word for 100, or centum? There is a precedence there. After all, CPM stands for cost per mille, the Latin word for thousand. But none of us say that. If we refer to CPM without saying the acronym, we always just call it cost per thousand. Likewise, we’ll all continue to refer to EPC as earnings per click; but if anyone asks why it doesn’t really mean earnings per click, I think I’ll throw in the centum thing just to watch them scratch their heads harder.

                          

“And it’s so easy, it’s so easy, it’s just so easy, to do the goat dance. Yeah, but it’s so hard, it’s so hard, to love somebody, really love somebody.” -Greg Brown, So Hard

If affiliate marketing is the goat dance (whatever that is), then tracking statistics is loving somebody. In Feeling the Pain, I mentioned that one of the top frustrations for affiliate marketers is having to log into every network to access the tracking statistics from their affiliate programs. Everyone we talk to that runs on more than one affiliate network tells us what a hassle that is.

So that begs the question of why it is so hard to aggregate those statistics. Certainly, companies have built databases for personal use that aggregate statistics across multiple networks, and some have even done it for commercial use. But they will tell you it is hard, and not a panacea. When you understand what they have to do, you begin to understand why.

First, there are only so many ways you can pull data from a database. If you have direct access to the database and know what report to run (or write), it is easy. But no network is going to give a publisher or advertiser direct access to their database. Instead, your access is either going to come from an Application Programming Interface (API) that was written and authorized by the network, viewing the reports through a Web browser (which you may or may not be able to export to your hard drive), or from the network pushing the report to you via FTP or email.

APIs

Let’s look at APIs first. APIs are great if you can get them. By writing an API, a network essentially tells developers what parts of their database they can access, and provides the vocabulary for them to pull the data they are looking for. So if every network had an API, a developer could easily use those APIs to pull all the tracking statistics into your own database, which you could then run consolidated reports from.

Here are the problems, though. First, not all networks have APIs. Even if they aren’t opposed to having you get your information that way (it is your data, after all), they have to take the time and effort to write the APIs. That includes documentation on what APIs are available, and what the data structures, object classes, protocols, etc. are used in them. Second, if they do have APIs (yes, there will most likely be multiple APIs), they may not be written using the same protocol. The same network can have some APIs that use Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and others that use Representational State Transfer (REST). That drives developers nuts. Third, even if they have some APIs, they may not have them for everything you are looking for in your consolidated report. That means you either have to forego that desired information, or you pull it in with a scrape.

Scrapes

A scrape refers to creating a program that will go to a website, log in as a user with a username and password, go to a particular page on the site, run any necessary reports, and harvest the results of those reports into a database outside the site. This happens automatically, perhaps on a daily basis. This sounds fine, considering you ostensibly should be able to pull all the information you have access to as a real user logging in.

Except for these problems. First, companies don’t particularly like non-humans logging into their sites. They may employ software tools to thwart hackers, which could restrict access. Just because an application can scrape the site today doesn’t mean it will have access tomorrow. And even if it does, it relies on everything staying the same on the site. If the website changes to where the report shows up in a different place, or with a different name, the data pulled from the scrape could be missing, or worse, replaced with incorrect data. That means your developer has to constantly be tweaking your report. And third, unlike APIs, networks don’t have any control over what information you’re pulling from their databases. Besides not liking that, it may be in violation of their terms of service.

The Good News

As we’ve talked to networks about data aggregation, we have yet to have one tell us they are opposed to it.

The Bad News

Just because they aren’t opposed to it, networks don’t seem to have a big enough incentive yet to help out with the effort, short of some of them providing APIs. Even though their customers are all clamoring for it, they aren’t leaving the network over it. After all, where would they go?

                          

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about designing effective business cards. Even though creativity is important (and usually what people talk about when they give tips on making business cards), I argued that a card needs to be functional.

Our company recently rolled out a new business card, and just to show that I follow my own advice, I’m posting images of the card here.

Although the front is glossy and uses dark colors, the back is not. We made the back easy for people to find our contact information, write notes on it, and run it through a card scanner. We tested it in our scanner and it picked everything up just fine. We opted out of putting our address on it, because as an Internet company we don’t get much foot traffic (and our website clearly shows people how to find us if they want to).

We had fun with the front. We think it is catchy, will be easy to remember, is consistent with our website design, and shows people (we hope) that our product helps them with their contact management.

The only tip we didn’t follow was putting our mugs on the front. We debated it, but ultimately decided the “hello my name is” sticker effect would give us more traction than our faces.

I’m curious to hear what you think of our new card.

                          

The term “affiliate marketing” conjures up a lot of images for different people. To some, it conjures up a work-from-home-in-your-undies picture. To others, it is synonymous with online fraud. Even to those who know it is used by legitimate businesses to make legitimate sales, they often think it somehow doesn’t have to follow the same discipline as traditional marketing.

Affiliate marketing is, after all, marketing. It is just a different flavor, just like TV ads and print ads are different flavors of advertising. Sure, one may use a different medium, and have different terminology, but both try to build brands and drive sales.

Sales don’t just happen. Businesses spend a lot of time and money figuring out who their customers are, how to most efficiently convince those customers they should be buying their products, and what the proper triggers are that will get them to actually buy. They then develop well-trained sales teams to implement their proven sales strategies.

So it strikes me as more than a little reckless when these same companies, thinking that an affiliate program can increase their online sales, decide to dabble in affiliate marketing without giving it the same consideration as their other marketing efforts. They might think that because they only pay when they see results, there is little harm if nothing comes of their testing the waters.

However, there is always a cost. Advertisers have to hire an affiliate manager to run their programs, re-task an existing employee to do it, or hire an outsourced program manager to run it for them. They need to buy tracking software, develop it in-house, or join an affiliate network. None of those options is cheap.

Based on the number of new advertisers joining networks (AffiliateTip reported that LinkShare has added nearly 200 advertisers so far this year), we’re going to see more and more advertisers jumping into affiliate marketing. So for those advertisers, here’s some advice: treat your affiliate marketing efforts the same as your other marketing efforts.

1. Do your research. If you already know who your customers are, figure out where they are online. Just like you would be more likely to place print ads in magazines that cover your desired demographic, there will be some websites that are frequented by more of your customers than other sites. Do those sites run affiliate ads on their sites? If so, what networks do they belong to?
2. If you don’t already know, figure out your margins. Online publishers (your affiliates), will not only want to run your ads if they think they’ll see a high conversion rate, but also if they think you’re generous in your commissions. Since you can’t be profitable paying more commissions than you can afford, figure out how much you can pay before you start your affiliate program.
3. If your competitors are running affiliate programs, figure out what they are paying in commissions. Can you beat that? Are there websites running your competitors’ ads? If so, those websites might be more eager to run your ads than if you’re pushing an untested program.
4. Be prepared to treat your affiliates well. You can think of them as special customers, crucial business partners, indispensible distributors, or whatever. But the fact is they will be pushing sales your way. They may even pay money out of their own pockets to drive traffic on behalf of your program. If you communicate well with them, are open and honest in your dealings, and take care of them, they will want to work with you, even if you may not pay as much as others. Remember that they have limited ad space on their sites, and possibly hundreds of advertisers wanting their ads in that space.
5. Transfer the best practices you’ve established in your offline marketing to your online marketing efforts. Give your affiliate marketing team the tools they need to be successful in their jobs.

Although there is certainly a learning curve with affiliate marketing, if you view it as a legitimate source for new revenue, you’re much more likely to be satisfied with your results than if you just jump in to test the water.

                          

If you are a business toying with advertising your products online through an affiliate program, you should know what an affiliate manager does, since you (or whoever manages that program in your company) will soon assume that title.

Getting Started

First, you’ll need to decide what your “program” is. This is basically taking a product you sell online, deciding how much commission (and for how long) you can afford to pay to affiliates that refer people who buy that product, and making sure you’ve got banner or text ads that those affiliates will place on their sites.

Second, you’ll need to get your program listed on an affiliate network (see An Advertiser’s Guide to Placing Ads in Traditional and Online Media). If you plan on running your program “in-house” (i.e. you won’t list it on a network), you’ll first need to have your own tracking system in place (see Newspaper Ad-Tracking Systems vs. Online Ad-Tracking Systems).

Once you have your program up and running, you’ll now need to attract affiliates to your program, make sure they actually run your ads on their sites, and then monitor the traffic they send you. This is broken down into three “ings,” which are Recruiting, Implementing, and Optimizing.

Recruiting (i.e. getting affiliates to join your program)

If your program is listed on an affiliate network, you can log into the network and browse the list of publishers in that network. Publishers will list the market verticals most compatible with their content, and include a description of their sites. If you see any publishers that you think would be a good fit for running your ads, you can contact them to introduce your program. Some networks want all such communications to take place within their software. Others provide contact information that you can use to communicate with prospective affiliates outside of their software.

You will also recruit by trolling websites you think would be good fits, and scrubbing them for contact information. Most contact information you’ll find consists of an email address, rather than phone number, so sending emails to prospects will be the primary means for recruiting. Once an affiliate joins your program, that publisher is no longer a prospect, but an affiliate.

Implementing (i.e. getting affiliates to actually run your ads)

Just because affiliates join your program doesn’t mean they will run your ads on their sites. In fact, roughly 90 percent of affiliates who join programs don’t end up running ads for those programs. Publishers have limited real estate for ad placement on their sites, and they want to make sure they fill those spots with the ads that will make them the most money. It is now up to you to convince them that your ad will convert better and be more lucrative to them than ads from the other programs they have joined. So you will need to continue following up with your affiliates. If they haven’t implemented your program, ask them why, and see if you can solve their concerns.

Optimizing (i.e. getting results from your ads)

Once affiliates start running your ads, you’ll want to make sure they are converting well. If publishers see ads that don’t make them money, you can’t blame them for replacing them with ads they think will convert better. Also, you may have two affiliates with similar websites and traffic, and yet one sends you much more traffic than the other. You’ll want to figure out why that is. Does your creative need tweaking? Is placement on the site an issue? Could someone else be stealing your traffic? Regardless, you need to continue to communicate with your affiliates to make sure both you and they are happy with your relationship.

If you make any changes to your program, such as payouts, specials that are time-sensitive, etc., make sure you let your affiliates know. They will appreciate your efforts to not only make their websites look good, but also make them the most money possible.

Additional Exposure

In affiliate marketing, where even large companies can have just a few people managing their affiliate programs, marketing yourself is almost as important as marketing your brand or program. As such, you will probably be blogging, be an active participant on online forums, and attend trade shows.

                          

Most people are passionate about something. Call it a hobby, or an addiction, or whatever. But it is something they spend a lot of time, energy and money on. Think about your passion for a minute. Now wouldn’t it be nice for you to actually make a little money from your passion, to offset what you spend on it? Maybe you could even develop it into a full-time career. Although it will take a lot of work, there has never been a better time to make money from your passion, thanks to the abundance of free, easy-to-use tools on the Internet. Here are three steps to get you started.

First, start blogging about your passion. Think about it—where do you currently get information about your hobby? Probably the Internet. How many blogs do you read where you think, “I know more about this than the blogger does.”? Starting a blog is as easy as creating an account on Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. You’ll want to make sure you have the flexibility of putting ads on your blog, though, so I suggest buying a domain (e.g. unicycleexpertadvice.com) and a hosting account from GoDaddy (less than $10 a month), and then installing Wordpress from within GoDaddy (it is free and easy to do).

Second, once you’ve got some posts on your blog, put up some ads. This is easier than it sounds. Think about the companies that sell products you use, would recommend, or might be blogging about. Go to their websites and search for “affiliate.” A lot of times you’ll see a link at the bottom of the page called Affiliate Program. That refers to you joining their affiliate marketing program (i.e. you become their affiliate), which is just a funny way of saying you’ll run their ads on your blog. If they run an “in-house” program, you’ll need to submit your blog information with them so they can accept you into the program. If they run their program through an affiliate network, such as Commission Junction or Share a Sale, they’ll require you to submit your blog information to those networks. Either way, there will be no cost to you. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be given some html code that you have to copy to your blog. That places the ad on your blog, and includes a script that tracks people clicking through your ad. Whether in-house or via a network, the program will track click-throughs and sales, so you get credit for (and paid a commission on) those sales.

Third, use CRM software to manage your efforts. CRM stands for customer relationship management, and is useful for recording contact information of people you are (or would like to be) doing business with, logging communications you have with them, and scheduling your tasks and follow-ups. There are a lot of CRM companies out there, but a few have a free tier, including freecrm.com, sugarcrm.com and esilverbullet.com, which is designed specifically for online publishers.

Before my dad retired, he sold pet food for his living. He once told me he knew more about dog food than anyone in our state. Had he been a blogger, you can imagine how useful his blog would have been for all the dog owners out there. And you can imagine how eager the dog-food companies would have been to place their ads on his blog. If you know more about something than most people do, you could create the same situation for yourself by blogging about it and placing relevant ads on your site.

                          

I’ve written previously about using affiliate networks to advertise online. Although running ads through multiple networks can compound problems for advertisers, online publishers have more of an incentive to join multiple networks.

So the question of which networks to join comes up frequently. And that question is often followed by, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a list somewhere of all the affiliate networks out there?” Well, yes it would be great. And I’m working on building that list. Since putting a list like that on this blog would be too static, I’ve built the list on Squidoo. The Affiliate Networks Directory there allows anyone to add a network that isn’t already on the list. My hope is that Squidoo visitors (which are a lot more than this site gets) will help keep the list current.

We first put together an internal list of networks last year. When I was recently adding it to Squidoo, I checked each website to see whether the network was still in existence. I found 34 that weren’t in business anymore. There are probably at least that many new ones that have started up since then, which are not on the Squidoo list.

With such high turnover, it is wise for any advertiser or publisher to do their due diligence before joining a network. Ask around to find out how long they have been in business, whether people on the network have complained about fraud or lack of payments, etc. At the very least, do a Web search for that company name, to see if anything comes up. The last thing you want to deal with is a network owing you money, but shutting down before you have a chance to get any of it.

                          

Traffic flows both ways, though, and by failing to think of the traffic leaving their sites, they may not be using their online marketing dollars as effectively as they could be.

A couple of months ago I attended a panel discussion where Tony Zito, CEO of MediaForge, said merchant webpage abandonment is 98 percent (i.e. only 2 percent of visitors buy anything) and shopping cart abandonment is 80 percent (which means only 20 percent of visitors who started pulling out their wallets finished the transaction). He said most of the people who get to a merchant’s website (the traffic that their SEO and keyword purchases bought) leave product pages to go out to blogs and social media sites to find reviews on those products. Can you imagine 80 percent of customers in a Target shopping center wheeling their carts to the checkout line, only to leave them there and walk out of the store to ask whoever is standing outside whether they should buy such-and-such a product? Crazy. And yet that is exactly what happens online.

Savvy merchants allow reviews of their products on their own sites, but people are naturally distrusting of those comments, even when written by consumers who probably have no financial tie to the company. The irony is that the “independent” bloggers who review that company’s products on an external site (the very blogs where potential customers land after leaving a product site looking for “unbiased” reviews) are probably getting compensated for writing those reviews. Although federal regulations now require bloggers to disclose financial compensation for products they review (see Jeremy Shoemaker’s disclaimer where he says he benefits “financially or otherwise from everything [readers] click on, read, or look at” on his site), many readers ignore those disclaimers.

I’m not saying it is wrong for bloggers to benefit financially from pushing merchants and products. Quite the contrary: right or wrong, consumers trust the bloggers, so the bloggers should be compensated for the value they bring. In fact, I am saying that online businesses should allocate even more money and resources to these bloggers and review sites. Since that usually comes in the form of affiliate marketing (i.e. the merchant creates an affiliate program for a product, a blogger joins the program by running trackable ads for that merchant on his or her blog, and gets compensated for each sale made thanks to the consumer clicking through the ad prior to the sale), these businesses should increase their affiliate-marketing efforts.

Merchants engaged in affiliate marketing often lump those dollars with expenses used for SEO and paid searches. Although affiliate marketing is great for driving new eyeballs to the merchant’s site (like SEO and searches), it is also a great tool for capitalizing on lost traffic. Regardless of how potential customers got to a merchant’s site, once they leave, it isn’t the SEO that is going to get them back. They’ll come back 1) if they find what they are looking for (i.e. a favorable review on the blog) and 2) if the blog they’re on makes it easy for them to get back. By merchants making sure they have an ad on that blog, they are increasing the chances that the consumer will get back to their site and finish their purchases.

To do this, merchants should put themselves in the shoes of their consumers. For each product they sell, they should do a search for that product and see what the top blogs or reviews for that product are. If there are negative reviews, that’s a separate product issue that they’ll need to deal with. But if there are favorable reviews, the merchant needs to make sure they have an ad on that site, ready to redirect the consumer back to their own site. By doing this, merchants are essentially using affiliate marketing programs to cast a wide safety net to catch potential consumers who stray from their site. Getting back to the Target example, that’s like anyone in the store’s parking lot telling the wayward shopper that not only are the items in the abandoned cart good, but also walking the shopper back to the front of the checkout line to finish buying the goods.

If just a small portion of the 80 percent of abandoned shopping carts come back to buy, that’s money well spent on bloggers.

                          

The other day I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that explained why so many creative people have trouble executing their ideas. It mentioned the oft-quoted “genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” The trouble with really creative people, it said, is they often lack the discipline to see ideas through to the finish. They have so many ideas that they only develop an idea so far before getting distracted and abandoning it for another idea.

I love creative people. I think they add spice to the world. Unfortunately, the world usually benefits from their creativity only if their ideas make it to fruition. So in an attempt to support the creative people of this world, here are some ideas to help even the most undisciplined person be more productive.

1. Set goals. Mentioning “goals” to creative people probably generates groans and eye rolling. Goals are limiting, whereas ideas need to be free-flowing and open, right? But the fact remains that people who set goals are much more likely to reach them than those who don’t. Goals can be specific or general, but at least they create a self-imposed timeline and benchmark that you can work toward. So even if you start to get distracted, every time you look at your goals, it helps to bring your focus back to your idea. Eye on the prize, right? Of course, that assumes that A) you write your goals down and B) you review those goals often. Failure to do either of those things reduces the likelihood of you ever reaching your goal.
2. Use a calendar. Calendars are cheap. Every PC, Mac or smart phone has one on it. Electronic calendars are the best because they can alert you when you’ve got a deadline. If you break the goal into small steps, then set targets for those steps on your calendar, you can establish those at the very beginning, when you’re excited about the idea. You can then let the calendar’s reminders do their jobs at keeping you on track.
3. Use a task manager. Task managers are even better than calendars in that they require you to mark one action as finished while scheduling the next action, all at the same time. This forces you to constantly be working toward the next step. A good task manager will allow you to do this in just seconds, so you don’t feel like you’re “working” too hard.
4. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Although a CRM tool is overkill for individuals that are working alone, such as painters or software programmers working on their own projects, if your work affects other people, either people you collaborate with or potential customers, CRM systems provide not only calendars and task managers, but also ways to keep track of communications with the people who will benefit from your creativity. They let you keep notes on your ideas, so when you do come up with ideas outside the scope of your current project, you can jot those down, knowing you can come back to them once you’ve finished riding your current wave of creativity.
5. Share with a small group. If you let a select group of people—such as friends, co-workers or family members—know what you are working on, they can help keep you on task. They can review your work as you step through the process, give feedback, provide support and encouragement, etc. You’re more likely to stay focused and productive if you know you’re not the only one looking forward to the finished product.