By Adam Ward

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.