Affiliate Network Management

Affiliate network management can be a time consuming part of your online business. That’s why most people use something like the Clickbank affiliate program or Commission Junction, or a similar “full service” affiliate-based site. There are some real benefits with these sites. You don’t have to think about creating affiliate links, tracking you affiliate’s sales, or even paying out your affiliates’ commissions either. It’s all done automatically for you … and set up is generally pretty simple too.

These types of affiliate program management sites can be a good way for products owners who are just starting out to get a feel for what affiliate marketing can do for their businesses. But for the serious online business, they have some major drawbacks. Before I get into that though, let me just step back for newcomers and define affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketer is the term we use in the online world to describe someone who pitches, promotes and ultimately sells products that someone else has created (for a commission, of course). Affiliate marketers are online sales agents, and they can sell anything from e-books to computers to insurance and … well, just about anything that is sold via the internet can be sold through affiliates.

In affiliate marketing, you either have products to sell (the Vendor), or you want to promote someone else’s stuff (the Affiliate). Depending on the type of product, affiliate commissions can be as high as 75%, so there is definitely a lot of money to be made online by promoting other people’s products. But the real big money comes from selling your own products through a network of online, commission-based sales agents (aka, affiliates).

But to do that properly and effectively (affiliate network management) takes a bit of work. As I mentioned earlier, starting out with one of the full-service affiliate sites is a good way to get your feet wet, but ultimately not the best solution for most genuine business owners.

For one, you’ll get dinged with some pretty hefty “processing fees” (clickbank.com, for instance, takes nearly 10% of your sales!). That might not seem too bad if you’re just making a few hundred dollars worth of sales a month with your ebook, but if you’re running a high-revenue online business, those fees can run into the thousands of dollars a month.

More importantly though, with these full-service affiliate network management sites you have very little control, if any, over who your affiliates are, and usually no way to communicate directly with them in any detailed way. If you’ve ever managed an effective affiliate program, you know that communicating with your affiliates is crucial to overall success.

Affiliate Network Management 101

You, as the product owner, already know the most effective ways to promote your product (if you don’t, then you should!) and communicating this to your sales team, which is what your affiliates are, is absolutely essential to your success (and theirs too). Good affiliate program management usually involves some form of affiliate marketing training. It doesn’t have to be complex. It could be just some simple tips and pieces of advice about what you have found to work best in promoting your products.

And of course, you’ll want to provide affiliate marketing tools for your team as well – stuff like pre-written emails to send out to their list; articles about your product and industry; banners; product reviews, etc etc … all with your affiliate’s unique affiliate tracking ID embedded within them.

You can find affiliate management software out there to do all this for you. Yes, you can probably find free affiliate tracking software out there too, but in my opinion, properly managing your affiliate network is a cornerstone for your online business, and definitely worth investing a small amount of money and time in a quality system that provides both the security you need and the flexibility to grow and manage your affiliate sales team easily and effectively.

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Try the free affiliate program software included with the all-in-one FusionHQ internet marketing software.