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Who Should
Be Your Affiliates?
Affiliate
marketing is a form of performance marketing, where people get
paid only when certain actions occur. If you are considering starting
an affiliate program for your business, one of your most important
decisions will be whether to build your own program or to contract
with a provider that specializes in administering and marketing
affiliate programs.
In most cases, it's a smart decision to examine the available
performance marketing companies and pick one that offers you solutions
to your program needs. It's expensive, time consuming and difficult
to set up and administer your own program, even if you have a
lot of financial resources and skilled people.
Performance
marketing companies, including Be Free, Commission Junction, LinkShare,
ClickTrade and Dynamic Trade, have already developed systems that
work well for most needs. They also have existing relationships
with many thousands of websites so that they can help you develop
an effective network of affiliates quickly.
ClickTrade,
for example, has 120,000 affiliates who may consider your program.
Acquisition is fast and easy and (relatively) cheap. Affiliate
networks might charge $1 per member plus another 20% commission.
Obtaining affiliates for $1.20 each contrasts well with the costs
involved in sending out direct mail pieces. Costs can range as
high as $20 dollars per affiliate, though, so make sure you understand
the costs involved when you design your program.
A
potential problem for small businesses is that they can deliver
too many affiliates! Make sure that whatever you do stays within
the budget you've established for this effort, or you can find
yourself in the million dollar ranges pretty quickly.
They
can connect you with websites that cater to the market you are
trying to reach. These websites offer content that will attract
your target market and may have detailed profiles of their visitors.
These companies can also track your results, provide professional
assistance and save significantly on the number of people in your
organization involved with an affiliate marketing program.
What
happens after you choose a performance marketing company?
Be
Free, for example, offers you an implementation engineer to set
up your program, then an account manager to handle your ongoing
affiliate account. Make sure that any company you partner with
offers sufficient training so that you can easily use your new
affiliate program and keep updated with changes that occur.
What
kinds of additional services do performance marketing companies
offer?
In addition to the promotion that performance marketing companies
do, they can also provide administration of your program. That
means they can cut the checks and you won't have to devote your
people (or yourself) to preparing and mailing out 15,000 checks
once a month or once a quarter. Most of these companies provide
web-based reporting and analysis of your results, so that you
can quickly and easily see what's working and what isn't. You
can also contract with them to answer your emails from affiliates
and to launch promotional campaigns.
Even with the help of performance marketing companies, you need
to have significant input into your affiliate program. You know
your business better than anyone else does. That means you know
who your customers are, and who you'd like to get as new customers.
It's possible to get lost in a crowd of 7,000 affiliate programs,
so consider performance marketing companies to be assistance for
your affiliate program, not the driving force.
BeFree:
http://www.befree.com/ Be Free is explicit: You own your relationships
with each of the affiliates.
In some other models, you do not have "ownership" of your relationship
with your affiliates. This allows you to build the value of your
brand name and your sales channel.
ClickTrade
http://www.clicktrade.com/
Commission
Junction http://www.cj.com/
Dynamic
Trade http://www.dynamictrade.com/
LinkShare
http://www.linkshare.com/ The oldest and the largest network
affiliate program. Some clients include 1-800-Flowers, Borders.com,
Dell Computers, Disney Online, CBS SportsLine, OfficeMax, Outpost.com,
and The Sharper Image
-Cindy
Nemeth-Johannes
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