This is one of my favourite phrases: “Management is everything.” If you launch an affiliate program or a performance marketing channel, and you don’t have intensive, competent affiliate management behind it, it’s likely not going to “gain traction” unless you are a huge Fortune 500 retailer that’s never done affiliate marketing before, then it might grow on its own. But otherwise, it needs a lot of doting upon and lots of TLC. You need very proactive affiliate management in place to both grow it and manage the affiliates as well as possible. Whomever handles your affiliate management, or is working with your partners, needs to do a very intensive job and really take it extremely seriously, it really is a seven day a week type of position. You need to encourage your affiliates to contact you to discuss the program or they won’t. Most affiliate programs aren’t managed intensively enough in my opinion, mainly because the affiliate managers in place don’t have the background or experience to effectively work with affiliates of all experience levels, on a personal level. Simply getting them their tracking link isn’t enough!
Want your Affiliates to Succeed – make it worth their time, make it worth their efforts, if you just look at as just another campaign, then don’t even bother because you really have to put a lot of love into it, blood, sweat, and tears in order to get the most out of your performance marketing in your affiliate channel. Facilitating your affiliates and partners with good management, i.e. tools, with resources, providing them content, original content, about your company, keywords, non-trademark keywords or even trademark keywords depending on your stance, to let them succeed and market effectively.