Comment to Win a Networking Plus Pass to Affiliate Summit East 2014

Have you seen Affiliate Summit‘s Tweet yesterday? In case you’ve missed it, it read:

Affiliate Summit is affiliate marketing industry’s largest affiliate conference which is a must-attend due to many benefits, including the amazing networking and educational content it provides. Speaking of the latter, I personally highly enjoy presenting at Affiliate Summits, and it is also the conference where I spoke for the largest number of times.  The upcoming Affiliate Summit East 2014 (to be held in New York City on August 10-12) will be my 11th time speaking there.

At the New York conference in August I will be speaking on the 5 Foundational Pillars of Affiliate Program’s Success, covering the five key processes which every affiliate (program) manager must devote their time to: affiliate recruitment, activation, policing, communication, and optimization [see also the video here].

5 Pillars of Affiliate Program Management

I also have 3 Networking Plus Passes (currently valued at $549.00 each, and giving you access to exhibit hall, Meet Market, keynotes, sessions 1, 5, 9, and all sessions’ videos after the show) to give away.

The idea behind the giveaway is simple — contribute a tip (or case study), and get a chance to be featured in my presentation and/or win one of the Affiliate Summit East 2014 passes that I have.

So…

Task: Share a great example or a brief case study of effective (affiliate manager’s) work in any of the above-quoted 5 areas.

Prizes: 3 Networking Plus Passes and/or visibility in/through my presentation.

Important: To allow the time for your travel/lodging arrangements, the deadline to submit your comment is Monday, July 21 (of course, you’re most welcome to comment after this date too, but those “submissions” won’t qualify you for the prize(s)). I will announce the winners no later than July 22, 2012.

Many thanks in advance for your participation, and looking forward to reading your comments!

6 thoughts on “Comment to Win a Networking Plus Pass to Affiliate Summit East 2014”

  1. I am currently the Affiliate Manager for a large UK based retailer in the sports industry that ships globally. The area that I have experienced real success with recently is on the recruitment side. Having recently launched an affiliate program in the US I have been trying to recruit fairly aggressively. As any Affiliate Manager will rightly know prospecting for new affiliate opportunities is a time consuming exercise especially if you want to venture outside of your network.

    Enter Linkdex Publisher Discovery…

    This is a phenomenal tool that has given me access to the affiliate networks that my main US competitors are working with giving me complete visibility on exactly who their affiliates are. I now have access to hundreds of new affiliates that I may never have found using tools such as Google search.

    I personally find recruitment to be toughest aspect of affiliate management. Linkdex has been a game changer for me!

  2. Great to hear you’re enjoying using our platform Chris,

    You’re totally correct – this is one of the most time consuming tasks; glad we’re helping to make it easier! 🙂

    Chris Tradgett

  3. I am currently in the process of helping create an offer and I think first and foremost the content optimization should be your biggest priority.

    Because content is the foundation for which all offers exist. If you focus on optimizing your affiliate program’s content this is a lot more valuable in helping the overall program management.

    This is true for the monetization strategies to work and helps better a recruitment pitch.

    Also keeping your content up to date and full optimization is the key to staying relevant.

    Sometimes I see programs/offers get too comfortable and they fall behind in their category and it’s hard to get back because they haven’t focused on this.

    Once that happens, you will lose the opportunity for earnings.

  4. Geno – Thank you so much for this great opportunity (crossing my fingers!).

    I’m the Affiliate Marketing Manager for FoodServiceWarehouse.com. My anecdote covers both the policing and communication pillars.

    My program is still pretty new (launched March 10, 2014), and I do not have any affiliate policing programs in place besides a weekly manual check where I visit all of my affiliates’ sites and make sure they’re representing my company and any deals accurately. While I will eventually pay for a program to do this for me, I do what I can for now.

    On one of these weekly checks in April, I noticed that a few coupon and CSE affiliates were advertising inaccurate promotions. Since they had violated my Program Terms, I decided that I ought terminate my relationship with these affiliates.

    My mistake was that I did not give the offending affiliates a chance to fix the problem. I set any and all affiliates who were advertising false deals (about 5 affiliates total) to terminate within the week and sent them honest but firm emails explaining why I had set them to terminate. …And in the process I came close to throwing a couple of babies out with the bath water!

    Fortunately all of these affiliates responded to me within a couple of days (before they were permanently terminated). They all claimed that they would take down the erroneous deals, and said they hoped they could stay in the program. At that point I had to do some damage control on how I had communicated with these affiliates. These were difficult emails for me – all those I had set to terminate seemed to be in earnest and I felt like the big bad wolf. Thinking of Geno’s advice in his latest book, I remembered to be as polite as possible, but still to be real with these affiliates, and true to myself in my communication style. With this in mind I asked for them to forgive me and gave them a chance to redeem themselves, too. Not all the affiliates were able to fix their sites in the time frame I had given them, but the several who followed through have become some of the best, highest converting affiliates in my program.

    I was glad that I had been vigilant and checked on my affiliates’ advertising tactics, and further proud of myself for being able to resolve at least some of the problematic situations. And apparently my communication style was effective enough to prevent affiliates who I had too hastily judged from quitting my program outright.

    The whole experience has made me more confident in my communications with affiliates, and has shown me how even very simple no-brainer policing tactics can reveal affiliates’ errors!

    Amelia Harman

  5. One of the most important steps you can take when policing your affiliate program is cracking down on affiliates who mooch off of your existing traffic, without adding anything substantial themselves.

    It’s imperative to disqualify PPC campaigns that target keywords like “discount” and “coupon.” Any referrals generated from these campaigns is likely from traffic that would have been yours anyways, which you now have to not only offer the discount on, but pay out to an affiliate as well.

    In addition to simply disqualifying those terms, it’s a great idea to simply set up a page on your own site as well that’ll capture the organic traffic from search engines. Here’s a great page from the experts themselves: http://www.affiliatesummit.com/affiliate-summit-coupon-codes/

    That’s a page set up to capture traffic from anyone who’s a sure buy anyways, who’s just googling around for an easy discount. Offering 5% off is an easy concession with a negligible impact on the bottom line, and they don’t need to pay out an affiliate.

    See you all at Affiliate Summit!

  6. Hi Geno,

    I would like to share my experience of affiliate management.

    I would like to talk about affiliate recruitment which is one of most important pillar of affiliate management. These are some tips for new or wannabe affiliate managers.

    1. Once you launched an affiliate program, don’t rely on auto pilot mode to recruit affiliates. If put your affiliate program in auto-pilot mode, you will mostly receive affiliate application with low traffic sites. The most assiduous task in an affiliate program is recruiting good quality affiliates. Don’t sit to let affiliates find you. You need to reach out them.

    2. Truth about Passive recruitment:
    If you are waiting for affiliates to let them find you then most of the joining requests would be from sites such as coupons, cashbacks, deals websites and content websites which may or may not be relevant to your niche.

    3. Affiliate recruitment tools/effective ways:
    Based on my experience with different affiliate network, these are most effective ways to recruit affiliates.

    3.a) Network ads and Internal Affiliate Recruitment Tool :
    I worked with different affiliate networks and I believe these are most effective tools to recruit affiliates.

    3.b)Recruiting Affiliates Outside network is not easy:

    For more than 6 months, I have been managing a program on Webgains as well. Unfortunately, during this six months time, there was no effective internal feature/tool available to recruit affiliates. The recruitment process was very difficult and I worked my fingers to the bones to recruit affiliates outside the network.

    I didn’t find directories submission much effective.

    I didn’t find forum listing much effective.

    I tried to contact many niche blogs that I found through Google. I have seen mixed responses. Sometimes positive http://prntscr.com/451pd7 and sometimes negative http://prntscr.com/451qh7 , and most of the time no response at all.

    I learned it’s easier to make people join your program who already using some kind of affiliate program. I searched affiliates on Twitter. And I find twitter very effective in recruiting affiliates. Here’s a little trick, search Affiliate network name + Keyword/product related to your niche. http://prntscr.com/451wvd 😉

    Ads on niche blogs and affiliate forums are effective.

    In your email, add a message to increase commission if the recipient affiliate joins your program before a deadline. Also talk about any kind of promotion you are running on affiliate program. If you do things right, you will see a reply like this. http://prntscr.com/451unr

    Thanks for reading this comment.
    Ishank

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