I saw this response on ABestWeb a while back, and apologize that I don’t have that thread included here, sorry.  This person responded to a termination letter they received because they had no clicks or sales in that particular program.  His response is a perfect reason why you don’t remove affiliates based on inactivity.  I have differing views on this, but for now, let’s explore his response:

Question from an affiliate:  “Why would I have links up that produce no clicks, much less sales?

Answer: To make my site much more extensive in scope to produce repeat visits. Lots of variety (diversity) as opposed to a just an extension of a single merchant or small group of merchants. I have one niche site with over 25 merchants, all within the niche. Would be nice if they all produced sales, and maybe they will someday if I can ever get the traffic. But for now they don’t. Yes, this waters down the selling power for any one merchant but its what I need to do in order to have an edge. Otherwise, it’s one sale and done.

This is another reason for going with SAS. Very few merchants drop you for low activity.”

I won’t address the comment on ShareASale (SAS), because I don’t think this issue has anything to do with any network at all.  Affiliate managers look at these affiliates with no clicks and no sales as just sitting there doing nothing, maybe using resources they could allocate towards producing affiliates (activation campaigns), and simply accounts they need to get rid of to “clean up”.

In my history I have performed many activation campaigns that ended up with removal of hundreds of affiliates, if not thousands because of in-activity.  And now running an outsourced affiliate management agency for some years, I can say that we haven’t removed affiliates simply because they haven’t generated clicks or sales yet.  Why?

It’s pretty simple.

(I like lists, can you tell?)

1. Many affiliates, and many good ones at that, join many programs each month.  And any affiliate is welcome to correct me.  They apply to an affiliate program with an eye for what “could be” and what they could do with that advertiser.  It’s a moment filled with promise.  Affiliates are very entrepreneur minded, so they have many of these moments every day.  I’m like that too, but I rarely get to them all.  But, with proper education, some brainstorming and relationship building, they and you may find the time to take the partnership to the next level.  But it may take a long time for it to work out, but it could.  No reason to limit the future opportunities.
2. It’s a waste of time.  I’d rather work on growing current producing affiliates, creating new offers and promotion and work on “moving the needle” rather than kicking out affiliates.
3. You get a bad rap.  Reputation can really be everything in the affiliate industry, and removing a potentially well known, vocal and successful affiliate isn’t worth the tarnish of your brand.
4. Like the reader says, many affiliates need the breadth of product to become their product.  It may not work out well for you in that particular instance as their shoppers are purchasing elsewhere, but it may be going the other way on another site.

I’ve worked with thousands of affiliates, both online and offline over the last 12 years.  I can count tens of examples of affiliates lying dormant in a program only to seemingly suddenly start producing sales out of nowhere.  Why?  Besides the reasons above, sometimes it just took them two years to get to my program.  Why remove this possibility when the cost for not removing them is so low?

Many advertisers/merchants that come to us are in the midst of determining whether they want to hire someone internally to manage their program, or find an outsourced affiliate management agency like JEBCommerce.  It’s a very common question, so if you are reading this post and in the throws of this discovery, you are not alone.

There are advantages to both and honest drawbacks.  But today, allow me to elaborate on ten reasons why using an outsourced affiliate management agency could be beneficial for you.  JEBCommerce has been managing affiliate programs since 2004 and our team has over 30 years of online marketing experience with over 30 programs.  That breadth and depth adds a lot to a program and it’s where our 10 reasons begins.

1. Instance Experience Managing Your Program: Affiliate management agencies provide an experienced team to manage and grow your program right away.  Immediately you acquire a team, with combined experiences, skills and proven track records that go far beyond what one single manager can provide.  This breadth of knowledge and exposure to an increasingly wide range of circumstances proves itself to be very valuable in launching and growing affiliate programs.
2. No training costs: Often times, an affiliate manager is still going to need training time.  But because an affiliate management agency should have it’s own training program, you don’t have to pay for this part of affiliate program management (JEBCommerce has an extensive training program we call MyAffiliateCoach).  Agencies are also exposed to many different circumstances, experience that only comes from working on multiple accounts across industries that allows us to act more quickly to circumstances because, in all likelihood, we have experienced something similar with a different client.
3. Lower overall costs: A good affiliate manager can cost upwards of $100,000 to  $150,000 plus bonuses a year.  An affiliate manager with 7-10 years of experience, successes over multiple programs and demonstrated success is priceless and worth every penny.    But many firms aren’t able to add that much to their budget.  Affiliate management agencies, like JEBCommerce, allow you to get industry leading experts working on your program, but also a team.  Where you could only afford one person, an outsourced affiliate management firm provides 2-5 people on your account.  When you compare the resources put to your account by working with someone like us and what you could get internally, the cost/benefit analysis falls heavily to the outsourced agency.
4. Exposure: When you become a client of JEBCommerce, you join a stable of clients, across industries, sectors and business models.  Simply by being in this “club”, you’re program reaches the affiliates in all these programs.  Agencies typically make a big splash at industry events.  At last year’s Affiliate Summit West, we brought four individuals and 6 people from our clients.  That was quite a force, 10 people meeting with affiliates and all of us promoting all of the JEBCommerce programs.  We also operate as a team on all the social networks, major affiliate forums and are constantly communicating with affiliates, as a team, reaching more affiliates every week.
5. Less internal resources needed: Because many affiliate management agencies can provide technical, creative and recruiting and activation resources, typically you only need to be available for a short meeting each week and a few emails.  Agencies operate differently, at JEBCommerce we manage everything from approvals and affiliate inquiries, to top level strategy development and execution to profitability and goal setting.
6. Lower risk involved in finding “the right fit”: With every employee hire you run the risk of hiring incorrectly.  And although you run this same risk with any type of agency, the risk is lower.  It is much easier to plug in an agency today, hold the course for a time, and replace them with another or an in-house affiliate manager than replacing employees.  Adding headcount is difficult and there is a value in not having to hire and fire an employee.  With an agency, you can keep that relationship and request a different account lead if one isn’t working out for you.  Because we work as a team on our clients’ accounts, if one account manager does not meet your needs, we can swap out another one with no downtime and no learning curve.  Every affiliate manager at JEBCommerce is brought up to speed on each account during our daily morning meetings.
7. Results Orientated: “We eat what we kill” is often the mentality of a performance marketing agency.  It can be an unsavory analogy, but one that fits quite well. Our industry is commission/performance/results based.  Because of this, agencies can often times deliver more results from this environment.
8. Economies of scale: There are certain functions in affiliate management that can be done quicker and more efficiently when done across many programs.  We often speak to one affiliate about all our programs at one time.  In this case, instead of say 10 individual 30 minute conversations, we can discuss each client at once on one conversation.  There are many different examples of this type of efficiencies available to an outsourced affiliate marketing agency that an in-house affiliate manager is not able to take advantage of.
9. Network Access Discounts: This is pretty self explanatory, but most agencies are able to offer discounts from the major affiliate networks.
10. The Juice: “you like-a da-juice?” (how could I not include this outstanding Saturday Night Live reference?).   I hope you get a chance to visit us at our offices and experience the vibe, the daily rundowns and the buzz and speed of how we work.  There is a certain undefined characteristic of an agency that is hard to measure or quantify, we call it the juice. It’s a culmination of our team’s diversity, our clients’ industry segments, our passion and experience lead to innovation, efficiencies, and full throttle performance.

Those are our ten top reasons to work with an affiliate management agency.  There are many more, if you’d like to hear them, and chat about your affiliate needs, feel free to call us at 800-208-6215 or  Chat With JEBCommerce Now!

Each situation has benefits and disadvantages, my hope is that after reading our article above, you can see more clearly why your program could grow faster, generate more sales, contribute more profit to your bottom line and attract more new customers.

JEBCommerce, a leading affiliate and performance-marketing agency, today announces that homeTRADER.ca, a leader in the real estate market, has selected JEBCommerce to grow and manage their affiliate program on the Commission Junction Affiliate Network.

homeTRADER is Canada’s real estate destination. Users can find and post rental properties as well as properties for sale, both resale and new homes and condos. homeTRADER publications include: New Homes, Renters News, Condo Guide, Home Renters Guide, Renovations, Home & Décor and many more. homeTRADER.ca is loaded with content, tools and functionalities to tour properties and neighborhoods.
Affiliates can leverage homeTRADER’s presence as the premiere real estate company in Canada to grow this affiliate program. Now affiliates are able to promote the homeTRADER.ca affiliate program on Commission Junction, managed by the JEBCommerce team.

Bryce Saunders, Senior Brand Manager – Real Estate at Trader Corp. “We’re thrilled to launch this new initiative with JEB Commerce. We see this partnership as a great fit and opportunity for both of us. Leveraging their affiliate marketing expertise with our significant reach in the Canadian marketplace is something we see really contributing to our business.”

Stephen Robinson, Director of Affiliate Marketing at JEBCommerce (an outsourced affiliate management agency), looks to leverage homeTRADER’s presence as the leader in the Canadian real estate market and JEBCommerce’s experience in lead generation to grow this program quickly. “We are very excited to be working with homeTRADER. They are the leader in the Canadian real estate market and their robust multimedia package allows sellers to maximize the exposure of their listings to potential buyers. For over 15 years they have built awareness to over 65% of Canadian consumers. and we are excited to combine their real estate expertise with the potential of affiliate marketing to help them grow their business and help affiliates generate more revenue. We want to encourage affiliates to join the program in the Commission Junction Affiliate Network today or contact us at trader@jebcommerce.com or 1-800-208-6215.”

JEBCommerce is excited to add homeTRADER to its current list of clients that includes philosophy, LuggagePoint.com, Elance, LiveChime, iFloor, 1800Pharmacy.com, Dean & Deluca, OverstockDrugstore, AmyAdele, OfficeFrog and more.

If you are an affiliate or website owner who is interested in working with the homeTRADER affiliate program, please contact JEBCommerce at trader@jebcommerce.com.

We are excited to announce that the Elance Affiliate Program has re-launched on the Commission Junction network.  Elance, the world’s leading marketplace for online talent, helps small businesses hire and manage freelance and contract professionals.

Here you will find out about our new commission payouts, fantastic creatives including custom creatives and much more.

Sign up for the Elance Affiliate Program today!

Commission Structure

Earn more with the new Elance commission plan.  You can now earn commission on four actions:

• $50 payout on a First Time Post
• $5 payout on a Repeat Post
• $5 payout on a Paid Provider Membership
• $1 payout on a Free Provider Membership

Creative

We have created a variety of static banners, flash banners and text links to support the program. We are also developing additional tools which will be announced as they become available.

Contact us if you have any specific creative requests and we will do our best to accommodate your needs.

Top Verticals

Over 100,000 businesses use our service to find rated and tested Programmers, Designers, Writers, Marketers, Customer Service Agents and Virtual Assistants.

Here are the top verticals of employers that convert the best. Promote these categories to increase your earnings:

• Web & Programming
• Design & Multimedia
• Writing & Translation
• Admin. Support
• Sales & Marketing

To keep up-to-date with everything going on in this program follow us on Twitter.

We’re here to help you succeed. Please feel free to contact us if you have questions or if you need anything.

Many of you have may have already met one of our affiliate managers, Jeff Nilges, at Affiliate Summit West last month, but I would like to formally introduce you to him. Jeff joined JEBCommerce in spring of 2009 as an intern and after showing great potential; he was promoted to affiliate manager. His strong background in social media and web development make him a valuable asset to our team. He was extremely helpful with my transfer from PC to Mac.

He hit the ground the running by successfully growing the OverstockDrugstore and Luggagepoint affiliate programs to record sales. A focus on merchandising as well as an aggressive approach to recruiting through building key partnerships has been critical to the success of the programs Jeff manages. Additionally he manages iFloor and has assisted in recruiting and strategy on our other accounts including drop.io and doba.

I recently sat down with Jeff for an interview to get his thoughts on the recent Affiliate Summit West Conference and to get to know him better. Check out the video below:

I realize I may be partial, but Jeff is a rising star here at JEBCommerce and he’s definitely someone to keep an eye on throughout 2010. Follow Jeff on Twitter at: @jnil.

Stephen at our booths at CJU Expo

Last week I went to CJU in Santa Barbara with our owner and CEO Jamie Birch. This was my first trip to CJU and the event certainly lived up to all of the hype.  This was an exciting conference since it was my first since accepting a full time position with JEBCommerce.

If you were there, you may have noticed that we take a different approach to these conferences by inviting our clients to join us.  We do this for a couple of reasons; it allows us to spend more time with them and they are also able to meet the publishers that promote their products and services.  This increased level of transparency has paid off for us in strengthening our partnerships.

Jamie and I went to CJU with several goals:

• Meet new publishers and potential partners
• Meet with our current partners to continue to grow these relationships
• Spend more time with merchants that joined us at the event and introduce them to our affiliate partners
• Look for new potential merchants

In addition to a full slate of meetings, we also hosted four of our merchants, Ned from 6pm, Brandon from Doba, Sumit from Luggagepoint.com and Steve from drop.io. We found that our affiliates really enjoy meeting our merchants and we really enjoy hanging out with them.

Brandon from Doba talking with mycoupons

Tuesday afternoon Sumit hosted his table for Luggagepoint.com and Brandon hosted Doba’s table at the CJU Expo. This was a great networking event and we even gave away some luggage courtesy of Luggagepoint. We were excited to see some of our current publishers as well as meet some new ones that have a lot of potential to do well for us.

After the CJU Expo, we hopped on buses and headed over to the Dell Welcome reception where we enjoyed some delicious appetizers and drinks while continuing to network. Pictured below on the right is Steve from drop.io giving a brief demonstration on the stop to TrialPay. Who needs wifi when you have an iPhone and a Mac?

Steve from drop.io walking Trial Pay through a drop.io presentation

Wednesday started interestingly enough when  Jamie woke up and realized he had no voice.  No matter how many times I told him to stop talking, he just kept on talking.  He was a real trooper.  Too bad Jamie doesn’t have an iPhone or he could’ve just used the “bump” app to network.  (A special thanks to Sumit from Luggagepoint for showing off this really cool app).  In fact, I suggested a 5 minute Bump networking session for CJU 2010.

We had a busy day full of sessions and meetings. Sumit, Brandon and I split up and covered some ground at CJU Connect, this was a unique networking opportunity where the publishers had tables and we came to them. I think Brandon and Sumit would agree that we had some very fruitful meetings during this event. The CJYou Awards Dinner was a classy event, great food and excellent conversations.  After dinner it was time to relax at the Cocktail Party at Tonic in downtown Santa Barbara.

With a full agenda of goals for this event, we wanted to be as efficient as possible. Therefore we created a special drop using one of our merchants, drop.io, to help us stay organized for this event. This drop allowed us to access our list of potential targets at anytime during the event. We also utilized the voice mail feature to leave voice notes after every meeting we had to make sure we didn’t forgot any action/follow up items. This proved to be a vital asset to the success of this event for us.

Sumit from Luggagepoint and I meeting with Marie from CJ

Thursday we wrapped up the event with a few meetings and lunch with our great team at Commission Junction. Thanks to Marie and Laura for treating us to lunch. This event wouldn’t have been as successful if it weren’t for the hard work of Marie and Laura who spent their days tracking down affiliates on our target list and introducing them to us. We are fortunate to have such a great account team at Commission Junction.

I came away very impressed from the event and anxious to follow up with many new publishers and old friends I met at the event.  This year’s event was a great success for us and we are definitely looking forward to CJU 2o10.

Monday 9:30pm - Affiliate Program Launch Party

The Affiliate Summit is right around the corner! Are you ready for 3 days of networking, learning and dare we say some fun? Well, we’d like to help you with all of those things!

So, on Monday night (August 10th), starting at 9:30, drop.io will be hosting an exclusive invite-only party  in downtown Manhattan. This party is sure to be one of the premier events of the Affiliate Summit with an open bar from 9:30pm - 11pm.

Come meet the founder Steve Greenwood and learn all about the exciting features of drop.io and their affiliate program while networking in an intimate surrounding close to the Affiliate Summit.  Jamie and Stephen from JEBCommerce will be there too!

As mentioned, this is an invite-only event with a limited amount of openings. If you’d like to attend, please email us at affiliates@dropio.com or call Jamie or Stephen at 208-635-5164. But don’t delay, the invites are going fast!

We’ll send all confirmed attendees information and directions as soon as you RSVP.

The Affiliate Summit in New York City is just around the corner.  Will you be going?  Jamie Birch and Stephen Robinson will be there representing not only JEBCommerce but all of our clients as well.

Jamie also has the great privilege of speaking at this years conference.  He will be participating in a panel titled “Keeping Your Affiliate Program Clean”, moderated by David Naffziger of BrandVerity.  We work with BrandVerity on a number of accounts and we are also a reseller of their keyword monitoring service.  It’s a great service and Jamie is excited to join David on the panel.

They will also be joined by Graham MacRobie of Alias Encor and Jashua Sloan of Sloan Tech.  If you are a merchant and have struggled with maintaining the integrity of your affiliate program, whether from downloads, software or ppc poaching, this will prove to be a useful panel for you.

We will be speaking on Tuesday, August 11th at 11:30 AM in Classroom A - Gibson.  You can read more here.

If you have questions that you’d like addressed during the panel, please feel free to email them and Jamie will do his best to get them to David.  You can reach him at jamie@jebcommerce.com.

We have a few surprised up our sleeves for this conference too.  If you want info on one of the hottest parties, then stay tuned to the JEBCommerce Blog, we’ll be announcing some cool shindigs here soon.