For a while I thought maybe my wife and I were the only ones watching Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen nightmares. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll remember I like to post about things you can learn from watching that show that relate to your business.

To my surprise, today I saw Linkshare run with that theme as well. I love it. I’m such a reality TV junkie it’s almost embarrassing.

Well, Linkshare is putting on a free webinar titled “SEO for Business Results: Wake Up From a Kitchen Nightmare”. From their announcement: “Borrowing a theme from Chef Gordon Ramsay’s TV show, “Kitchen Nightmares”, see how your website is a lot like a restaurant. SEO specialist Sally Anne Dishong will serve up some quick take away pointers on how to turn your website into an attractive, profitable, visitor-friendly place. You’ll also learn the recipe for SEO Secret Sauce for 2010. ”

Learn more and register here.

I just got off the phone with a very close friend of mine.  I’d venture to say he is in my circle of best friends.  Definitely in the circle of trust, without a doubt.  We’ve known each other for over ten years now and actually our families spent the last weekend on vacation.

We had talked this weekend about a colleague of mine, former employee, that saw the other side of the affiliate fence and not only jumped over, but is now enjoying a nice financial benefit as well as the freedom that comes from being your own boss in affiliate marketing.

I think that story really pequed his interest.  The reason for his call was to find out how one gets started as an affiliate.  “Jamie, how did he do it, how could I make some extra cash by being an affiliate. Just how is that done?”

I love those types of questions.  In it yields so much hope and promise and optimism.  An opportunity is just waiting to be discovered and taken.  It’s a great place to be and I love walking people through it.  It’s one of the reasons we started an affiliate manager coaching program, I love to teach.  I really do enjoy seeing people take something they have learned and be successful with it. But anyway, enough about me, this blog post was to be some sort of answer to his questions.

What are you passionate about?

That was my very first question to my friend.  Since we knew each other so well, we walked through several different things he loves to do and his wife loves to do.  There were several different things they were passionate about, knew a lot about, and would love to teach others about, or simply add value to the search process for those things.  After talking a few of them through, I think we not only identified one that has great affiliate marketing potential, but one in which an online seminar or educational program would work very well for him.  So, if you are asking how to get started, start by listing out the things you are passionate about.

Here are some things I’m passionate about, love to do, or simply know a lot about, for example purposes:

• Family - I’ve got a bunch of kids and spend most of my time not spent in the office, spent with them
• Camping - Love it
• Huntin’ & Fishin’ - If I could spend my time in the woods, that is where I’d be
• Music - I so wish I could play the ax like Slash or the acoustic like James Taylor, just sayin..
• Gardening - My wife and I have a pretty big garden and love every minute spent in it and eating the harvest

So there are some of my examples.  We are actually working on a site that encompasses  few of those into one, but that’s a story for another time.

Who is your audience?

After he had more ideas than he could shake a stick at, we moved on to the next important thing, who are you trying to attract?  I recently was working with Matthew Scott of Strategic Incubator on our coaching program and this was one of the first things we did.  We identified every type of target.  We looked at who they were, what they were like, what they did and why would they need the information/product/site I was trying to build.  So I walked my friend through this briefly as well.

Identify your target market in a comprehensive and detailed manner.  Once you know who they are and how they got to the point of needing what you are thinking of building, then you can create that perfect, value added property or product and roll up affiliate marketing into it.

How can you add value?

Now that he had some great ideas, and he is working on identifying his audience, he, and you, can begin to brainstorm ideas on how you can add value to that person and become a great resource and destination for them.  So just jot down some things that you feel would be of benefit.  A great place to start is to search for those types of things.  You’ll really want to identify a gap in what is being provided already.  Adding value within a niche, value that isn’t being added already, service that isn’t being offered, is going to make you stand out and make success even that much easier.  So go ahead, jot down some ideas and search around and see what you find.

After that it is really up to you.  This wasn’t really a “three easy steps to affiliate marketing success” type of post, but if you start here, you’ll develop something that people will love to go to, tell their friends and you’ll be building a business that won’t be too worried about paid search costs, overall marketing expenditures and Google’s next update (can someone say Florida - I think I just dated myself).

What do you think?  Am I off my rocker?  Did I miss the boat?  Do you have a story to share along these lines?

Last week I had the good fortune to sit down with a good friend, super affiliate, and overall great guy, Matthew Bredel.  Matthew runs The Web Reviewer and MatthewBredel.com, among other sites, and we have worked together on several different affiliate programs over the years.

Last week we jumped on skype to catch up with each other.  I wanted to see how he was doing, see the new things he had going on and mostly to see what he thought about the affiliate industry and it’s current changes and obstacles.

We chat about how Matthew got his start in affiliate marketing with his site TheWebReviewer.com, how we moved to being an affiliate full time, and some of his new product launches. Matthew also recently did an awesome review of one of our clients’ products, LiveChime. You can read his review here.

Take a listen below, I hope you enjoy our talk and check out his projects below.

MatthewBredel.com
TheWebReviewer.com

A very typical phone call we receive, and probably at least one each week, is one from a new merchant looking for immediate sales through affiliate marketing.  We love to get calls from new prospects and enjoy meeting new people and learning of new business models.  It’s one of the reasons I love this industry.  There is always something new going on.  If it wasn’t like that, I’d probably would have taken that job at Jeld Wen out of college and not the “Search Engine Guru” position I ended up with .

Many of these callers have the same basic profile:

• they have a brand new site
• they just started selling their products
• they need sales

Does that sound like you?  We all need more sales, and more often than not, an affiliate program is a great way to increase your bottom line.  But is it right for everyone?

The answer is pretty simply, no.  It hurts a little to say that, as an outsourced affiliate management agency, we make our living launching and managing affiliate programs.  But, we’ve been doing this a long time and have launch and managed huge programs for large brands, as well affiliate campaigns for mom and pop stores and everything in the middle.  So we’ve seen that it is not always the best thing for you to do.

When we have launched affiliate programs for companies that are brand new, with no track record, we have found a few things that stand out and helped them become successful.  I’d like to share a few of them with you:

• Affiliate marketing was not their ONLY method of marketing.
• Their expectations were realistic, it takes time to build a strong program.  (for more info on expectations of a new program, see our blog post titled When should You Expect a Positive ROI from Your Affiliate Program)
• They had a long “runway” - meaning they had funds to run the business for quite a while, giving their affiliate program and other programs time to produce results.
• Their product was not only good or clever, but really filled a need that consumers had.
• They had active management - well us really
• Clear and concise rules.
• Solid standard creative.
• They were not only willing to test new things, they had a modest budget for paid placements.
• They could do coupons, discounts and promotions, not only site wide but also by category and individual product.
• Great educational content for affiliates.

Those last two have been big ones.  Having a great and clever product, and one that you could offer a discount on, opened these merchants/advertisers up to many new affiliate relationships.  Offering them solid, comprehensive and unique educational content allowed affiliates to really inform the consumer about this new product and new advertiser.  Without that, you are really just relying on a banner to entice the click.

Now, the ones that had failed?  They showed some common characteristics as well.  You can basically take that list above and write down the opposite of each one.  I’m sure many of you have worked with programs both big and large, what did you find that made one successful and the other not?

I was reading an article on InternetRetailer.com this morning titled Penny’s billion-dollar bet.  Penny’s, one of the earliest adopters of ecommerce among large retail chains, has experienced flat sales the last few years.  They are now planning and investing in a new ecommerce platform to grow their online channel to over 2.5 Billion.  Yes that is a “B”.  (when you get into Billions and Trillions, that just boggles the mind doesn’t it.

The article brought to mind something I’ve learned and been told over the years.  I can’t exactly remember who or where I heard it but it’s stuck with me.  In down times, you prepare, you plan, you build for the future.  Right now the economy isn’t all the great, but do we just sit here and take it?  Have you been doing that?

Now is the time to plan, to invest, to build your next big thing.  Now is the time to push forward your new ideas.  This concept also plays out historically.  Many of the large and successful firms we all know today, were started during the great depression.  Did you even know business were successful then?  The difficult economic times aren’t always dismal and dreary.  They can be the perfect time to try out your ideas.  If your next big thing works during this economic climate, imagine how it will be when things turn around.

It’s almost counter-intuitive, to invest millions, maybe hundreds of millions when no one is buying, you are facing increased pressure from Amazon and other retailers and this general economic malaise.  But JCPenny doesn’t see it that way.  Now is the time to re-tool, revamp and position yourself for the future.

A couple questions for you - are you cowering in the corner and just trying to survive or are you like JC Penny, investing in the future to build your business.  What have you been avoiding that could lead to a more successful venture in 2011, 2012 and beyond?

I’d love to hear your comments.

Zak Stambor wrote a great article at InternetRetailer.com about online office supply retailer Shoplet.com and their amazing feat of increasing sales by triple digits in our current economic climate.

“Even last year, in one of the worst economic environments in the past 50 years, it grew an Internet Retailer-estimated 33%, to an estimated $100 million in online sales, helping it secure the No. 134 spot among North American retailers in online sales, according to the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.”

That growth is impressive, especially when you compare it to the big box office supply retailers with established brands, offline presence and marketing machine behind them.  How did they do it?

“Key to that success were three simple principles, Tony Ellison, Shoplet CEO, said today at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition during a featured address:

• Differentiate from the competition.
• Focus on a niche market.
• Earn customer loyalty.“

Ah, differentiation.  Many companies focus on carving out their niche and their branding overall, but so many forget to allow, or force, this to bleed through to their affiliate program.  Are your affiliate’s differentiating you from the competition?  Have you provided them with the education, information, collateral, training and guidelines to allow them to do that?  If you are seeing great success by firmly differentiating yourselves like Shoplet.com has (and we’ll be watching them closely as we launch our client OfficeFrog.com soon), are you sure you are doing everything necessary to carry that through to your partners so that not only can you see added benefit (new customers, sales, etc.), but your affiliates are better able to take advantage of your position in the marketplace too?

You see, this comprehensive affiliate management strategy isn’t all that difficult to complete, it’s just takes resources, time and consistency.  If you need any help with that, call us at 1-800-208-6215 x 101 or chat With JEBCommerce Now!

AffiliateBenchMarks is looking for affiliates, agencies and advertisers to fill out their 5 minute survey on the affiliate industry and your views of it.

We’ve filled out this survey in the past, as have our clients, and the data you receive from it is fantastic.  We highly recommend you take a few minutes and fill this out.

Here is more information from them:

All we need from you is a few minutes of your time for a quick survey. Take the survey now or Read on to learn more… 

With your help 2010 AffiliateBenchmarks research study will be the most comprehensive survey of affiliate marketers ever. Last year we surveyed over 3500 affiliate marketing executives, providing real insight into this secretive space. 

That’s why we’re reaching out to you; the study only works if we get the opinions and perspectives of as many professionals as possible. As an incentive, if you complete the survey before July 16th 2010, you will receive a copy of the final report absolutely free. 

What you can gain from the 2010 study? 

- Which advertiser types produce the greatest revenue. 

- The best of all tried and tested routes to drive traffic to your affiliate page. 

- The benefit of better run campaigns as networks, agencies and advertisers read the findings of the study. 

- The opportunity to have your voice heard and contribute to a greater understanding of affiliate marketing. 

- A multidimensional look at the relationship between affiliate marketing and other online marketing channels. 

We’ve made improvements from the 2009 study 

- Our study is now simpler. We removed some questions and streamlined others to ease the burden on busy affiliates. 

- We’ve added a short survey for advertisers/merchants to collect some information on their challenges and views of affiliate marketing. 

- We added a short survey for agencies/OPMs/consultants to collect some information on their view of the industry. 

- We have even more partners who have agreed to distribute the survey and ensure that 2010 will be the largest affiliate research study ever produced (a title currently held by our 2009 report). 

- The 2010 report will feature more indepth analysis than ever before.

You get back what you put in 

As in previous studies, any participant who answers every question (not just the ‘required’ fields) will receive the full survey results and participants who answer all of the required questions will receive a copy of the executive summary. With your help, we can meet our goal of illuminating the affiliate marketing industry. 

PLEASE NOTE: The survey will close on July 16th at 5pm EST.

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?

The Performance Marketing Association (PMA)  just announced new working group structures.  I was fortunate enough to work on one of the initial working groups during the forming of the PMA, membership fees I believe, and it was a fun experience.  I got to work with some great people and brainstorm ideas on how to make the PMA great.

From their site:

“The Performance Marketing Association is a not-for-profit trade association founded in 2008 by the leaders of the performance marketing industry, to connect, inform and advocate on behalf of this rapidly growing field.

The Performance Marketing Association (PMA) strives to raise the profile of performance marketing by demonstrating the value of this multi-billion marketing channel, which comprises more than 200,000 businesses and individuals. Continued growth of the performance marketing space is expected as advertisers, facing small budgets and big expectations, increasingly look to performance-based marketing initiatives to expand their business.”

The restructured working groups are as follows:

• Anti-Fraud/Anti-Abuse, sponsored by Online Intelligence (an Epic Advertising company)
• Advertiser Practices  to Avoid Fraud, sponsored by Adperio
• Data Feed/Content Standards, sponsored by Ebates
• Industry Pledge to Ethical Practices, sponsored by Ebay
• Convergence with Offline, sponsored by MediaTrust

To learn more, check out their blog.

The PMA has done some great work, and along side some amazing affiliates/affiliate managers/network, they have lead the amazon tax initiative and had some huge wins.  They have proved to be very valuable and a needed resource in our industry.  If you’d like to learn more about membership, click here.

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.