One of the things I learned from working at and with several large, national, multi channel retailers, was the concept of same store sales.  Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a complex metric that I came up with, it’s only something I have found useful when managing affiliate programs.  Whether retail programs, lead gen programs, business-to-business programs or others, it comes in quite handy.

Same-store performance is a concept used by retailers and investors to evaluate a retail company’s performance.  It compares sales of stores that have been open for at least a year in that organization.  From investopedia:

This statistic allows investors to determine what portion of new sales has come from sales growth and what portion from the opening of new stores. This analysis is important because, although new stores are good, a saturation point–where future sales growth is determined by same store sales growth - eventually occurs.

So why should you care?  As an affiliate manager it is important for you to know where your sales are coming from, how your current partners are performing and what percentage of your sales growth comes from new partnerships.  And like the description above, at some point, your program’s sales growth will be coming from your current affiliates as your program becomes saturated with all the appropriate affiliates.

You need to be able to measure if your program is growing by new partners, or existing partners.  Your plans, promotions, offers and strategy will be dependent on this measurement and will change as you move from new partner growth to current partner performance growth.

JEBCommerce wasn’t able to attend the Affiliate Summit in NYC this year.  We very much wanted to, but we are working on some big things here, launching a few new clients and hiring new people, so a journey across the country was not in the cards.  If you haven’t attended an Affiliate Summit and are still on the fence, do it.  You won’t regret it.  Our entire team will be heading to ASW10 in Vegas next year.  We won’t be missing that and we hope to meet you there as well.

Fortunately for us, more than 50 attendees have posted their recaps of the event online.  Our team went through and found recaps from people such as Ian Fernando, Zach Johnson, Clickbooth, Missyward, the Martells, Murray Newlands and more.  We’ve listed many of these recaps here.  It sure sounds like everyone had an awesome time, and lots of business was done and networking took place.  If I missed your recap, just send an email to jamie@jebcommerce.com and I’ll add it today.

Revenews’ CT Moor’s Recap

Stephanie Lichtenstein’s Recap

Affiliate Summit East Slide Shows

James and Arlene Martell on Webmaster Radio

MissyWard.com

Murray Newsland’s Recap

ClickBank’s Recap

Affiliatetip’s Recap

Buy.at’s Recap

Eric Nagle’s Recap

Vinny Ohare’s Recap

HelpMeDrive’s Recap

TheChrista.com’s Recap

Ian Fernando’s Recap

AdHustler’s Recap

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics’ Recap

Nerdy Affiliate’s Recap

Mike Chiasson.com - Love his welcome to NY moment.

TrishaLynn.com

CashTactics.net

ShockMarketer

Super Affiliate Twins

DailyConversions.com

InternetMarketingWorldCup.com

Sunny with a slight chance of failure?  Does that sound like a forecast you have been putting together for your affiliate program?  With the fourth quarter running rapidly at us, our team is working on their forecasts for each of our clients.  It’s an extremely important aspect of affiliate management, and one that drives the strategy for the month, quarter and year to come.

We create a forecast each year for our clients, then update it on a quarterly basis.  In our affiliate manager training program, MyAffiliateCoach, we spend an entire module on forecasting and goal setting.  During that module we talk about some of the mistakes made in developing a forecast, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

But let’s start off with a small confession.  Each and every one of these mistakes I have personally done…… many, many times.  Hi, my name is Jamie, I have, in the past, been a horrible forecaster for my programs.  Ok, I feel better now.

All kidding aside, forecasting is difficult and important.  If you have yet to put together a forecast for your programs, maybe we can help.

There are many ways you can mess up a forecast, let’s go over three of those most common errors:

• Isolation - Creating a forecast within a vacuum.  I’ve personally created, and seen many affiliate managers create forecasts without any input from other marketing channels or taking into consideration the activities of the entire company.  The foundation of a forecast tends to be historical data, but if you aren’t looking at things such as Catalog drop schedule, consumer promotion schedule, retail store openings, overall online sales forecast, seasonality, nationwide events (elections for example) and other things outside of the affiliate silo, you’ll really be missing out a lot.
• Identifying your key drivers - There are actions, events, and other items that directly effect the sales of your affiliate program.  Things like how many producing affiliates, average order size, number o contacts and outreach you make, catalog drops and orders per affiliate, are drivers of your affiliate program sales.  Now, yours may be different, but you need to identify those things that directly drive sales and effect the amount of sales of your program.  You need to be a bit scientific about your forecast.  How many affiliates product 5 sales a month, how many $5000 in sales, how many active affiliates producing our average sale amount do we need to hit X amount of sales?  Not identifying these things will make your forecast less accurate, and will increase the difficulty of creating a plan to reach the forecast you create.
• No trust in the gut - I have put together countless forecasts where I included all my drivers, all the seasonality and even a daily sales schedule based on catalog drops and store openings, only to be told “you need to be 20% higher.  When asked why, the response was - “it just needs to be, my gut tells me we can do more”.  The first time I heard this, after spending about 40 hours developing a scientific forecast, I was like “ok, what the heck, why did I got through this process in the beginning if the sales goal was going to be pulled out of a…. hat?”  Sometimes you either need to work back from a sales number you just have to hit, or you just have to trust your gut and work back from there.  Don’t be too discouraged, use that number, identify your drivers, and work your way back to identify how many and how much of each of those drivers you need to hit those numbers.  Then you can create your plan.

We spend a lot of time developing solid, accurate and achievable forecasts.  When we begin our quarterly planning process, this is where we begin.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a daunting task, but avoiding the mistakes above is important to be successful.

We’d love to help you develop a forecast and reach it.  If you are interested in our outsourced affiliate management services, contact us at jamie@jebcommerce.com.  Want to learn more about our MyAffiliateCoach program, contact coach@myaffiliatecoach.net.

Last month our Director of Affiliate Relations, Stephen Robinson, was featured on the MediaTrust blog, Relevantly Speaking.  Stephen discusses some of the major concerns big brands have in the performance marketing space and how companies and individuals help with these.  Great interview Stephen!

Guest Post - Joe Sousa

“From time to time, we have the good fortune of having a well respected, successful and knowledgeable individual provide a guest post for this blog.  Today is one of those special days. Joe is a close friend of ours and his opinion as an affiliate is one we rely on significantly to ensure that we are doing our job and being great affiliate managers.  I was watching Joe’s Twitter stream last week, http://twitter.com/drcool73, and read his struggle with a certain advertisers datafeed.  We do quite a bit with datafeeds, so I reached out to Joe to ask him if he would be interested in sharing this story and his view on datafeeds for our readers, especially our My Affiliate Coach members.  So here it is, a first hand account of working with a difficult datafeed.  Thanks Joe!”

Why are you making it hard for your affiliates???

As an affiliate I build many different types of sites. Sometimes I will take one product and build a site around it, sometimes I will pick a handful of related products and create a site, and sometimes I want to put up thousands of similar products on a website. When I do a site for just a few products I will usually just do everything by hand but when I want thousands of products it would take forever by hand so I use a datafeed.
A datafeed is basically a database of products supplied by the merchant for the affiliates to use. Generally speaking the feed will contain the name of the product, a URL to use for your affiliate link that goes directly to the product, a link to an image, price, categories, and product numbers. Some feeds contain much more information like product descriptions, colors, keywords, and so on but for the most part I just like my feeds simple and will usually delete all the extra fields I don’t need.

I wanted to update a site I have had for years with a new datafeed since it contains a bunch of new products since I last updated the site a couple months ago. Before we go any further let me give you a bit of background on this merchant. I won’t say who they are but this seems to be a fairly common problem among merchants:

This particular merchant has an in-house affiliate program as well as being on three different affiliate networks. I generally prefer to use their in-house program because when you use their program on the networks the links take you to a page before you get to the actual page where you can buy and the conversion is quite a bit lower than the in-house program. So I usually use the feed from their in-house program.

But first let me tell you about the feed I can get from one of the networks. For the most part it is a good feed. There aren’t really any incomplete records and all the information is there. The problem is the categorization on that particular feed is terrible. The products I want are all of a certain category and in this feed they are spread out through 3 or 4 different categories and mixed in with a bunch of products I don’t want. Combine that with the lower conversion rate and it really makes me like the in-house feed.

I downloaded the feed from the in-house program and instantly saw many, many problems:

• 1) The feed should have around 130,000 items and this feed for some reason has over 290,000. Not a huge problem. I delete duplicates and I am down to right around 130,000. No idea why there is so many duplicates.
• 2) Out of those 130,000 items 84,265 of them are in great shape. All the info is there, they are categorized properly, and good to go. But that leaves 45,000 that are missing categories, missing prices, missing links, missing images, etc. They do all have an item number and a product name so that is a start.
• 3) There was really only one category of products I needed so just to see what happened I deleted all the records with missing info and everything that wasn’t the category I needed and was left with about 900 items. I checked the merchant site and saw there was 1270 products on their site in the category I needed so that meant that in the stuff I deleted there was probably around 370 items I needed to create information for. I could have just gone with those 900 items and called it good but that is over 25% of the products that would be missing and potentially 25% fewer commissions for me. GRRRRRRR!
• 4) I was able to do some cutting and pasting and cell merging and was able to create the image links and buy URLs for the products fairly easily. That maybe took 10-15 minutes or so once I figured out what was going on.
• 5) Then I needed sub-categories for all these products. They are all in one main category but there are over 30 sub-categories I needed for these products so it was pretty much a manual process. Luckily I am very familiar with these products so I was able to just look at the product name and know what sub-cat they went in. Just a lot of manual typing and stuff.
• 6) Now I just needed the price. For these products there are about 4 or 5 “standard” prices so once again I was able to do some filtering, cutting and pasting, and was able to get quite a few of the prices in fairly easily. But there were still about 150 or so products that had odd prices. So I needed to manually look up these products and get the prices so I could enter them into the database.
• 7) OK, it seems like the feed is ready to go. Many hours spent tweaking the feed but it seems good to go. So I plug the feed into the program I use for my datafeed sites and it spits everything out. But there is a problem. One sub-group of products isn’t showing any images. GRRRRR! Turns out those products have images in a different format than the rest of the products. And with the way they are formatted there is no easy way to do it. So it is manually cutting and pasting image URLs for about 80 products.

But now it is finally done! The site is up and running. There are a few images that aren’t working properly but not too many. I can just clean that up slowly over the next few days. I did, however, spend a bunch of time cleaning up the feed when I would have liked to use that time to improve my site in other ways, create some videos, do some redesigning of the pages, etc. to make more sales.
For the most part I have no problem tweaking a feed if that tweaking is done to distinguish it from other feeds. If I need to write custom descriptions, add in keyword fields, or something like that I am happy to do it because I know that will reap benefits. What I don’t like is to spend 8 hours getting a feed to the point where I can use it. The feeds should come ready to use. This should be the job of the affiliate manager. Most AMs are pretty good about getting decent banners and text links that work to their affiliates so why do so many skimp when it comes to datafeeds?
Affiliate managers should be able to help their affiliates and assist them in making sales. That is pretty much why they are there. That will take a different form for different merchants but the affiliate manager should be able to provide their affiliates the tools they need to succeed whether that is text links, banners, custom banners, videos, or datafeeds.

I have worked with dozens and dozens of affiliate managers over the years and there are only a handful I would really say do a good or great job. I don’t think most of them have had enough training or have enough knowledge of the industry to be of service to their affiliates. Affiliate manager isn’t just a job you can throw anyone into. They need to be taught how to do their job and know what they need to do to help their affiliate. Something “simple” like providing the affiliates the proper tools (like complete datafeeds that contain all the information) is one of the main ways they can help.

You can find more of Joe’s thoughts and opinion at http://www.whatdoesjoethink.com.

If you are looking for help with your datafeed, overall coaching and mentoring or complete outsourced affiliate management, please contact jamie@jebcommerce.com.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of jumping on the phone with the founder of AFFMETER, Firuze Gokce. I had heard about this tool for affiliates from an affiliate friend of mine and thought it would be great to get the lowdown.

From their site: “Affmeter is a focused, structured and manageable environment where the affiliate marketers can gain complete control over their both revenue and costs, apply customized solutions and measure their earnings in an effective, secure, and private manner.”

Basically, it’s a system that allows affiliates to bring in performance data from multiple networks, combine them together, slice and dice the data and manage their campaigns and costs better and more efficiently. I was very impressed with what Firuze told me, but enough of what I think, why not listen for yourself:

Check out some of the screenshots from this software package:

Network Comparison

Merchant Monitor

Check out more at www.affmeter.com.

I love to see the companies I have worked with in the past announce new things, today is no different with the announcement by Coldwater Creek that they have a new mobile site.  I spent many years at “the Creek” and still keep in contact with many of the people there.   It was a great place to work and the web team always pushed the envelope and did an outstanding job.

Seeing that I have an android phone, I thought I would check it out.  It actually works pretty well.  Now, I didn’t go through the process of buying something, their skirts and jackets just aren’t my style (although my wife says I do have the legs to pull it off).

The overall functionality is great and the speed refreshingly quick.  The overall way they stylized the site, product description pages and buy options is clear and concise and lends itself well to my small screens size.  I really like what they have done.  Most of all it’s pretty quick, which is important on mobile.  The shopping cart is also pretty easy to use and looks good.

I would be interested to hear how many users are using this online, never really thought of their target market as very prone to purchase on their phone, but with more people getting their emails on their smart phones, I guess I can see this being an important part of the process.

I wonder what this type of thing (mobile sites) opens up for affiliates?  Hey affiliates - what do you think?

Here is another shot:

(sorry for the quality of photos, taken with an iphone…)

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?

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?

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.