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The One Traffic Tool Every Product Owner Should Be Using Daily
By LizTomey | November 13, 2007
What if there was a magic bottle that you could rub and a traffic genie would pop out to beckon to your every internet marketing command?
After the initial shock wore off, you’d be quite happy to have it in your possession, right? 
Well, in a manner of speaking, such a genie exists. She exists in the form of an “affiliate manager”.
An “affiliate manager” is someone who oversees the operations of an affiliate program in exchange for compensation.
And, out of all the traffic “tools” on the market, the affiliate manager is the one that you should be using daily in your business if you own your own product.
Why?
The bottom line is: more traffic, which results in more revenue for you.
But, specifically, there are 3 reasons why you need an affiliate manager…
1. Recruiting.
Your affiliate manager can recruit new affiliates into your program for you. Instead of you spending time trying to find (and then convince!) affiliates to join your program, your “affman” can do this for you while you focus on other things.
2. Rewarding.
Everyone knows that simply getting people to join your affiliate program is not enough. It takes a lot of effort to get passive affiliates to become (and stay!) active. An affiliate manager is responsible for motivating your team to remain involved in your promotions.
3. Running.
Beyond getting affiliates into your program and making sure they stay active, your affiliate manager can “run” as much of your operations as you want her to. Here are just a few things my affiliate manager (props to Nicole!) does…
* Creates training materials
* Write follow-up mailings
* Communicates with affiliates
* Answer affiliate support questions
* Monitors contests and incentive programs
* Posts to our blog
* Clerical stuff (creates rebrandable files, etc.)
* Circulates content (article directories, etc.)
I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Perhaps the best part of hiring an affiliate manager is the fact that it doesn’t have to cost you a penny in out of pocket expenses. That is, you can setup your agreement to be performance-based: you pay the affiliate manager a percentage of the overall revenue generated through her efforts … the more revenue she brings in through the affiliate program, the more she earns.
Now, the question is –
** Where do I find an affiliate manager? **
There are actually quite a few ways to find quality (emphasis needs to be on “QUALITY!”) affiliate managers for your program. Let me share just one…
One of the easiest ways to find an affiliate manager is to visit your favorite affiliate marketing (or internet marketing) forum and post a request asking for recommendations or responses for your needs.
You can do this in two ways -
1. Post a PUBLIC Request.
That is, you post a message for everyone to see, with brief details on the position you have available and that you are seeking recommendations or interest to explore further.
2. Post a PRIVATE Request.
The other option is to identify those participants at the forum who appear to have experience and/or knowledge in affiliate marketing who might be good affiliate manager material. Then, you would simply contact them privately to see if there is interest in discussing your needs.
Running your own affiliate program is a tremendous traffic generation tool, but it has a lot of parts. There are many different activities that are involved in successfully running an affiliate program, and hiring an affiliate manager to oversee your operations is a great way to free up your time to work on creating additional products and other “creative” work.
A good affiliate manager can bring in affiliates, train and motivate them, and run your operations for you. Her efforts bring in the traffic; your efforts turn the traffic into orders.
It’s the closest thing to a traffic genie in a bottle that you’ll find. Rubbing is optional. Using this strategy isn’t.
Jimmy D. Brown is the author of Sales Army Secrets, full of meaty details on ways to find affiliate managers, how to structure your agreement with them and tasks to have them handle. Details at www.MyAffiliateForce.com
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Topics: Kick Butt Marketing Info |
November 15th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Hi Liz
Another Great Post! My next product developoment will be to create a product which will lend itself to running an affiliate program.
Done correctly there can be no better way in my opinion to drive volume traffic to your products site.
The fact that you can leverage the work of others makes it more than worthwhile those individuals getting paid a large slice, the fact that they can drive large volumes of visitors should ensure volume sales as long as the product stacks up and also at the same time you can build or increase your list.
Having an Affiliate Manager would appear to me to be one of those Essential Internet Marketing Tools if you wish to develop your own product.
I intend to take a look at this in more detail for myself.
Thanks again for a terrific post
Kind Regards
Chris
November 26th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Having run my own affiliate program for about 7 or 8 years I can tell you it’s an incredible amount of work — if you do it right! You’ll find that out of 100 affiliates that sign up for your program, something like 6 will actually sell anything. Many people think all you have to do is set it and forget it and that’s exactly what will happen — your affiliates will forget YOU! You need a cheerleader who can motivate these people to take the desired actions you want. Well worth the effort and expense if you’re serious about affiliate marketing.