Time for another Affiliate Marketing Best Practices article, but this time it’s an article for merchants. Disclaimer: It’s been a while since I’ve managed an Affiliate program, so correct me if I need it. But I think the primary concepts and techniques for effective Affiliate management may just be timeless.

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Just as Affiliate marketing has evolved and matured, so has the roll of Affiliate Manager (AM). Today’s managers (and the merchants they work for) have to understand the process of building a quality program. And a process it is, especially if the program is new. It takes a lot more these days than launching in reputable networks. There is too much competition among merchants for the top Affiliates. Retailers, maintain a program that’s more compelling and higher converting for Affiliates, and you win. You attract the most talented marketers who consistently bring you new customers and large sales volume. But how can that be done? And what resources are available?

Over the years one thing that has remained the cornerstone of effective program management is consistent communication with Affiliates. So email your Affiliates. Email them collectively with big news or with a monthly newsletter. Email them one-to-one and support them, offer ideas, talk shop. Over time effective communicators build solid relationships and get honest, constructive feedback. Both of which empower Affiliates to drive more sales.

Options for program management include hiring in house, hiring a management firm or using a network. AvantLink recently rolled out a very competitive Managed Solution service level for merchants. And there is a strong proof of concept in what we’re doing. The fundamentals are rooted in business and branding strategy, and any web-based business can benefit from them. Especially web retailers with Affiliate programs, and Affiliate marketers themselves.

For communication, traditionally AM’s used email, instant messaging, and telephone. And more recently Twitter. That’s all good. But consider these additional channels for engaging Affiliates, link building and growing your Affiliate program brand; all at the same time.

1. Wordpress. Start a blog dedicated to your Affiliate program and nothing else. Distribute your monthly newsletters as blog posts, make a post about new banners, new products, and of course sales and promotions. Think critically about the subject line, and use a good link strategy. There are many reasons why you should use Wordpress for your blog, but that’s for a different article. Take a look at the Backcountry Affiliate Blog to see a working example.
2. ABestWeb. Sponsor a branded, sub-forum on ABestWeb.com. This is the largest Affiliate community on the web, and every inbound link from ABW is gold. Essentially, what you post to your Affiliate program blog, you can post to your ABestWeb category. Tweak the subject line a bit, and don’t re-purpose the content exactly from your blog. The extra 10-15 minutes you take to rewrite the article is well worth the effort. Check out Altrec’s sub-forum on ABestWeb to see an example.

The reality is that the best Affiliates won’t simply take your word for it. Especially if you’re not a nationally recognized brand. Any retailer can talk up how good their program is, and how well their site converts. Likely the first thing Affiliates will do before signing up with any program is Google “Merchantname Affiliate program” and see what comes up. So make sure there is more in the results than just the Affiliate program info page on your site. The more blog articles and forum threads about you, the better. But no thin posts or articles!

A couple of other examples of distribution channels AvantLink regularly uses includes the AvantLink category at the Rocky Mountain Affiliate Marketing Association’s (RMAMA) blog. We’ve also used PRWeb.com (see sidebar of blog) consistently over the years to get important news out. These articles also include very important links to our content. We try and take full advantage of any opportunity to pump out good news!

So to conclude, Affiliate managers who are competent communicators should align themselves with the distinct branding and content distribution channels discussed above. Not only will this open up more communication mediums (your Wordpress blog’s RSS feed, for example), but every bit of content being distributed will get picked up quickly by Google and the others. This is what builds your authority and positive brand in the Affiliate space.

Once prospective Affiliates get a sense that your program is an authority, and that someone is communicating effectively, it will in essence become a powerful recruitment or acquisition channel as well. The task of forming good, long-term and prosperous relationships just got easier!

Gary M

Note: Visit our Solutions page for more information on our Branding Package for merchants. With this package we offer merchants the distribution channels highlighted in this article, at a substantial package discount. The Branding Package may be utilized as a stand alone service, or encompassed in our comprehensive Affiliate Management Solution. Contact us for more information.

For the next Affiliate Best Practices article I’d like to discuss our Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) tool.

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Bloggers and forum owners should pay special attention to the ALE, but any Affiliate site can benefit from this innovative tool we rolled out in October of 2007. In a nutshell, the ALE allows webmasters to place one line of Javascript on any page and/or site-wide template, and if a direct link (without Affiliate tracking data) to an AvantLink merchant exists on the page, the script will automatically convert the direct link to a tracking link on the end user’s browser. The script scans the page for domain matches, than does it’s thing.

Please note with the ALE that Google and the other search engines will still see the direct link as it exists in the html code. So if you mouse over a store link on an Affiliate page utilizing the ALE, you’ll see (in the browser status bar) the tracking details. However, if you view the source code of that same page, all you’ll see for the merchant URL is the direct href link code. And if you look hard enough, you’ll see the ALE Javascript on that page as well! To see a great working example of the ALE in action check out the ALE information page on our site.

Now on to the best practices for the ALE…

For bloggers and/or forum owners, the benefits should be easily apparent. In fact, with direct input from Greg at AlpineZone.com (read Greg’s testimonial on this blog), and a few other valued Affiliates, it was apparent that they were sending loads of traffic (and sales!) to merchants without necessarily getting credit. This was because their community members would often post direct links to outdoor retailers that are a part of AvantLink. Rather than editing the content of the community, Greg was more interested in finding a way to convert the click on the fly to one that would rightly set a cookie and credit him for any subsequent sales.

So for forum owners that may be in the same boat, here’s the secret. And it’s quite complicated…not! Simply login to your Affiliate account and generate an ALE script for a particular site configured in the network. Once you have the one line of Javascript, simply place it in a site-wide template (for example, your header or footer) and wala. Instant tracking on any direct to merchant link that exists anywhere on your forum (as long as the merchant is in AvantLink). You should also note that this include ALL direct to merchant links, even archived links from months or years ago!

For bloggers, same concept. You might have years worth of archived content that can be monetized just by adding this one line of Javascript. Talk about easy money. And we do have multiple success stories already in regards to bloggers benefiting greatly from the ALE. Here’s just one example: Lou runs a legendary blog for backcountry skiing enthusiasts called WildSnow.com. Over the years, Lou has posted links to Backcountry.com and other retailers quite regularly when he reviews products, etc. Since Lou’s a blogger, and not necessarily an Affiliate marketer, the thought alone of logging into a network to generate a tracking link every time he linked to a retailer was tedious. So he added the ALE and instantly began generating revenue on years worth of archived content. Of course, this includes the links people posted in the comments’ section of each post.

General use of the ALE is also encouraged for people custom building many optimized pages. Rather than taking the time to use our Custom Link Builder tool (which, btw, is easy as pie), simply include the ALE Javascript in your base template. Once that’s in place it’s just a matter of writing your editorial, using the merchant image source for the product, and adding a deep link to the product detail on the merchant web site. No logging into the network for link code is necessary.

So there you have it! To generate the Affiliate Link Encoder for your site, follow these simple steps:

1. Login as an Affiliate, and click “Tools” from the main menu.
2. Under “Ad/Link Tools”, click on “Affiliate Link Encoder”.
3. Select your website, and add a custom tracking code (which is optional).
4. Click “Get Html”, and you’re done!

I hope this helps and Happy Converting!

Time for another blog article for the Best Practices category of AvantShare.

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Affiliates, with this article I would like to discuss a unique tool that’s available to you only through AvantLink. It’s officially called the Coupon Feed Syndication tool in the network tool center, but a similar variant of the tool comes with the dynamic Deal Of The Day campaigns we provide as well.

This is a unique proposition because it allows you to syndicate your Affiliate feeds (product content or ad campaigns) to your site visitors by way of RSS feed distribution. When one of your site visitors in fact subscribes, the outbound links from these subscriptions will have your Affiliate tracking embedded in them. This provides a new level of customer ownership for you that moves well beyond that of a cookie placed on an end user’s PC.

With these powerful Affiliate feed syndication options, you can effectively promote RSS subscriptions to deal feeds, as well as display the feed content on your site(s). So it’s very much in your interest to become proficient at not only selling the products, but selling subscriptions to the feeds from AvantLink!

This is sometimes hard to explain to folks because it doesn’t fit the traditional mold of any type of Affiliate marketing campaign that you may have seen before. But I’m here to tell you that it’s VERY effective, and from those who have embraced these syndication techniques for the deal feeds, we’ve seen impressive sales volume.

Your question at this point might be: “How do I go about promoting subscriptions to RSS feeds for coupons and daily deals?”

Ok it’s simple. Really simple. Just remember that every merchant on our platform has the ability to easily flag text links to be included in the Dynamic Coupon Feed. Once they do that, it’s accessible to you.

Here’s how to offer RSS subscriptions to merchant coupon feeds:

1. Login to your Affiliate account, and click “Tools” from the main menu.
2. Under “Coupon Feed Syndication”, click “Get Merchant RSS Coupon Feed Syndication Links”.
3. Select the merchant for the coupon feed RSS subscription you want to promote, and your website.
4. Click “Get HTML”.

After you click “Get HTML”, in part, here are the instructions you’ll find:

“Subscribe icons for some of the most popular RSS readers are available below. Simply grab the code, paste to your site, and encourage your customers to sign-up to the feed. This creative has your Affiliate tracking ID embedded, which gives you lasting control over that customer.”

So in essence, you’re retrieving the RSS reader subscription icons through our system just like you would retrieve a banner.

Paste this code on your web page next to the coupon feed itself, and offer a call to action like “Subscribe to the REI deals feed and have their latest sales, promotions and coupons delivered directly to you.”

Note that you can find these same RSS subscription icons in the output HTML for the RSS integration option of the Deal Of The Day tool. So the same call to action (encouragement to subscribe) can be applied to those as well. Both the coupon feeds and the daily deal feeds are compelling subscriptions for shoppers, because it saves them some bucks. Take a stab at it, and you may just secure long term subscribers who will set your Affiliate cookie on every click from the feed for months, even years, to come!

Comments, questions and suggestions are certainly encouraged!

Gary & AvantLink

I would like to use this article to introduce a new category on our network blog:

Best Practices

We thought it would be helpful to some if we periodically posted tips and info on how to best utilize our deep linking tools. First and foremost, let me make sure and state that we will not share sensitive marketing techniques from any of our valued Affiliates.

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Affiliates, with this post I would like to discuss link building for your Web Service Datafeed Client subscriptions. I’ve written a couple of articles previously on our blog about the Datafeed Client here and here (and here is a helpful tutorial on how to add PHP includes to your subscriptions). There are also a couple of legacy discussions on ABestWeb about this tool…click here to read one.

The first version of this tool was actually created in 2004 before AvantLink existed, and marketed as a third party Affiliate tool. In order to more effectively facilitate the distribution of this product (among other things), the proprietary platform for AvantLink was built, incorporating the Datafeed Client as a subscription based tool integrated within.

There are documents and help files in the Affiliate tool center for configuring, installing and customizing this product; but for the following let’s assume that you already have the client working properly, and customized for an attractive presentation on your site.

Once the Datafeed Client is working, it’s a maintenance free solution that uses a standard SOAP web service definition to interact with AvantLink and serve/cache static HTML pages on your web server. So not only is this a hands off dynamic solution, the output content is 100% search engine readable. Since we update most merchant datafeeds on our end daily, this means that the product content you’re serving is generally no more than 24 hours out of date. Accurate inventory and pricing is paramount to good conversion, so this is important to note.

The most successful Affiliate sites have authority, and good standing in the search engines. A vast organic presence on the SEs takes hard work, dedication, perseverance and original/useful content that naturally gains links over time. But you already know all this, so now the question might become: How would I pass that authority on to my product level datafeed pages?

There are a number of ways you can help the crawlers get to and index these pages, but let me first mention that each Datafeed Client subscription you configure allows you to target that feed to specific categories, product groups or even brands. So consider this when working out your strategy. For example there is no real need to publish the entire Backcountry.com datafeed on your ski related site, when you can just utlilize their Ski category.

Now the fun part. Since your Datafeed Client is functioning it’s time to link build at the product level and return to what you’ve always done to build content and drive traffic. Here are three very effective ways to help get your product level pages ranked effectively in Google et al:

• Use a blog (we prefer Wordpress hands down!)
  Just the nature of blogging in and of itself can drive traffic because generally it’s an authority maintaining the blog, there are constant updates, the permalinks are time/date stamped, and (in the case of Wordpress, anyway) each category is by default a tag for the content. Another thing to note with WP is that an auto included plugin called Pingomatic actually syndicates your posts to several dozen blog directories including the biggies like Technorati. This is vastly different from waiting for the search engines to come and find you. So, on a ski related site for example. Add Wordpress and blog away. Write product reviews, details on your ski experiences, highlight daily conditions, etc. When you mention a product, deep link to that product in your datafeed.
• Use a forum (we suggest open source phpBB)
  Install a forum, think critically about the categories and be diligent in helping to jump start the board by getting actively involved. Anytime a user posts a new thread, be sure and comment and/or contribute. After some time of community building the users will start to generate the content and the topics will be compelling. You’ll be effectively publishing gourmet Google food with the help of like minded individuals! Once the forum is established over time, use the content when appropriate to pump link juice into your product related pages on your Datafeed Client subscription.
• Use PR distribution services (we’ve been loyal to PRWeb)
  It’s pretty much the same idea as deep linking to products through your site articles, blog or forum. There are many PR distributon services out there now. Some hold more link value than others, which means some will cost more than others. But you get what you pay for. In our case for example, we’ve used the $200 distribution level at PRWeb to announce new technology, partnerships and other significant news about AvantLink. Each and every article we distribute includes keyword rich hyperlinks to relevant pages. To see some examples, just check out the “News/Press” category on side bar of this blog.

To conclude, what it comes down to is…

1. adding a relevant datafeed subscription to a site with authority and good standing out there, then
2. using any means you can to pump product specific links to product specific pages.

This can be done tastefully and subtly, and the end result will be high organic search engine rankings for your product pages…which means harnessing some of the highest converting traffic in our industry. IE, people searching Google for products they are looking to buy. Happy converting!

Gary M