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Managing Affiliates

[private].[/private]We covered how to recruit affiliates and once you’ve put together a team of people to promote your product the fun really begins.

You can’t just sign up your affiliates, hand them the promotional material to help them along, and then sit back and relax. You must effectively manage your team in order to achieve the best results.

You still need to be hands-on in order to make sure your affiliates are happy, motivated, and on track.

First I will tell you what to look for in an affiliate management system. This is crucial because you must be able to track your affiliates properly in order to achieve success.

You’re going to want an affiliate management program/script that is capable of the following:

** Track affiliate traffic and sales

** Pay affiliates

** Manage a tiered system (if you would like to exercise this option)

** Provide usernames and passwords

** Provide forum access

** Provide stats login

** Provide links to promotions

** Automatically embed promo materials with unique affiliate link

If you are running your own affiliate program, you can purchase software/scripts to do the job for you. Here are a few links to some of my favorite affiliate management scripts:

JAM: http://jam.jrox.com/

Idev: http://www.idevaffiliate.com

EasyClickMate: http://www.EasyClickMate.com (Great if you’re selling on Clickbank!)

Now let’s talk some more about your role in managing your affiliates. As I said earlier, you can have a top-notch automated system looking after your affiliates and still not succeed if you’re unable to motivate your affiliates and keep them in the loop with what is happening regarding your product.

Communication is the key to your success when it comes to managing your affiliates. Just like any manager in any work environment, you must always be talking to and listening to your team. Make sure they know how to get a hold of you and relate their concerns/issues and always follow up with them in a timely manner.

Here are the areas in which you want to be active and on top of things before they slip away or get out of control:

New affiliates: You should be reviewing new affiliate applications as they come in. You want to make sure you sign them up while the interest is at its peak. If you only review applications once a week, then you can miss out on many affiliates who have moved on before you ever look over their application, approve it, or make first contact. You don’t want that to happen.

Build rapport: You want to make it personal with your affiliates. If you were a manager of an office team or in a store and you were face-to-face with your staff, then you would chat, socialize, and build a relationship that would help you work better with your team. You must do the same thing with your affiliates and you can do this quite effectively by using an auto-responder designed specifically for your affiliates. You also must include your name and contact information in the signature of all of your communications with your team.

Checking in: Please check in with your affiliates frequently. By this I don’t mean annoy them with daily or weekly, “how are you doing?” or “why aren’t you making any sales?”. I mean to keep them in the loop, offer them new information regularly, and give them mild prodding. You can certainly offer to help new affiliates get started because you have noticed they have not made any sales yet. Maybe you will contact them after they sign up, at three weeks, and again at six weeks. Just be gentle and be sure to have a reason every time you do communicate.

Respond: You would think this is a no-brainer, but many product owners concentrate the majority of their time allotted for support on customers and forget that customers come from affiliates! Keep it simple and make it your goal to respond to each and every inquiry within 24 hours. When you do this, your affiliates won’t forget it. You may even want to setup a support script on your site and allow affiliates to use the script in addition to customers.

These tips, along with the professional management system you are using, will ensure your affiliates are happy and are promoting like crazy. When this is happening, they will make loads of money and so will you!