How to manage your affiliate program like a pro (with Post Affiliate Pro)

The Internet has changed our relationship with the world, opening up a door of countless opportunities.

New technologies provide new channels and different ways to attract consumers with products, services, and content. Through this wave of change, affiliate programs came to life.

Many entrepreneurs are willing to take advantage of this type of business, work from home, and make a good profit margin without having to purchase physical goods or make other investments. In turn, businesses are also willing to promote their products or services through affiliate marketing.

An affiliate doesn’t need to create a product, maintain a website, or even run sales operations. All of the opportunities related to affiliate marketing revolve exclusively around promoting links, which serve as product recommendations of products produced by other people. 

This post will tell you everything you need to know about managing this kind of program and how to make cooperating with affiliates easier.

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, the following article may be interesting for you: Building Relationships with New Affiliate Partners

How one can become a successful affiliate?

Success is something that everyone pursues these days. The truth, however, is that most digital entrepreneurs don’t achieve their goals. 

Money doesn’t fall from the sky, nor is it the result of pure luck or chance. Being lucky helps, but most successful people will tell you that their achievements are based on hard work. However, the good news is that all effort yields results and those who are dedicated to their work are in a strong position to succeed.

If you want to attract hardworking and dedicated affiliates in order to create a successful affiliate program, then you must think of your affiliate network as a separate company. This means that in order to obtain high conversion rates and good financial results, you will have to use business management techniques and leverage proper tools while managing your affiliate program.

The strategies that you will need to adopt correspond to four basic management areas: planning, marketing, finances, and controlling. Sounds complicated? Don’t worry! Everything is much easier than you may think, and you will find more details about these areas below.

Planning: Design your affiliate strategy

Planning is the key to success in any business.

If you want to create a successful affiliate program and manage it consciously instead of playing Russian Roulette, you have to plan your actions. A good start is to outline a work schedule in which you define how much time you are willing to spend cooperating with affiliates.

It is also advisable to suggest specific tasks to your affiliates, such as writing blog articles. This strategy will help them keep their focus and remain productive and efficient.

However, keep in mind that planning goes beyond just developing a plan. You also need to set financial goals, which will help you guide your joint work. First, you need to establish a commission structure that you can offer to affiliates and suggest profit margins that should be achieved in the short, medium, and long term.

Next, you need to review what actions you and your affiliates need to take to achieve all of these goals. Put them down on paper (or use your favorite project management tool) and get organized so that you can really focus on achieving your goals – that’s the secret to growth!

If you’re looking for an advanced  affiliate software for tracking affiliate programs and networks, consider Post Affiliate Pro. It has multiple features organized under its User Interface groups such as customizable interface, mass payments, and multiple affiliate program administrators, to make the management of your program easy. Simply put, these functionalities enable you to plan and monitor all activities regarding your affiliate program.

Marketing: Teach affiliates how to promote your products

If you want to achieve your goals with an affiliate program, you must be aware of the fact (and emphasize it while communicating with affiliates) that the promotion of links is purely about marketing. It is therefore essential to use the right tools, strategies, and techniques. Below you will find six tips for those who want to hit it out of the park when promoting links. Feel free to pass these tips on to your affiliates so that they will know what actions need to be taken to promote your products successfully.

Owning a website

This will require a certain investment, but it’s worthwhile in the long run. Statistics show that conversions are higher when the advertisement comes from an affiliate’s own website. It is advisable to create a specific website for each affiliate niche.

Channel diversification

An affiliate needs to use multiple channels to communicate with consumers. In addition to a website, you should ask your affiliates to use social media, forums, or other places on the Internet that their potential customers are present and active.

Successful affiliates also leverage email marketing and physical advertising (which works very well in specific cases). Remember, whatever channel you use for promotion, high quality is essential! Today’s consumers expect visually appealing pages and ads with good technical quality and no spelling or grammatical errors.

Investing in paid ads

Many affiliates don’t want to work with paid ads, simply because they cost money. But a successful affiliate knows that ad costs shouldn’t be considered a cost, but rather an investment. This strategy will practically guarantee a substantial increase in reach, which directly relates to an increase in conversions. Paid ads usually result in affiliate links getting more clicks, conversions improving, sales and profits increasing.

Creating content and updating the website

Content production is one of the biggest secrets to the success of websites, blogs, and social media profiles. Creating quality content is what guarantees a loyal audience. The important thing is to prepare compelling copy and messages with interesting and useful content. These messages will attract consumers to pages where they can access links to products you promote through affiliate marketing.

Encourage affiliates to create useful and high-level content. Learn more about how you can do so here: Affiliate Marketing – 5 Hacks To Write Right Content

Specific niche

When starting the promotion, your affiliate should focus on a niche market. The more specific and focused it is, the better. To achieve the best results, a website or blog that is a part of an affiliate program shouldn’t mix advice for two different consumer groups. For example, you shouldn’t mix bodybuilder ads with messages for animal lovers.

Even though both audiences may have common interests, it’s better to choose a specific consumer profile and craft your communication with just one audience in mind.

The advantage of segmentation is that affiliates can be more precise in their strategies to spread the word about your product.

Choosing products that are attractive for a target audience

Now that your affiliate has defined their customer profile, they should choose the right products to promote. The secret is to find items that are most relevant to the client, i.e. digital products that are most useful for their niche.

Post Affiliate Pro offers an extensive library of Promotion Materials for its users. You can leverage these resources to provide your affiliates with content such as discount coupons, flash banners, HTML banners, lightbox banners, SmartLinks, text link banners, and more.

Finance: Earn and invest your money properly

Financial management is one of the biggest challenges for businesses of all sizes. Few entrepreneurs have the technical knowledge to manage resources properly. If that’s the case for you too, don’t worry. There are two basic points to consider when managing an affiliate program: how much commission to offer and how to keep making money while supporting your affiliates. 

We won’t elaborate on these points right now, but if you want to control your cash flow, know which campaigns bring satisfactory financial results, track various campaigns at the same time, or assign commissions, then you can do so using Post Affiliate Pro. Its types of commission feature enables you to track campaigns running on an unlimited number of websites and different domains.

Read more: Why is affiliate marketing no-risk marketing?

Efficiency: Monitor and control performance

The three aspects that we have already analyzed ─ planning, marketing, and finances ─ all have to be controlled. This is the element that will tell you if the strategies you co-created with affiliates in each of the above-mentioned areas are performing successfully.

But ultimately, how do you manage an affiliate program? You have to use the right metrics! There are several different types, and some can give you very similar answers. So the secret is knowing what to measure and how to do it correctly.

The key to managing affiliate programs and affiliate marketers is to check whether their actions are working and bringing satisfactory results. To do this, you have to average the conversion of each affiliate and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their performance.

If they’re doing well, you can keep monitoring and motivating them (by increasing their commission, for example). If you notice that their overall performance is much lower than expected, you can either guide them to improve their results, or make more extensive changes in your cooperation model.

With Post Affiliate Pro, you’ll have access to features that enable you to monitor and measure the performance of each campaign, making it easy to track the progress of your affiliates. These include affiliate link styles, custom affiliate tracking codes, fraud protection, and multiple tracking methods. You can also leverage multiple comprehensive reports that give you the power to track the performance of your affiliate program effectively. With just a few clicks you can generate audit logs, online user reports, top affiliates reports, top URLs reports, and much more.

Wrapping up

We’re not reinventing the wheel here. Even though we’ve only touched upon the basics, applying these strategies will help you manage all your active affiliate programs that promote your products or services. However, don’t expect life-changing lump-sums of money, or sales that will double your financial results overnight.

Affiliate marketing takes time. Focus on establishing the basics with your affiliates first. As your program grows, set new goals, and continue to experiment. This is how you can build an affiliate program that will eventually generate a substantial proportion of your income.