Managing Affiliate Program

In the digital marketing world, about 30% of customer traffic comes through the affiliate program.

An affiliate marketing is a process that connects several factors:

  • The client, who surfs the Internet.
  • an affiliate who wants to generate income from his website/ blog/ social activity and media promotion.
  • The advertiser / service provider who wants to recruit customers and sell / promote products and services.
  • Affiliate network, a company that connects publishers, affiliates and advertisers, while they are managing tracking links, advertisers' payments to affiliates, and more. There are many affiliate networks such as www.cj.com, www.shareasale.com, and etc.
  • AFFILIATE AGENCY, such as my company: imec.co.il, is a service that connects advertisers, affiliate networks and the ad groups.


When you wish to recruit clients using affiliate marketing you need to follow these steps:


1.Calculate your MAX marketing budget:

Which is the maximum cost per customer that we can pay to the distributors/ affiliates with the intention of creating an incentive for redirecting their visitors to our site / venture.

As part of the planning of marketing commissions, I have always done research on the fees that exist in the market, competitors, seasonality (such as holidays, weather, etc.) all in order to create the most attractive fee for the partners.


2. Building a commission plan is ranked according to success:

Like every salesperson, all the affiliates work on commissions and incentives. The fees should reflect an incentive for the effort and risk taken by publishers who direct traffic to us instead of to another affiliate program or Google AdSense. Below is an example illustrating this.


3. Adding and implementing an AFFILIATES management software to your website:

An essential step in which we will add software that will allow us to measure the traffic of the visitors and the actions they do on our site, which site they came from and how much commission we need to pay for each affiliate/ publisher.  


4. Creating an orderly legal agreement:

You need to define, what are the terms of the plan, what is considered a normal lead / action/ new customer, the terms of payment, dates and cancellations (yes, you cannot avoid this)!


5. Accounting organization for monitoring and making payments:

Of course, we want to reach a lot of publishers and a lot of payments (we wanted to recruit customers, did we not?), that's why we're committed to organizing both accounting and organization to make payments for multiple publishers.


6. Preparation of a database of various ads/banners/ and promotional materials for the use of AFFILIATES:

In order to promote our products/ services we need to enable the affiliates/ publishers tools that will promote the best message we wish to target. Therefore we need to create: banners, landing pages, keywords, coupons, videos, social ads and various promotions.

If your target audience is in different countries, it is necessary to prepare accordingly with the appropriate banners / landing pages.


7. Program exposure on sites displaying AFFILIATES programs:

There are quite a few affiliates' directories that allow adding the program and presenting it to publishers who are looking for income generating programs.


8. Quality control of leads and analysis of results:

Performance improvement, running the program requires constant results analysis, with the intention of reducing and expanding the activities of the various partners.


9. Keeping in touch with your partners:


Like any salesperson who promotes your products/services, there is a need to keep in touch with various partners who refer us to visitors and help them maximize their income as a result of referring customers. Remember, when your program and your competitor affiliates program offer same payment, it is most likely that the affiliate will chose to promote the program with better personal connection between him and the advertiser so what you can do to save your time and invest your effort on personal connection with your partner.  


The affiliate industry is a dynamic, fascinating and with its own peculiar rules.


A small example of a real case with our client:

The negotiations with a particular affiliate and the traffic that he can deliver showed that he could earn about $ 4,000 a day in commissions on marketing our affiliate program, ostensibly a great reward. The affiliate, made his calculate, how many visitors can he send a day, the conversion he can earn per each customer, what is the recruitment fee to recruit each new customer and so.

The calculation by that same affiliate showed that promoting another program could reward him with $ 8,000 in daily fees (no, this is not a mistake).


We have to make a lot of effort that our site will convert very well, that is, the percentage of visitors who turn to us and become customers will be high otherwise the affiliates will feel that they wasted traffic in vain and that neither they nor we want.