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Affiliate managers talk about two percent of their affiliates generating ninety-eight percent of transactions, as if that makes sense.

It’s time that you trimmed the fat off your affiliate program. According to data that I collected recently for the AffStat 2005 Report, thirty percent of affiliate managers downsized their affiliate programs in the last year.

While the prevailing mindset in affiliate marketing has been quality of quantity for years, there are still lots of people that talk quality and keep quantity.

The Kindest Cut
Why bring down the size of your affiliate program? After all, Amazon touts a base of nearly a million affiliates. First of all, you’re not Amazon. And second of all, just because they are doing it doesn’t make it right.

Amazon sells Sea Monkeys. So does that mean you’re going to start selling Sea Monkeys on your site?

But seriously, folks. Having a gigantic number of affiliates may dazzle the MBAs in your office, but it’s a liability to carry extra weight. Think about it, how well can you monitor potential fraud, shady adware, CAN-SPAM compliance, and your brand when you’ve got tens of thousands of affiliates?

You can’t handle those very important issues properly with a big, gangly affiliate program.

Less is More
Yes, I know the party line. You are risking the chance that you might throw out a diamond in the rough if you remove affiliates from your program. That’s a myth, but I’ll play along.

As a first step in removing the non-producers, slice out all of the players that are running their operations from free sites (Angelfire, GeoCities, etc). If they are not willing to invest $8 in a domain, they are not going to be diamonds this year. This is strictly Cubic Zirconia territory.

If you have been accepting affiliates on auto-approval, and that is nearly a quarter of you, according to the AffStat 2005 Report, your affiliate program is probably well populated with these sorts of sites.

Oh yeah, there’s the argument that it doesn’t cost anything to keep the dormant affiliates in your affiliate database. Well, if you are doing your job and monitoring your affiliates, they do cost something.

They cost you time to monitor them. It’s easy to catch the scammers that go overboard and drive astronomical stats. They’re greedy and rarely succeed. The real pests are the affiliates with junkyard sites that lie under the radar and do a little bit here and there to see if you’ll catch them. They cheat dozens of programs at a time, and their take can be substantial in aggregate.

Affiliate-land Security
After you’ve dumped all of the free sites, take a look deeper at your affiliate base. You’ve got to look for affiliates that have anomalies in their profile. This is a lot trickier, but important.

These are affiliates that might have seduced you into clicking the Approve button, because they pretended to represent a big time site. If you have Yahoo.com or Forbes.com in your list of inactive affiliates, take a closer look.

Do these accounts say to make the checks payable to Joe Smith and a Hotmail email address? Probably. These are affiliate sleeper cells. They join up with lots of programs, sometimes with real information stripped from WHOIS records, and later update their profile to collect their ill gotten gains.

Usually I’d wince when talking about a net loss, but in the case of an affiliate program, it’s a good thing to optimize and minimize as time goes by. Otherwise, you could be leaving yourself wide open to shysters, spammers, and tricksters. Staff up or cut down!

Missy Ward is the Director of Marketing for CPAEmpire.com and Ronald Bell is the President and CEO of Ronald Bell Consulting. Both are co-founders of Affiliate Summit – the leading Performance Marketing Conference held annually.

One of the most effective advertisements for a product or service can be a customer testimonial or a review from an objective source. With all of the hyped up advertising copy out there, consumers are skeptical marketing efforts.

This can be difficult to overcome, but as an affiliate, your job is to pre-sell the offer and initiate the relationship of trust between the consumer and merchant. And a recommendation from a satisfied client or industry publication serves as a very persuasive sales tool.

The testimonial as affiliate text link provides tangible proof to your site visitors and newsletter readers that the company you are promoting is capable of doing what they boast about. This sort of creative can be as short as several words, or as long as a paragraph or full page.

You’ll notice that most affiliate programs do not offer testimonials as affiliate text links, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them. It’s actually a good thing for you if they are not being offerred to all affiliates. Then, you can contact the affiliate manager and ask for permission to use customer testimonials as affiliate links yourself.

If you prefer to run banners over text links, suggest to your affiliate managers that they ought to create some banners that are based on testimonials.

Affiliates can also pick and choose customer tesimonials from some merchants (example: InstrumentPro).

If you are a customer of the merchant you are promoting, try writing a testimonial of your own and run it by the affiliate manager.

I’m working on the development of an affiliate program for a web hosting provider. Frankly speaking, I’m quite concerned with it. My task is to promote it to those who are interested in the possibility of money making. What are your recommendations concerning the creation of an efficient affiliate program for a web hosting provider?

You’ve got a task that is common to all affiliate managers. It’s time to turn your concern into action.

First things first, open up Excel and create a file for your category (web hosting). Set up columns for all of the pertinent details in the programs of your competitors: pay out, cookie/return days, payment threshold, payment frequency, tracking, etc.

After you’ve mapped out the competition, make a list of the most attractive attributes of each affiliate program in your channel, and modify your program as best you can to be the ideal affiliate program, in comparison with your competitors.

Then, you’ve got to get yourself in front of the affiliates that are already doing well promoting web hosting services. There are a bunch of tools for affiliate prospecting, including ARELIS and Link Capture.

When you have a target list, try reaching out to them by direct mail, phone, and buying placements in pay per click search engines.

It’s all about crafting a superior affiliate program, and then shouting from the rooftops to let everybody know.

FOR ALL THE HYPE ABOUT affiliate marketing, is it effective? A new study by Ronald Bell Consulting suggests that affiliate programs can lead to business, with 14 percent of affiliates generating conversion rates of more than 5 percent. For the study, more than 130 affiliate managers–ranging from small mom-and-pops to Fortune 100 companies–were surveyed on their overall strategies, as well as a number of issues about their affiliate marketing channels such as staffing, recruiting, and management.

About one in seven affiliate marketers–14 percent–reported that conversion rates on such programs were greater than 5 percent, according to the study. An additional 10 percent reported rates of between 3.1 and 5 percent, while 13 percent reported conversion rates of 2.1 to 3 percent.

Complete article at http://publications.mediapost.com/…

I just came across an affiliate program tutorial written by affiliate marketing veteran, Allan Gardyne. It’s an 18 step guide to getting started and succeeding as an affiliate.

Whether you’re brand new to affiliate marketing or you’ve been at it for a while, I’d suggest giving it a read.

Read the tutorial at http://affiliatetip.com/news/article0049.php

I use MyAP. I seem to be getting clicks, and now even a sale from affiliates, when I cannot even find our link or banner on their website. Is there a way to search a website for a banner/link? And have you any idea how this could be happening?