OK, lets assume its your first day as an affiliate manager. Your boss gives you a bit of a pep talk, tells you to increase performance by 100%, and then bogs off back to the golf course without a backward glance.

Let’s also assume you don’t have a clue about affiliate marketing. In fact, you were only in the building asking directions to the nearest train station when they asked you the fateful question “Ah. So do you know what this internet thing is then? Beautiful. You’re hired!”

OK? Right. The following advice is the best you’ll ever hear in your new career.

Forgive the sarcasm (it’s not as if you’re not expecting to see it on this blog!). However after being alive and kicking for around 10 years in the UK, the venerable institution of affiliate marketing still seems to be beset by what I perceive to be newbie mistakes by an unacceptable proportion of merchants.

A recent survey of super affiliates by UK affiliate management agency R.O.EYE (geddit?!) uncovered that the biggest bar to growth of many affiliate programmes is simply poor management. This isn’t news to myself and most other affiliates. We’re well used to this status quo. It’s time for merchants to sit up, listen, and make use of the valuable resource affiliates represent. Most importantly, it’s time for merchants to realise that lack of attention to your affiliate programme can seriously damage your bottom line. The study underlines that with Affiliate Marketing in the UK having passed the £2 Billion mark in 2006, it’s high time that the resources dedicated to programme management reflected its revenue spinning potential.

So sit back, relax, and let the affiliates do the talking: –

What Super Affiliates Really Want

- Do Your Housekeeping. Is an up to date data feed too much to ask? How about making sure your affiliates are up to date with current special offers and promotions? Regularly updated creatives? It’s hardly rocket science guys.
- Communication Is The Key. Communicate directly with your affiliates. Passing information only via your affiliate network can be frustrating for your affiliates. It can also result in “Chinese Whispers” syndrome with miscommunication a common by-product.
- Affiliates Really Just Want To Be Loved. Include the affiliate stream as an integrated part of your marketing strategy. Make use of their expertise at the outset of your online campaigns, and make sure everyone is aware of each other’s goals and striving to achieve them together.

There. It’s not hard is it? There are many highly talented marketers in the affiliate world. They are in the business because they can earn better money from their talents than becoming a marketing consultant… doesn’t that tell you something about their skillset?

On behalf of all affiliates I say: –

“Oh great merchants hear my plea… YOU can make more money by talking to me!”

Affiliate managers are often lambasted for making poor decisions and generally ticking affiliates off at times. For all of us, having a good moan about various programme managers who clearly don’t have two brain cells to rub together has become something of an occupational sport. I enjoy this as much as the next chap, but I do think it’s important to realise that there are a lot of affiliate managers who make real efforts to communicate, assist and add value to the affiliate programmes they are running.

Not one to usually give people free plugs or let on who I promote but…

One programme I’ve been really impressed with is CreditExpert. Their affiliate manager, Patrick Perraton, regularly sends out useful seasonal information on his program and also sends articles for use on affiliate sites out on a regular basis. Beyond that, he’s always good at dropping me a line to ask what I’m up to and if there’s anything he can do.

With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting for us affiliates to find out what a hardworking affiliate manager gets up to on a day to day basis and how one ends up walking the hallowed halls of affiliate management!

Patrick’s background in his own words:

Born in London, grew up in SE Asia, did my Bachelor in Business Administration in Vancouver, Canada – then completed the full circle and moved back to London. My first proper job was as a Sales and Marketing coordinator for a financial institution in London. I naturally got heavily involved with the website as this is where my main interests were and then ended up managing the operation of it. The company then got taken over and instead of moving down to sunny Bournemouth – I took the redundancy payout instead.

That’s when I joined CreditExpert (part of Experian – the UK’s largest credit reference agency). Launched in the UK at the end of 2003 – CreditExpert is now the UK’s leading credit monitoring and identity theft service. The product has grown very rapidly since its induction by providing customers the tools they need to ensure that they stay on top of their credit status and at the same time protect themselves from identity fraud.

The Role At CreditExpert!:
As the CreditExpert business was growing so quickly, the already successful affiliate program needed someone enthusiastic and motivated to take it on to the next level. So that’s where I came in – to make sure it reached the potential it deserved.

What do I actually do!!
- Develop rapport with existing and prospective affiliates to help them maximise their sales
- Create promotional campaigns and incentives
- Identify and recruit new affiliates on to the program
- Help new affiliates to use the networks if necessary
- Brief internal design team on new creatives to fit into affiliate promotions
- Analyse reports and stats
- Check affiliates are promoting CreditExpert properly and not damaging the brand
- Provide optimising suggestions to affiliates by sharing successful techniques and supplying copy, editorial and general tips
- Educate CreditExpert to both prospective and existing affiliates
- Engage in face-to-face meetings and attend networking events
- Liase with the affiliate networks to ensure they are doing the most for us they can
- Grow the affiliate channel so that it reaches its potential.

Phew! So if any of you thought that people like Patrick spend their entire day sitting formulating their next evil ploy to confound those “grubby little affiliates”, then you’d be entirely wrong (well, about Patrick at least!)

Finally, I asked Patrick what makes him feel warm and cosy inside when he thinks about his job, and what he hates the most!: –

Warm and Cosy: Educating an affiliate from scratch about CreditExpert and how to promote it effectively – then seeing them bring in applications. Its literally planting those seeds of success for a win-win situation.

Yah Boo Sucks To: Putting lots of effort to help affiliates strengthen their campaigns and from a select few – not getting the same energy back.

If you want to contact Patrick to see if you can make the odd quid or two promoting free credit reports, give him a hoy at: –
patrick .perraton @ uk. experian .com (remove spaces) He tells meCredit Expert fit well into most verticals other than travel and gaming – get in touch with him and he can show you how.

You can find out more about the programme Patrick runs for Credit Expert at: –
joincreditexpert.com

P.S – I absolutely wasn’t paid or bribed in any shape form or fashion to write this. I just appreciated Patrick’s kind attention and help and wanted to say a public thanks! See? It’s nice to be nice!

I upgraded to the new Yahoo Search Marketing platform a few days ago. After an impatient 8 hour weight whilst the Yahoo servers gave birth to my shiny new account I finally got around to taking it for a test drive today.

I wanted to wait until I had something real to pop up there, and I completed my newest PPC site today. I must say, after some initial disorientation I was pleased with a lot of the changes. For me there are still a fair few points of frustration in terms of the usability that means they still just don’t compete with the Adwords interface.

These are only some brief impressions I jotted down whilst I set up a single adgroup within a new campaign. I’ll start with the negatives!

Yahoo Frustrations

1 ) Since they changed over to the new service, I can no longer see my UK ads when I log onto Search.Yahoo.co.uk out here in Australia. I e-mailed Yahoo support, and to their credit they actually answered within a few hours. With a response that, as usual, is absolutely no help whatsoever.

“Dear Mr. McCubbin,

In order to change this option, please click on the ‘Administration’
tab and then the ‘Edit’ button in the field ‘Account General
Information’.”

Apart from being mistaken for a man, the only way they know of for me to see how my ads are looking in the results is to activiate my ads within Australia. To be fair, that’s exactly the kind of response I’d expect from the Adwords support team… so they’re well up with Google on this one!

2 ) The new interface allows a maximum of 20 campaigns. Due to the way Yahoo have chosen to migrate the accounts (by allocating a campaign to each adgroup I had set up in the old Yahoo Search interface), I now have 83 campaigns. Most of these are dormant adgroups. So as soon as I tried to set up a new campaign I was hit with “sorry, no more than 20 campaigns”. To delete a single campaign requires you to visit 3 different screens. I’m in for a thrilling few hours

3 ) The migration process seems to have sorted my search terms within my old adgroups into several new adgroups. They are grouped by keyword type, and I can see the merit in this approach.. but to be honest, I’m just finding it confusing right now!

Welcome Yahoo Innovations

1 ) I’m liking the campaign setup process. The ability to target ads geographically is clearly presented and easy to use. They’ve even included a map for the bewildered and easily confused. Even Jade Goody could work out the geography of the UK with this addition.

2 ) Ahh… the new add keywords function. A breath of fresh air, making it easy to apply many keywords to a single ad.

3 ) The new Yahoo traffic forecasting tool is pretty neat. I love the little graph that shows you where the traffic starts to kick in depending on your bid amount. i.e. If you’re looking at spending 20p a click and that’s not getting you enough in the way it’s easy to see at which point other bidders start to get a reasonable volume of traffic.

4 ) The nice wee option that lets you preview other ads that are live for your search terms whilst you are writing your own ad copy. It’s great to be able to see how the competition are behaving in your targeted search space so you can seek to improve on their ads.

5 ) Dynamic titles! Hurahh!

Overall, I’m happy with the changes Yahoo has made. It’s a huge improvement on the old interface which has repeatedly resulted in my coming down with a bad case of computer rage (and has often led to me abandoning attempts to pop up listings.

There are still a few frustrations though Yahoo… so don’t rest on your laurels. Get the development team right back in there and continue the improvements!