Affiliate Marketing 101

Affiliate Marketing 101
Last Fall we entered into the affiliate marketing world and signed on with the big networks: Performics, Commission Junction and Linkshare. Our strategy was broad brush--sign up with as many merchants as we can to determine which ones drive the best search traffic, clicks and of course sales.
Now that we've been at it for a while, we've been able to focus in on what works for our business and how to get the most out of our affiliate partners. Here are a few of the things we've learned:
Learn to edit. There are many many merchants that likely don't apply to your site or customer that will clutter up your content. Focus on the few that you care about and make sure to merchandise their content well.
Make a personal connection. We were resistent to reach out to our affiliate partners because we were new to the space and weren't driving huge sales. We took a risk and attended the linkshare conference and built relationships with all of their top merchants who now have Judy's Book on their radar and are willing to work with us to help jump start sales
Don't be afraid to ask. We figured that exclusive deals and higher commissions were reserved for affiliate sites that were reporting the biggest sales. In just a few conversations at the Linkshare conference it became clear that affiliate partners were very willing to extend special offers or help with custom data feeds and in general enter into a conversation to make the relationship successful
Find a way to stand out. Affiliate partners partners have positively reacted to the Judy's Book value prop, especially the local focus but they also liked our deal editor program which assigns an editor to each of the brands we care about giving the merchant trust that their content will be merchandised and manually reviewed ultimately resulting in what we believe is a higher quality deal site.
We've still got a long way to go but we've made good progress over the past few months and will driving hard to make the affiliate channel work for JB.
July 23, 2007 Permalink
Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, Affiliate network, Commission Junction, Judy's Book, Linkshare, Performics, Search