What Makes a Good Affiliate Program?

The affiliate program concept has taken a back seat to the more recent obsession in social media in the minds of many online marketers. Overlooking affiliate marketing as a tool to drive traffic to your website however is to abandon a very powerful ally in your online marketing attempts, no to mention your SEO efforts.

What is an Affiliate Program?

An affiliate marketing program is simply a referral system. It allows other website owners to promote your products or services on their website using banner ads or text links you make available via your affiliate program. If your affiliates (the other webmasters promoting your website) refer someone who converts to being a customer on your website, your affiliate gets a commission.

What are the Benefits of an Affiliate Program?

The benefits are pretty compelling, including:

• You only pay commissions on results.
• Commissions are a very strong incentive for other webmasters to promote your product or service.
• Increase in the number of back links to your website.
• Increased exposure for your brand or website. Each banner impression your affiliates deliver exposes your brand to yet another person.
• Usually much cheaper than any other form of paid advertising on the web.
• Affiliates are more likely to Tweet or write articles about you if they can include an affiliate link in their content.

What Makes a Good Affiliate Program

Here are some tips to implement to make sure your affiliate program is appealing:

• Offer a decent commission.
  Apple offer a miserable 1%-2% and have been heavily criticised for it. I'd suggest at least 8%, more if you can afford it.
• Provide plenty of good quality banners in numerous sizes.
  Offer at least the IAB standard sized banners. See common web banner ad sizes here.
• Be clear about what affiliate can and can't do.
  For example: no spamming, list pay per click terms they can't compete on, provide terms & conditions etc.
• Make sure your affiliates can check their statistics online.
  You'll find affiliates continually check to see if they have made some money. This also encourages affiliates to work hard on sending traffic to your site!
• Communicate with your affiliates regularly.
  It only takes a quick email each month to touch base with the people working to promote you. They appreciate your advice and encouragement and it keeps your program from feeling stale.
• Consider offering top performers a higher commission.
  If you are lucky enough to get some affiliates who really deliver for you, consider increasing their commission. This is an excellent way to retain and encourage top performers.
• If possible, offer deep linking.
  Deep linking allows your affiliate partners to link straight to pages deep in your website (a particular product page for example). This often results in more conversions since people don't have to navigate your website to find what they are looking for.

Affiliate Software Suggestions?

You have two options when it comes to affiliate software: 1) use a third party provider and 2) install and manage your own software.

Personally I always prefer a self hosted and managed solution as it has a number of benefits:

1. You won't owe a 'cut' to the third party provider. Typically they expect 25% of what you pay the affiliate on each commission.
2. You get true backlinks! Third party providers redirect through their system - that is not a back link in the eyes of a search engine.
3. It's more personal, and affiliates feel a stronger connection towards you and your brand.

The software I use is called iDevAffiliate which has been around for years and considered one of the better pieces of affiliate software that you can implement. It offers a huge range of features and is very fairly priced.

Good luck with your affiliate marketing program!