I’ve managed numerous affiliate campaigns both when working for a network and now at i-level, and to my mind there are only three ways to grow an affiliate campaign
- Recruit more affiliates on to the campaign
- Increase what your existing affiliates are doing
- Work with the merchant to increase conversion rates.
I want to concentrate on the first one today. Networks will tell you that they have tens of thousands of affiliates on the network, yet launch a campaign and you often struggle to get upwards of 50 affiliates actually driving sales. So your client, the merchant, is always pushing you to sign up more affiliates, specifically content affiliates.
So where are all of these affiliates? With the success of the channel we have seen more and more merchants come into the sector, but do we have enough quality affiliates to go around?
So at i-level we’ve been asking the question, which I’m sure all networks are asking too.
- How do we recruit more affiliates into the industry?
- How do we get current website owners to monetise their site?
- How do we make it as easy as possible for people to position our products on their site?
I think the first couple of questions are key to sustaining the industry going forward. A couple of thoughts:
- Will the roll out of the Google Affiliate Network introduce more people to the industry? Will all those site owners who currently have Adsense on their sites move over to the GAN and then begin to branch out and look at other networks?
- Is there a way of the industry (the networks) coming together to go out and promote the benefits and ease of website monetisation? How do you do this, where are the best places to advertise?
- Is there more that merchants, agencies and networks could be doing to support new entrants into the market? Are there any support structures in place currently?
Given that we are now officially in a recession, unemployment is rising daily and people are staying in more is this not an ideal time to be going out there with the message that with a little bit of effort you can generate yourself a reasonable and steady income stream?
