R.O.EYE Blog

By Andy Mitchell, Programme Manager R.O.EYE

I wonder how many articles with that title have been written? 100’s? 1000’s?

Well this one is written from the point of view of an affiliate manager, and asks the question why “content is king” for an affiliate programme….

When launching an affiliate programme, you look for some quick wins that will bring in volume. This is fairly straight forward and generally involves working with some talented PPC affiliates who can add value to the programme immediately. Follow this up with ensuring that the merchant is placed on cashback sites and strategically supplying offer codes to discount code sites, you can be reasonably sure the programme will start to bring in some quick results. Obviously you’ll work with these affiliates and help them as much as possible to deliver maximum results for your programme.

But where does the programme growth come from? How do you ensure that the affiliate programme doesn’t stagnate and continues to steadily grow?

Once you reach a level where the PPC affiliates, cashback sites and voucher code sites are delivering a steady volume, you start to look for other affiliates. Generally, those ‘other affiliates’ are content affiliates, building niche sites and occupying natural listings. But why only look for them now? When the programme isn’t growing at the rate it once was?! This is a common mistake in the early stages of an affiliate programme….

In most cases, it is content affiliates that will ultimately determine whether your affiliate programme can continually grow. It is also content affiliates that can take longest to produce results, due to the nature of their type of promotion. So why not start working with these affiliates as soon as your affiliate programme launches?! That way, a few months down the line when their sites start to flourish and produce results, there won’t be a period of stagnation - just continual growth.

How can you do this?

In many ways!
Tell your affiliates what you think you’re top selling products will be for the next year. This means SEO affiliates can start building and optimising sites for those products.
Offer affiliates a higher commission on some of your key products - If you know an affiliate who is capable of producing results via SEO, then ask them to work on a site promoting these products in exchange for a higher commission - the worst they can do is say no!
Make it as easy as possible for SEO affiliates to get to work. If you are asking an affiliate to promote certain products, send them that product so they can personally review it. It’s hard work trying to promote something you know very little about!
And finally, provide content! We have a several merchants who are increasingly providing unique content to individual affiliates. Be it PR articles that weren’t used internally, or articles specifically written for affiliates, more merchants are starting to supply targeted content to affiliates, recognising the benefit content affiliates bring to a programme.

So, if you are planning to build a site to promote a specific merchant or product and need some content, ask the merchant if they’ll give you a hand!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 1:20 pm and is filed under SEO, Google, Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.