Assign an On-Staff Affiliate Manager

For your Affiliate Program to run smoothly, you will need to assign an Affiliate Manager. An Affiliate Manager is a lot like a sales manager: you may have an excellent team of salesmen, but without encouragement, guidance, and oversight of a sales manager, the team is likely to stray. Even if you are running a small Affiliate Program, your manager will need to work at least fifteen hours a week to keep the program running well.

Affiliate Managers find and recruit Publishers, approve new Publisher applications, develop and test creative, track leads, and monitor transactions. They communicate regularly with Publishers, review website and marketing campaign quality, send out newsletters, create promotional material, run incentive programs, and address Publishers' concerns. They must also manage the Affiliate Program's records and regularly analyze the program's effectiveness.

There is no college degree for Affiliate Managers, although some informal training materials and events (such as http://affiliateclassroom.com, http://affiliatesummit.com, and http://affiliatebootcamp.com) are available. Most good Affiliate Managers develop their skills by working in different capacities with Affiliate Programs over time.

When looking for an Affiliate Manager, try to hire someone who has several years of experience in internet marketing. Unfortunately, training in public relations or general marketing simply doesn't provide a person with the knowledge and skills necessary to be an Affiliate Manager.

It's not just a matter of avoiding rookie mistakes. An experienced Affiliate Manager should have established relationships with many of the best Publishers that might not otherwise give their attention to your campaign.