Whether you’ve just launched an affiliate program, or you’re experienced in the field and are looking to increase your sales, attracting the right kind of affiliates is a must to ensure a successful Q4.  The following checklist highlights recruitment strategies that merchants can apply to ensure they are bringing in the right affiliates into their program.

1. Brand Exposure
Merchants love affiliate marketing for its performance-based  revenue model, but affiliates are savvier than ever before and know that their customers won’t buy brands that aren’t well known and trusted. You need to increase brand exposure every place possible, online and offline. For example, a merchant that wants Canadian traffic needs to launch on and offline ad campaigns north of the border, or it will be hard for any affiliate to give prime real estate space on their site to promote a brand their customers don’t recognize.

2. Customer Promotions
Coupon codes, free shipping and other deals make a major impact on whether or not a customer will buy a product/service.  Affiliates flock to offers that are unique, exclusive and convenient—so if you can, introduce these marketing incentives, then make sure they are clearly visible when marketing your affiliate program to new partners!

3. Get Social
Technorati, Google Alerts, Facebook and Twitter are all great channels for attracting new partners who promote products/services that may be similar to your own. Use keywords related to product/service in Google Alerts and Technorati to find blogs that are good match for your own program.  And keep in mind that Google and Microsoft both recently secured deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has also inked one with Facebook to include updates into Bing search results.  This makes social media marketing all the more important to marketing in general, and specifically to search engine marketing.

4. Performance Bonuses
Performance bonuses are excellent incentives to attract new partners, or even to complement an existing affiliate’s performance campaign. Merchants can either offer a set dollar amount or a tiered bonus commission that is based on sales. Try tailoring your bonus system according to your budget, and if you so choose, only offer these incentives to affiliates who’ve performed well in the past.

5. Referral Commission
Many affiliates get into the business of affiliate marketing because of friends who are also affiliates. Encourage this word of mouth marketing through referral commissions. Many affiliates may hear of affiliate programs through forums and search engines, but word of mouth is just as influential. Offer a flat referral commission and if you can afford it, a lifetime commission on transactions the referred affiliate sends.
If you’re already active with all or some of the above recruitment strategies make sure your affiliates and potential affiliates know about them.  Announce these details in your company newsletters, on your blogs, on your website and even in industry print publications.  The more affiliates know of these details, the more likely you are to attract quality affiliates to your program.  And if you’re not yet active with these recruitment strategies, Q4 is the perfect time to get started!

For more techniques, tools, tips and great resources to make sure you’re getting every last drop out of your affiliate marketing campaigns, be sure to come back to the Share Results blog. Until November 27, Share Results is throwing a big Holiday Blogging Event, packed with all kinds of seasonal information regarding trends for Q4, tips to get the best deals, consumer trends and how best optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Are you active with social media marketing? A recent announcement by Google and Microsoft now makes social media marketing all the more important to marketing in general, and specifically search engine marketing.

Google and Microsoft have both secured deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has also inked one with Facebook to include updates into Bing search results. For now, Google will be focusing solely on including tweets in their search results, but rumor has it they will be looking into Facebook soon.

This announcement bodes well for marketers who are active with these two social media venues, meaning more opportunity to be found in real-time searches.

Both Google and Microsoft are still working out just how these results will be included among their other conventional search results. Bing is working on a beta tool for people to try out, while Google has now gone live with the Google Social Search service.

Bing features a “Best Match” option, which prioritizes certain tweets over others. Bing has stated that credence will be given to Tweeters that have the most followers. Google Social Search, meanwhile, is designed to return traditional results along with updates and tweets that users’ friends and other contacts they follow on various social networks have posted.

Are you active with social media? If so, how are you using it, and has it been successful? If you haven’t tried your hand at Facebook or Twitter, will this recent announcement by Google and Microsoft change your mind? We want to know!

LinkedIn – the popular business networking site – has launched a new feature whereby users may save profiles of potential contacts in an easily managed Profile Organizer. Previously, adding a contact involved several steps and was not especially user-friendly. Thus, the idea is to make LinkedIn more appealing to those who are on-the-go.

Several users have found this to be quite useful as the “notes” tool provides a quick and easy way to jot down comments regarding potential business contacts. These notes can then be reviewed before meetings or conferences to keep track of past discussions and behavioural characteristics! The downside? You need to have a paid version of LinkedIn to benefit from this useful tool.

The blogs featured on this week’s BAMroll offer opinions on LinkedIn’s newest feature.

Duct Tape Marketing Blog offers great insight into the development. They delve into the differences between researching and contacting when using LinkedIn’s tools and explain the benefits of this improvement.

WebProNews Blog explains the Profile Organizer and even offers a video introduction to the feature. Moreover, they offer explanations from LinkedIn’s Elizabeth Reaves about the feature and its usability.

See you next week!

We are in the era when ‘a little birdie told me’ is a well-respected source of information, and not just a sarcastic phrase. That’s right, it’s Twitter Time! Our vocabulary has come to adopt the new wave of online jargon that includes such comical terms like tweet, thumb, sphinn, and digg.

As social media becomes a major player in the online world of business and networking, these ‘little birdies’ are tweeting their ways into the lives of you and me. However, it is not as easy as one might think. Although the bare essentials can be mastered by children, creating a following and retaining them is quite a difficult task.

Thankfully, these two blogs help shed light on the methods and strategies necessary in order to maximize your Twitter practice.

• This blog ‘Here’ was created and is written by Kieron Donoghue who also owns and operates UK Offer Media Ltd. His blog How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Online Business is an informative tool with some great tips for those who are interested in Tweeting. His experience is focused primarily around affiliate marketing but he specializes on online marketing in general.
• Chris Frost aka Frostie on the A4U affiliate forums is an experienced online marketer and affiliate. He has been very active in the UK affiliate marketing and PPC arena over the years and is well-versed in the social aspect of networking. His blog, Increasing your Twitter Following, gives insight into what has worked well in the past and things to consider for your own Twitter page. Moreover, he has several blogs pertaining to Twitter and maximizing its potential.

If you are interested in keeping up-to-date with informative blogs that are featured here, you can download the OPML file on our BAMroll page.  We also have badges for your blog, if you’re already a BAMroller.

The marketing potential of social media is not as some kind of hyper targeting tool that you can use to advertise your products/services to consumers. Rather, the value of social media lies in how it can help brands and affiliates build trust and a reputation with their target market. And that trust, in turn, can not only help you gain added customers, but actually retain them. After all, when a consumer feels like they have a relationship with your or your brand, they are that much more likely to become a loyal customer.

That being said, when many marketers first wade into social media, they can often make. Here’s an overview of 5 common social media mistakes:

1. Trying to dictate the conversation: trying to censor the conversation will rob your communications of the authenticity that makes social media so powerful. Besides, it’s not very social when you talk at people.
2. Putting on a false front: outright lying to consumers can backfire spectacularly. Just imagine if one day you found out your best friend was never who they said they were. Would you ever trust them again?
3. Failing to prepare for the flood of customer communications: once you get a conversation going with consumers, you need to take responsibility for answering queries, addressing complaints and updating content. You can’t engage consumer and then just give them the silent treatment.
4. Mistaking social networking for traditional advertising or corporate comms: social networking is about forging connections, creating credibility and building relationships rather than hard-selling, so injecting some personality into your communications will help you seem more inviting and engaging.
5. Thinking that they’ll come if you build it: you need to put some effort into marketing your social networking presences, and even more importantly, you need to give people a reason to want to engage with you..

The original post, of course, goes into more detail on each of these. But suffice it to say that social media marketing is similar to many other acquisition channels in that it is not a get-rich-quick, overnight-conversion scheme. Rather, it’s something that takes time and planning to do correctly.

The return social media marketing, however, can be many times greater than the investment. After all, not only will make back your time and effort in conversions over time, but you will also gain the trust and respect of consumers, which will help you retain them.

Because affiliates and etailers are more focused on conversions than anything else, they often wonder whether social media has any real value. Well, a recent study conducted by Sage Software and AMI-Partners shows that more than 260,000 small businesses in the US and Canada are using social media in some form, but sales/conversions didn’t at all figure into the top 7 social media priorities.

Rather, the most common uses were for customer engagement and networking. And even advertising/promotion came in 4th, with only 33 percent of businesses doing so on social networks.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that social media isn’t valuable for driving sales/conversions. Much to the contrary, social media is exceptionally useful for building trust within a given market demographic. And that trust, in turn, can not only help you gain added customers, but actually retain them. After all, when a consumer feels like they have a relationship with your or your brand, they are that much more likely to become a loyal customer.

This was the impetus behind our CEO’s suggestion that affiliates use Twitter to build brand trust, as well as why Chris Brogan emphasizes that communities are best used for building trust-based relationships, and by trying to just “sell to them,” you’re very likely to shoot yourself (and your bottom line) in the foot.

But this doesn’t mean that social media is only good for “hanging out with your customers.” Rather, Website Magazine illustrates, different social networks have very specific demographics.

So by determining where your target market is most active and engaging them there, you can build your brand reputation in a way that actually converts. It’s important to bear in mind, though, that like all solid business initiatives, social media is no get-rich-quick-scheme. Rather, it’s about building brand, reputation and trust.

In the last installment of Coffee with Nicky, our CEO Nicky Senyard discussed how affiliates could use twitter. Something that she focused on was how the channel itself should not tried to be monetized. Rather, affiliates should focus on using it to further grow and better engage their existing audiences.

Well, this is a clip of Chris Brogan discussing how any marketers should approach online communities in general, and his point is rather similar. Specifically, whether their affiliate marketers or corporate representatives, Chris underscores how communities are best used for building trust-based relationships, and by trying to just “sell to them,” marketers are very likely to end up shooting themselves in the foot. Enjoy…

Earlier today, we posted a video of our CEO discussing how affiliates could use twitter. Of course, this was more at a strategic level, so we thought we’d add a few tactical tips for affiliates who are seriously considering leveraging the medium for business purposes. So here you go:

1. Use TweetDeck: this is a desktop client that allows you to filter, manage, and monitor multiple conversations at once. For affiliates, it’s worthwhile checking out because it will let them effectively participate in (1) the affiliate marketing community, (2) the community of consumers they target, and (3) their network of personal friends. This way they can make business contacts, reach out to consumers, and still keep in touch with those closest to them.
2. Get the TweetMe Wordpress Plugin: whether you blog about affiliate marketing or about the products/services you promote, this a great plugin for Wordpress blogs that tweet a link to you latest blog post to whatever Twitter account you choose.
3. Check out the Affiliate Twit List: just like the affiliate AIM list and affiliate Skype list, this is a list of some of the biggest names in affiliate marketing who are on Twitter. It’s a great way to find interesting people to follow, connect with, and learn from — and then you can manage your conversation with them through TweetDeck!

The way that Twitter has grown in popularity has left a lot of affiliates wondering how to best use it toward their affiliate marketing goals. After all, whereas brands might be focused on simply building awareness or managing their PR, affiliates need to focus on actual conversions. Well, in the latest installment of Coffee with Nicky, our CEO Nicky Senyard discusses exactly what the potential of Twitter is for affiliate marketers, and how they should consider using it toward their affiliate marketing goals.

With Twitter having exploded that way it has over the last few months, it’s not just the web-savvy brands who “get it” that have jumped on the bandwagon. Now, brands from all walks and industries are having to consider the medium as a way to reach out to an interact with its target market.

Well, our CEO, Nicky Senyard, touches on what Twitter means for brands in the latest episode of her video blog Coffee with Nicky. But why take our word for it when you can hear it from Nicky directly?