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.

It’s November, and with Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, consumers are looking forward to some of the biggest savings of the year. Whether through brick and mortar stores, online retailers, or both, consumers will be browsing products throughout the month to snap up the best bargains, come November 27 (Black Friday) and November 30 (Cyber Monday).

For affiliates and merchants, it’s important to start your campaigns early and to get the word out about your promotions in order to capitalize on impeding traffic. And while many people associate Cyber Monday as strictly online sales, and Black Friday solely about offline sales, the truth is, both days are important to your online sales goals.

In fact, while the majority of consumers identify Black Friday weekend as the time to buy big ticket items, research shows that Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are actually quite similar, suggesting that shoppers don’t separate the two in terms of online and offline sales.

A recent study by the Yahoo Insights team supports this finding, concluding that online sales on Black Friday were not too far behind sales that occurred on Cyber Monday. The study reveals that online retailers experienced a greater percentage increase in conversions on Black Friday, than Cyber Monday.

Trends identify Black Friday/Cyber Monday as having the best deals on personal, home or office and electronic products. Location is also important, with more than 50% of consumers shopping from their workplace, for added convenience.
This year, due to the still recovering economy, Black Friday sales ads are expected to offer shoppers a selection of huge bargains and deals on even more products and services. Free shipping offers are also especially popular during Cyber Monday, with 75% of customers preferring to shop with an online retailer that offers this incentive.

So with mere weeks left until two of the biggest shopping days of the year, merchants and affiliates should definitely make sure their marketing campaigns are ready. Consumers will begin product/service browsing now, so make sure your deals and free shipping promotions take front and center. And remember, online sales are not just about Cyber Monday anymore; Black Friday is going to be equally important to your marketing campaign success.

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!

We wanted to let you know about the latest Share Results Hot Coupon Deals for November 2009. There are some exciting promotions including the launch of one of our newest merchants AdditionElle/Penningtons/MXM – the leading fashion experts for plus-sized women!

NEW:AdditionElle/Penningtons/MXM

Affiliate Promotion: Earn an extra 2% commission for all orders (from 6% to 8%)
Offer expires November 30th, 2009

Coupon Code: Customers get $15 off orders of $75 or more
Coupon Code – Available via the Share Results Coupon Feed
Offer expires November 30th, 2009

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Imaginary Greetings

Coupon Code: Get a free personalized phone call with purchase of a Santa Letter
Coupon Code – Available via the Share Results Coupon Feed
Offer expires December 31, 2009
Coupon code can only be used once by one customer and cannot be combined with other promotions

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StyleFly

Customer Promotion: Black Friday/Cyber Monday Coupon
Coupon Code – Available via the Share Results Coupon Feed
Canadian Traffic Only – Offer available from November 27 – 30, 2009

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Tundra Gear

3 Coupon Codes:Customers get 10% OFF any hat
*Customers save 10% on all products
*Buy 2 hats, get a 3rd hat free

All offers expire after December 31, 2009 and cannot be combined

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The CuteKid

Affiliate Promotion: Brand new $1.25 CPL offer for Member Registrations + landing page

Offer is now Ongoing!

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ZooBooks

Coupon Code:
Get 20% OFF any order (subscription not included)
Offer expires December 31st, 2009

Customers get 10% off all products (excluding subscriptions)
Offer expires February 14th, 2010

Both coupon codes – Available via the Share Results Coupon Feed
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T-Shirtmonster.ca

Customer Promo: Brand new Military T-Shirts for Remembrance and Veterans Day + New landing page for products

Offer expires November 30, 2009
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UnderGroundHipHop.com

3 Customer Promotions:
*10% Off orders
*$10 Off orders $75+ or more
*$25 Off orders $150+ or more
Coupon Codes – Available via the Share Results Coupon Feed
Offer expires December 31, 2009

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Nero

Affiliate Promotion: Earn an extra $25 for your first 10 sales in November
Offer expires November 30, 2009

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Language of the Leaf

Coupon Code: 10% Off on all orders over $30 + Free shipping over $50
Coupon Code – Available via the Share Results Coupon Feed
Offer expires November 30, 2009
Coupon code can only be used once by one customer and cannot be combined with other promotions

Login your Share Results affiliate account to access all these great coupon offers! http://www.shareresults.com/affiliates/login.php

You really can’t ignore the vampire trend that has seemingly swept the nation. From television shows and movies, to merchandise, vampires are in, and the buzz surrounding them is only increasing. As such, the new vampire blockbuster Twilight: New Moon is set to open November 20^th worldwide, and the hunt is on for official Twilight merchandise. This Halloween definitely wasn’t without its fair share of Edward costumes and Bella outfits, but for any other day of the year, how may someone show their admiration?

Official Twilight: New Moon Merchandise

MXM has the EXCLUSIVE plus-size Canadian rights to the OFFICIAL MOVIE TEES from THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON!

MXM, a trendy 14+ fashion brand, is 5 years young and has quickly grown in popularity by featuring the latest hottest looks and trends. This new line of exclusive merchandise from the Twilight Saga is a huge benefit to affiliates who are interested in promoting MXM and/or one of its sister brands AdditionElle and Penningtons. Together, these three brands are the leading fashion experts for plus size women.

For November Share Results is offering MXM affiliates some fanastic affiliate and customer promotions. All affiliates will benefit from an additional 2% rev share commission for the month! That’s a total of 8% commission!

Customers will benefit from $15 off any order of $75 or more during the month of November. Customers can purchase from all three brands in a single checkout and benefit from a low, flat shipping rate to Canada and the US, therefore making this coupon even more effective! Login to obtain the coupon code!

If you are not already an affiliate of the AdditionElle/Penningtons/MXM program, you can read more and sign up for the Plus-Size Clothing Affiliate Program

Happy Fall!

The holidays are the most wonderful time of the year, and present merchants and affiliates with tremendous earning potential. In fact, holiday shopping can account for up to 50% of an online retailer’s yearly sales, meaning that affiliates too have an equal opportunity to leverage this peak shopping season.

In 2008, an estimated 85 million people shopped on Cyber Monday, known as the kick-off date to the online shopping season. This year, many online retailers are looking to the Monday after Thanksgiving to bring another sales surge.

The Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend accounts for a significantly large portion of the holiday sales for online retailers. Yahoo Advertising reports that Black Friday is the new Cyber Monday, stating,

“When compared with the average day in November, Black Friday showed a 147% increase in conversions, while Cyber Monday had a 73% increase in conversions.”

This year, the lucrative Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend falls between November 27-30; affiliates, make sure your campaigns are ready!

The 2009 forecast looks promising, when compared to 2008. Amazon.com has reported its third quarter income has increased to $199 million from $118 million last year. It’s forecasting 4th quarter growth of 21% to 35% over last year.

To leverage your earning potential, it’s important to note what shoppers will be looking for:

1. Deals
2. Discounts
3. Coupons

As economic difficulties continue, consumers are looking for money-savers now, more than ever. Coupon sites have seen monumental growth this year, with shoppers looking for discounts and deals. Sites such as RetailMeNot are seeing over 200% growth over last year.

According to Netelixir , keyword search advertising is expected to be the most important customer acquisition channel during the 2009 holiday season. With Google reporting a 7% increase compared to the third quarter of 2008, PPC affiliates will have a great opportunity to increase their search revenue. For affiliates looking to try their hand at PPC, the holidays are the perfect time to get started. And with Share Results’ recent launch of their SEM Agency , it’s easier than ever to get the support you need to drive the success of your affiliate marketing campaigns.

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.

Halloween is in two days and falls on a Saturday this year so the parties and get togethers will be in full swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re throwing a Halloween jam or giving out candies – dressing up in a costume can make it more fun and enjoyable.

So who will you be dressing up as this year? According to a recent article from MercuryNews.com, Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga and Kate-minus-Jon will be some of the hottest costumes in 2009.

Halloween can also be a great time to start an affiliate marketing career. Brian G. Johnson from NetMarketingCourse.net said that:

“It is estimated that during the 2009 Halloween season, consumers will spend more than 7 billion dollars on costumes, candy, decorations and other assorted seasonal niche items.”

This can be a huge opportunity for new and established affiliates to generate revenue and ride strong into the holiday season.

Happy Halloween from the Share Results staff!

The holidays present online retailers with tremendous earning potential.  With mere days left in the month of October, and the countdown to the real holiday madness just around the corner, now is the time to have a good look at your marketing campaigns to make sure you’re set up to enhance your sales volume, and ultimately, seal the deal.  Here are some key areas of your marketing campaigns that you should look at to make sure you’re in shape for the season.

1. Quality Affiliates
Having knowledgeable, capable marketing partners is crucial to the success of your online campaigns.  A quality affiliate will have an attractive, user-friendly website with a high page rank, and will employ multiple marketing methods to promote your product(s).  So make it a point of recruiting these affiliates and regularly logging into your account to evaluate the quality of partners that you are attracting to your program.

If you don’t feel confident about the caliber of your partners, you should speak to your affiliate manager, or consider re-evaluating your recruitment strategy.  Your Traffic Report can also help you identify your top-performing affiliates, along with their conversion rates, and can be pulled based on Affiliate ID.  Once you have partners whom you believe have the potential to perform well in your program, the more likely quality sales will be generated.

2. Click-Through Rate
Your click-through rate is an important indicator to help you determine whether (a) customers are attracted to your product/service, and (b) if they are abandoning your landing page for some unforeseen issue.  For example, you may create an effective banner ad or coupon, but a problem on an affiliate’s site, your landing page or your shopping cart could be impacting the customer’s ultimate decision to buy.

The Deep Linking tool is applied by merchants who want to help their affiliates highlight specific products that match the need of the customer.  This tool allows affiliates to send customers to an exact area of your site that truly responds to their buying need.  When a customer sees a product on a banner that they like, and then lands on a relevant landing page for that item, you are helping to seal the deal, and reduce the odds of shopping cart abandonment.  If you’re seeing low stats, consider permitting a tool like deep linking in your program, or talk to your Share Results affiliate manager to offer some insight.

3. Seal the Deal
Once an affiliate has sent a customer to your website, and the customer is ready to buy, it’s up to you to seal the deal.   Make sure you have the right tools, and are doing everything you can to make buying convenient and simple.
An example of a deal breaker might be a banner on an affiliate’s site promising a flat price for one of your products, only to have that customer discover shipping charges during the checkout process.  In fact, according to comScore, 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges, and 72% of consumers say that if an e-commerce site eliminated free shipping, they would use another e-commerce site that did offer free shipping.  Free shipping is just one of several incentives that are important to online shoppers, so make sure to incorporate this in your strategy whenever possible.

Most importantly, remember to apply your Share Results marketing software to its full potential by using the tools at your disposal, and to check in with your affiliate manager regularly to find more strategic techniques for closing the sale.

Is your affiliate marketing campaign ready for the holiday season? If not, this is the blogging event to get you ready for the busiest season of the year. Check out last week’s blogs, and make sure to tune in until November 27 for more tips and techniques to help you end Q4 with your most successful campaign yet!

According to a recent article from eMarketer.com, the No. 1 metric of success for the marketing and sales managers polled was the number of new customers acquired. Lead generation and increased sales were also tracked by more than two-thirds of respondents.

This holiday season, it will be more of challenge than ever for retailers to attract new customers to both brick and mortar and online stores. That is not meant to imply that there will not be shoppers. In fact, Marketing experts National Retail Federation (NRF) have predicted that the holiday sales for 2009 will see flat growth largely due in part to the recent recession and consumers being much more money conscious.

So, there will likely be a bevy of shoppers this season, but a post-recession, research savvy new breed of shoppers, best described as the selective consumer. That means that this season, more than ever, it is important to stand out, and make educated decisions about where advertising money should be spent.
That means operators will have to roll out customized promotions that are tailored to their customers. More significantly, it means that the operators who can forge a relationship with their customer base will be those who succeed this Q4.

“Marketers have been aware of the effectiveness of building relationships and trust with content since long before the Internet,”

said Gordon Plutsky, director of marketing and research at King Fish, in a statement.

“Technological change has rapidly increased media channel options and the patterns of information consumption among consumers. More and more marketers are abandoning old media—and traditional advertising—to venture out on their own with original content.”

The marketers studied in the eMarketer.com article considered their corporate Website the best method for achieving their top goal of reaching prospective customers. Social media and custom content and media were not far behind.

As the shift into more in depth consumer research continues, this season will see more value shoppers who will browse research and compare products on the Internet using Social media. Consumers are using social media more to search for deals and coupons via Twitter and Facebook, so marketers may want to channel more resources into that avenue.

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 (http://blog.shareresults.com/). Until November 27, Share Results (www.shareresults.com) 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.

Whether you’re an existing affiliate looking to optimize your campaigns, or just getting started in the industry, here are some the most important tools you need to succeed in the upcoming holiday season.

Optimize Search Campaigns
Online customer acquisition strategies expert NetElixir predicts a 7-10% increase in search campaigns this holiday season. That’s a lot of potential for new sales, and affiliates will want to make sure they’re in a position to capitalize on this opportunity. PPC affiliates wanting to make sure their campaigns are running smoothly should be constantly testing their campaigns, running keyword reports, running promotions early and getting ready for Cyber Monday. Affiliates can also take advantage of SR tools such as the ACID feature which the affiliate can use to track the performance of any keyword for their campaign.

Join Programs
Affiliates looking to maximize sales will want to seek out the best product and program offerings. After all, even the most savvyaffiliate will fall short without teaming up with the right merchants and programs. Affiliates looking for new advertisers or products to promote in Q4, should check out the merchants in the Share Results network such as Imaginary Greetings, UnderGroundHipHop.com, Tundra Gear and Cute Kid, all of whom provide products that can be extremely popular for the holidays. Affiliates can browse a full list of our partners by visiting the Share Results website.

Securing High Converting Offers from your merchants
The months leading up to the holiday are important for setting up the promotions necessary to have a successful season. Affiliates should be using this time to get high performing coupons and deals from their top merchants. An excellent example is a free shipping offer. Shoppers flock to free shipping offers around the holidays, so affiliaters who have taken the time to set up these promotions in high visiblity areas on their sites are likely to reap the benefits.

Highlight Shipping Policies and Deadlines
Last minute shoppers are in abundance the last week before Christmas, and a lot of merchants have extended shipping deadlines. It’s important for savvy affiliates to stay on top of shifting deadlines, and to update promotions accordingly. During the Christmas rush, a few days can make the difference between a sale, and a lost sale.

Coupons
According to a recent survey commissioned by Retail Me Not, 62% of online adults look for coupons for online stores and more merchants are embracing coupons as a way to connect with their budget-conscious shoppers. Affiliates looking to capitalize on this trend should be sure to partner with merchants who have coupon offers. Like other offers, affiliaters who have taken the time to set up these promotions in high visiblity areas on their sites are likely to reap the benefits.

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.