Arming yourself with the tools to give you a competitive edge in affiliate marketing

TAGS: Affiliate marketing

There is a multitude of tools out there currently which propose to aid us in becoming better affiliate marketers. Just to name a few there are tools to build knowledge, cut down deep linking process, generate bespoke feeds and aggregate all networks. Kevin Sung, Client Services Manager at Silverbean takes a look into the minefield of tools out there and extracts the best from the rest.

Competitor analysis

Fancy a snoop into your competitor’s traffic, demographics, daily unique visitor trending and even the sites the visitors also visited?

Google’s ad planner is an amazing free tool that enables just this. Initially designed as a tool for display marketers to plan their ad campaigns and placements the ease of use and depth of information has enabled Google’s ad planner to be used for much more.

Let’s say you are an affiliate marketing manager and wanted to explore new sites in the vouchercode sector to target simply type in a more well known voucher code site into the search box, hit enter, and as part of the results there is a ‘sites also visited’ section where you can research other sites of similar content.

One Click Deep Linking

This one is more for affiliates than merchants. Paid on results was the first to release this in 2007 in the UK and since then a fair few other networks have produced their one click deep linking tools too. This shaves lots of time off going back into the interface and having to paste the relevant link into fields and the like. Networks that currently support ‘one click deep linking are paid on results, link share, Affiliate window and Buy.at (now part of digital window).

Using these tools saves so much time and resource giving affiliates time to dedicate to more important matters such as earning that first million pounds.

For merchants choosing the right network with tools such as these is vital for affiliate program success.

Evolved product feeds

Both one for affiliates and merchants to consider - the simple product feed can be classed a text based catalogue of your stock which affiliates can manipulate to display the products they wish.
However Apple iTunes have developed a very innovative way to produce a feed suited to particular niches. As you can imagine iTunes sell a wealth of products across many countries and the ‘catalogue’ of products can be mind boggling to sort through even in excel.

So let’s just say randomly that I am a Korean affiliate and my site is centred around reviewing the top iPhone applications in Korea. If I was using a standard product feed there would be much manual manipulation to pull the relevant information.

However the innovative iTunes Store RSS generates feeds by user requirements. So I could select Korea as my country of choice, media type as applications, feed type as ‘top 10’ and hit generate and I would have my very niche feed.

Let’s hope this type of product feed becomes more prevalent as merchants become aware of such advancements and get the developers to produce something similar or even better.

Consider your affiliates when revealing amazing new sites

As well as a big SEO blunder if a merchant develops or improves their site and a major ‘revamp’ is involved sometimes entire url structures change and the affiliate channel can often be the one to suffer as affiliates are often told to ‘amend their links’ to the new structure.

However the ‘tool’ that can prevent sales and traffic drop off and disgruntled affiliates digitally attacking you is the simple 301 redirect.

It is a no brainer and an easy win for all Google likes it because your domain isn’t pointing to broken links and 404’s, affiliates like it because their links can still generate them sales, your agency likes it because they don’t have to look around for reasons why sales have dropped and try and fix the issue and ultimately the merchant likes it because there will be minimal negative impact in the transition from a revamp that should bring in more sales.

Power-up your affiliate page

Many merchants now offer an affiliate page on their domain this lets potential affiliates know about their affiliate program and typically includes stats such as commission structures, validation periods, approval rates and the like as well as providing a sign up link to the relevant networks.
However the affiliate page could be so much more - it could be the direct source of information and latest resource for affiliates when thinking about your affiliate program.

A great example is www.sunshine.co.uk/affiliates/

From this page a potential affiliate can join the program and ‘live’ chat to the merchant themselves.
But in addition there is a wealth of tools for the existing affiliates to use without having to log in to the network. Such tools include wordpress templates, product feed downloads, Banners, search box widgets, HTML newsletters and even RSS feeds.

Providing an effective affiliate area is beneficial to your reputation as a merchant, as well as providing effective tools for productivity of your affiliates.

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