Why Do Affiliate Managers Exist?
by: akagorilla

Affiliate Managers exist to help optimize affiliate sales by creating better relationships between affiliate merchants and affiliate partners. How they do that would justify another video.

9/15/2011 10:30 AM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time

Click here to register

Affiliate or Ad revenue – either way your ads have to click and convert. Learn some of the basics on how to keep your advertisers happy with higher CTR (Click thru rates)by monetizing your site or blog design for ad performance.

20 minute presentation followed by the opportunity to have your site or blog reviewed.

I spend a lot of time speaking with new affiliates and bloggers hoping to earn ad revenue on their blogs and as a result I decided to focus some of my posts on the “Internet terminology’ every publisher (and blogger) needs.

Today ‘s Internet Geek Terminology choice is:

BOUNCE RATE

Where you will see this term ? In your traffic stats .

What is it ? This is a term of measurement that defines the percentage of initial visitors to your website (or blog) who ‘bounce’ away from your site instead of clicking through to a second page within your site.

Example A

Susie lands on your website and sees a second blog post (or page) that she likes – she clicks another blog post to open it and read. Susie is NOT a bouncer

Example B

George lands on your newest blog post and starts reading – George sees a banner for hot girls in your side bar and clicks it. George goes to look at hot girls (and to download spy-ware and Trojans to his site.) George IS a bouncer. (Of course you don’t have those banners on your site it was just a hypothetical example.

What are other ways a person can  ‘bounce’ off their initial visit ?
A visitor can bounce by:

• Typing a new url into their browser.
• Clicking a link on your page to a different website
• Closing the browser window or tab
• The session timing out (inactivity)

So how to you determine your blogs bounce rate ?

Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits`

What is a good bounce rate?

Pick a card, because it’s not a black and white answer.  You have to KNOW the purpose of every page to determine what a good bounce rate is for any page. If you PURPOSE is to get a visitor to click through to an affiliate offer or ad then you want a high bounce rate. If the purpose si to engage the user into registering for your site then you want a low rate.

Generally an AVERAGE bounce rate rate is between 45- 60 %.

Best of all Nifty stats provides  you with a FREE solution to track your affiliate commissions and affiliate campaigns. If you run one, or fifty affiliate programs, even 500! Nifty stats will save you time logging onto all of the affiliate networks.

Download a free copy of Nifty Stats today and check it out.

Take a look at the affiliate banners on your site. Do they have a call to action ?

The 125 banners to the right all have NO call to action. I found these on a blog which is interesting as I often here from bloggers that they won’t run affiliate programs because they don’t earn revenue.

You will find many small affiliate merchants that offer in house affiliate programs do not have hours of experience monitoring large volumes of ad impressions, clicks, and sales that a dedicated affiliate manager has. So their creative goals are usually to brand their business and look great. Or they simply don’t have the expereince to create the banners you need. The same holds true for some graphic artists, they design based on design not sales.

This will NOT help you as an affiliate drive converting (purchasing) visitors through your affiliate links.

I have watched a campaign receiving over 20 000 US only impressions a day go from a click through rate of .05 % to 1.1% simply by changing the creative to include a clear call to action and offer statement.

So how could these banners generate more qualifying clicks ? By including a simple clear call to action such as:

1. Click here
2. Shop Now
3. Buy Now
4. Go
5. Click for free shipping <- call to action & incentive or offer statement
6. Get info here
7. Check it out
8. Go Shopping
9. Subscribe now
10. Join now

I made this banner in about 3 minutes (so pardon the unfinished look) I want to show how just a simple question and call to action can increase your affiliate programs performance. So which of these would you click?

OR this one:

Call to action Call to Action Call to Action. Yes, it’s an affiliate marketing mantra. If your affiliate programs aren’t converting – check your banners.

Your affiliate merchant should be providing you with full sets of IAB Universal Package banner sets for a variety of offers and landing pages that allow you to target your affiliate offers to send them better qualified visitors.

If they aren’t it’s time to send them an email and let them know your sales would increase if they provided better and MORE creative.

One more disclaimer, this post is titled affiliate banners need a call to action. Really ALL banners need a call to action.

If you are searching for affiliate programs to promote for Valentines Day, be sure to register for Cookie Surprises affiliate program.

Her Affiliate Manager will help you with custom creative as needed to successfully promote Cookie Surprise’s Valentine Day Affiliate Campaign.

Cookie Surprises Valentine’s Day Affiliate Program includes;

Fresh New Creative

Animated banners

Dedicated Affiliate Manager to help you create custom articles, creative, and posts.

Key Words for adsense campaigns

Click here to register

If you haven’t yet, be sure to also register as a partner with Her Affiliate Manager.

Online advertising is not new, though the idea of blogs is relatively new, website publishers have been selling ad space long before the days of WordPress.

Account managers have tracked and monitored ads and know what works so don’t try to invent something that will push the big advertisers away from your website.

The guidelines were updated in November 2009 based on the input of leaders from creative agencies, media agencies, and publishers.

If you are hoping to work with large networks and advertisers you need to be able to support the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau)’s Universal Ad Package. The sizes are:

300 x 250 – (Medium Rectangle)
180 x 150 – (Rectangle)
160 x 600 – (Wide Skyscraper)
728 x 90 – (Leaderboard)

Additional sizes can be found on their wesbite however, the sizes above are standard to all large media buys.

Kay McFarlane is an outsourced affiliate manager specializing in products and services for parents and women. Become a partner at http://www.HerAffiliateManager.com and receive free affiliate coaching and opportunities.

P{ostling is incredibly user friendly. The service is designed for those of us who may not be techy geeks but need a way to save the time of having to log onto five or more social media sites each day. The dashboard is clean and easy to navigate.

Postling allows you to;

• update your social media ‘statuses’
• create a Blog Post
• upload an Image
• or share a link.

These are the four main actions of managing a Social Media account and for a small business owner really the only tools you need to jump into Social Media.

At this time Postling only allows you to link up the following Social Media accounts:
Facebook
Twitter
Blogs
Wordpress
Blogger
Tumblr
Typepad
Squarespace
Drupal
Photos
Flickr

I am hoping they will add bitly support and more of the social media networks I use on a regular basis. Especially Linked In (as it is an important network for small business owners), plurk, and  indent.ca.

Try managing your social media accounts for free at Postling. Click Here

I received 59781 ad impressions and 535 clicks. The CTR was bit low .0.0089 but over a cost per click of less then 2 cents per click which is great. I did receive some sign ups ( no payment required) though I didn’t track the number of signups.

So if you are looking to increase traffic to your blog with some paid advertising on a budget, I would say adgitize blog ads is a good option. I am not sure how affiliate offers would convert as they audience is rather broad.

Also, as the site becomes more popular you may find your impressions will be less.

Give Adgitize blog ads a try.

According to their website they have served over 52,000,000 blog ad impressions. They sell blog ads based on a monthly fee with no guarantee of a minimum number of blog ad impressions or clicks which makes it impossible to determine the value of their blog ads. Call me crazy but I decided to give them a try so I could report back to you my results. Their test suggests an average of 77 clicks a day with my blog ad.

Want to test it out with me ?
Advertise across blogs for just $12

I will update you on the results next week.