Merchant ABCs #1 What is an Affiliate Program and How Does it Work

[Deborah aka Loxly]

Merchant ABCs is hosted by Deborah Carney and Vinny O'Hare of Team Loxly internet marketing. In this first episode they talk to merchants that are considering setting up an affiliate program and outline what merchants need to know before making the jump into creating an affiliate program.

Things we will be doing in future podcasts:
Case Studies
Merchant reviews

Covered in this podcast:
Setting up and starting an affiliate program.
Whether you should have an affiliate program.

What is an affiliate

Our podcasts focus on Retail, not ebooks or information products, or lead generation affiliate marketing

Something that people need

PMS - Solve a problem - Problem Make Solution
Set up your site to sell - affiliates won't promote a site that isn't already converting.

Get a consultant to optimize your site for conversions before you even think about about adding an affiliate program.

After your site is optimized to sell, decide if you want to have an inhouse or network affiliate tracking solution.

Affiliates get paid commission, networks get a commission and may have a monthly minimum.

Managing your program - networks don't manage and recruit, they are just for tracking
and payment. We don't recommend adding the network services for management, they may not be in your best interests.

Some things to think about for your program Terms of Service

Network Vs Inhouse

Set up - Graphics, text links, other creatives

Affiliate Manager - Inhouse or Outsourced. Sales manager or PR person shouldn't be the guy running the affiliate program. Outsourced Program Manager - OPM - company that manages multiple programs, short term or long term.

OPM - can find you good graphics people, help you decide on a network, introduce your program to appropriate affiliates - they are your shortcut to do things the right way.

Merchant - Affiliate - Network - OPM/Inhouse AM

Affiliate links to your site, the links track through the Network or your inhouse tracking - shopper goes to your site and completes purchase. Network takes the affiliate commission and their fee at the time of the purchase, but is invisible to the shopper.

Links to companies mentioned in the show:
ShareASale
Commission Junction
Google Affiliate Network
LinkShare

Zen Cart
osCommerce


Affiliate Summit West and East

Follow us on Twitter:
Merchant ABCs @MerchantABCs
Deborah Carney @loxly
Vinny O'Hare @vinnyohare

Many thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts and many other educational and entertaining podcasts related to all things geeky

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[Deborah aka Loxly]

This series is going to be different from the Affiliate ABCs and Blogging ABCs in that we actually have an ABC format we are going to be following. This is going to start from the very, very basics and work it's way into the more advanced topics.

I would like to invite affiliates that want to be involved with educating merchants on specific topics to contact us via email, PM or Skype ( affiliateabcs ) and we can schedule you into the podcasts on the topic you want to address. For example, how merchants create and utilize newsletters is a topic we have a lot of good feedback on, but since that isn't ready to be posted yet, that podcast will be recorded down the line and we'd love to have some affiliates on that one. Datafeeds is another hot topic