3 Key Aspects to an Effective Affiliate Management Program

An effective affiliate management program has three key aspects to keep everything running smoothly. Manage these three aspects and you will see your bottom line increase and your affiliate program

take off.

Train, Train, Train

Your affiliates can only be as good as your training. If you leave the affiliates high and dry without any backup, you cannot expect them to sell your products properly. They will be left to their own measures and will be forced to make up their own rules.

Offer your affiliates training, content and even promotional items. If your company is giving a discount, share it with your affiliates. They will be more than willing to promote the discount and drive sales to your site. Additionally, when you give them content, you effectively control the information released to the public and you can make sure it is 100% accurate.

Last, the more support you offer the affiliates, the better quality affiliates you will attract. The best affiliates pick and choose their products based on a wide variety of factors.

However, when it comes down to two equally good products, the one with more support will win out. It tells the affiliate the company is committed to their success and is willing to help the affiliate become successful. This additional support can make all the difference in the world.

Track & Reward Sales Efforts

When you start tracking the sales records of affiliates, you can see which affiliates stand out from the pack. Not only will this allow you to reward their efforts, it will give you insight as to what methods turn browsers into buyers. This targeted information can be priceless to your company.

If targeted information was not enough, you can offer incentives to all your affiliates by rewarding top affiliates. The smallest of prizes and incentives will bring out the competition in affiliates and the bragging rights of the top ranked affiliates cannot be bought. Simple software will allow you to track this without any additional effort.

Track Affiliate Tax Records

The importance of effectively tracking affiliate tax records cannot be overstated. It is this one seemingly small aspect of affiliate management that causes the online business owner to lose thousands and possibly millions of dollars. An IRS audit can result in fines and penalties. This is not something anyone wants. Therefore, tracking affiliate tax records is vitally important.

So what do you need to track? Everything you need to know about your affiliates will be in the W9. Now it is not enough to trust your affiliate network to provide you this information. After all, they are not the ones held responsible for inadequate or inaccurate information.

As an online business owner, you need your own software to track this information. You need to have a signed W9 for all your affiliates. The IRS accepts a digital signature, which makes getting and storing the signatures even easier. With digital signatures and free software, there is no reason for an affiliate management program to not track affiliate tax information.