Affiliate management makes it simple to maximize the value of your affiliate connections and referral marketing channels. Affiliate administration entails overseeing all aspects of your affiliate program, from cultivating the correct partnerships and managing recruitment to driving traffic and deploying an affiliate monitoring solution.

Affiliate marketing is still one of the most effective online marketing tools for driving more customers to your e-commerce or lead-generating website in the business. Outsourced affiliate programs provide a very appealing income-sharing business model from third-party sites.

However, to achieve the desired outcomes and generate true growth, an affiliate program requires high-quality content and meticulous maintenance.

What is Affiliate Management and How Does it Work?

Affiliates are people or companies that promote products on their websites, blogs, social media profiles, etc. They do this in exchange for commissions based on sales they generate. The most common type of commission is when affiliates get paid per sale, but there are other types, such as getting paid per lead generated from an email campaign you send out.

B2B Affiliate Management in 2022 - Affiliate Management

The affiliate management process starts when a company decides to use affiliates to market its products/services. The first step is usually finding someone who has experience working with affiliates. An experienced affiliate manager should have worked with many different types of affiliates over time.

They can see what type of affiliates work best for them and which ones don’t fit well together. If there isn’t anyone on staff, then outsourcing this task may be necessary.

Managing Affiliate Growth

There are two main ways to manage affiliate growth – either manually or using automation tools.

If your business has a large number of affiliates, then manual methods may work best for you. If you have only a few affiliates, though, automated solutions might be more suitable.

In general, there are three types of affiliate management systems available today:

1. Manual Systems

2. Automated Systems

3. Hybrid Systems

Affiliate Program Recruitment

B2B Affiliate Management in 2022 - Affiliate Management

One of the most critical aspects of any affiliate program is recruiting quality affiliates who have the right skill set and mindset to help grow your business.

This means finding people who want to work hard and earn money doing so. It also requires identifying those individuals early enough to recruit them before they become too busy promoting other merchants’ products.

Recruiting Quality Affiliates

Finding quality affiliates takes time, but there are some ways to speed up the process.

Don’t stop recruiting, no matter how successful your program launch is or how many affiliates the above announcements bring you! There is no assurance that an affiliate will continue to market your products or services or that he or she will be successful.

There are two broad categories of affiliate recruitment tactics:

  1. Passive Recruitment – These are the types of actions designed to increase your affiliate program’s visibility. The idea is for your affiliate program to be easily found.
  2. Active Recruitment — These are active outreach programs where you locate potential affiliates, learn their contact information, and invite them to join your affiliate program.

Managing Different Types of Affiliate Marketers

Our team of experts will help you create a custom plan based on your goals and budget. The process starts by understanding who you want to reach, how they’re connected to other people, and which channels would work best for reaching those audiences. 

Affiliate Management in B2B

From there, our team works closely with you to develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy designed to give you the maximum ROI while keeping costs low.

What does an Affiliate Manager Do?

Scaleo will help you build out your own affiliate network by providing all the necessary services, including:

Analytics – Making sense of data generated from your affiliates’ performance

Reporting – Creating reports to measure your progress against goals and KPIs

Payments – Managing payments between you and your affiliates

Why You Need an Affiliate Marketing Program Manager

Affiliate marketing entails far more than the typical marketing strategy. It is a constant process that necessitates creating and maintaining relationships, monitoring, and upgrading processes, anticipating and adapting to market developments, and so on.

Rogue affiliates are automatically approved when there is no affiliate marketing program manager to assess and approve affiliates through their actions.

What Do Affiliate Management Solutions Offer?

Affiliate marketing is a great way of making money online by promoting other people’s products or services for them. You can make a good commission without having any technical skills required. You have to find an appropriate product/service, promote it on your website or social media accounts, and let others know about it. The rest will be taken care of automatically.

What Are Best Practices for Working With Affiliates?

  1. Make sure you know how much money you want to earn from each partner. If it’s too little, then there won’t be enough incentive to keep them active. Too much means you lose control over your brand image and reputation. You don’t want to look greedy, so find a happy medium.
  2. Find people with similar interests and goals. For example, I am interested in helping others build successful online businesses.

Running Successful Affiliate Campaigns for your Brand

B2B Affiliate Management in 2022 - Affiliate Management

Our team will help you build out your own custom affiliate network using our proven strategies and systems. The process starts by building out a list of high-value keywords based on keyword research. Once you’ve selected these keywords you want to rank well for, we’ll create a plan to acquire long-tail variations of those terms. Next up is creating content assets like videos, articles, landing pages, etc., which helps to promote your brand over time while providing authority backlinks to your site.

Optimization of Affiliate Channels

In its most basic form, optimization entails monitoring the affiliate program and taking actions to enhance it. This can be accomplished through increased commissions and/or sponsored placements in exchange for more brand visibility.

Reaching out to affiliates that have low clicks and revenue year after year is an excellent place to start. Auditing promotions and content, as well as Trademark + words, is also part of the optimization process.

There’s a lot of strategy involved here, which makes it a great part! It’s also critical to make use of the network platforms with which your clients or merchants are affiliated.

When used to their greatest potential, networks are extremely powerful tools. They help with recruitment lists, placement possibilities, and seasonal tips and techniques to maximize a program effectively. Building relationships – with network, customer, and affiliate contacts – is at the heart of affiliate management.

To properly manage affiliates and affiliate programs, frequent and constant communication is essential.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most efficient marketing techniques for driving new consumers and incremental sales when managed properly and with the right partners.

Last Updated on January 19, 2024

Author

Elizabeth is a Senior Content Manager at Scaleo. Currently enjoying the life in Prague and sharing professional affiliate marketing tips. She's been in the online marketing business since 2006 and gladly shares all her insights and ideas on this blog.