Keep Optimising Podcast Featuring Chris Tradgett
The April episodes of the Keep Optimising Podcast focused for the first time on affiliate marketing. Keep Optimising is the regular podcast from Chloë Thomas of Ecommerce Masterplan.
Chloë interviewed four influential writers from the affiliate industry to cover aspects of setting up and managing affiliate programs for ecommerce advertisers.
Rick Magennis of Bearcat Media, spoke on reviving an existing affiliate program. It's certainly not uncommon for a company to start an affiliate program without a real plan. They either just let it run on its own or the person who set it up has moved on and no-one knew quite what to do with it.
Rick talks about how an advertiser can re-energise existing affiliates and look out for new opportunities.
Ami Spencer of Webgains covered the issue managing of coupon and discount affiliates - ideally to drive full price sales.
She gives great advice on defending your pricing against the race to the bottom via discounting.
Arlen Robinson of OSI Affiliate ...
You can hear more on the Keep Optimising website.
Affiliate Webinar
At the end of the month, the four speakers from the podcast come together for a group webinar.
You can listen in on the Keep Optimising website:
How to Find Great Affiliates
Chris' episode was wide ranging covering all areas of affiliate recruitment. Chris drew on his experience working with Publisher Discovery clients - as well as years network and client side.
Chloë makes for a great interviewer and the conversation flowed pretty well. Chris covered how affiliate managers find new publishers and the issues of searching in Google using keywords. An advertiser will find all sorts of websites figuring for their main keywords, a mix of competitors and other publishers. Chris talks about how you work through that.
They discussed how many networks have a recruiting tool built in to find appropriate new publishers already on the network. Networks such as Linkconnector in the USA and Affiliate Future in the UK have a special integration with Publisher Discovery, applying machine learning to make that even more powerful.
Other networks, including CJ Affiliate, TUNE, Cake, Everflow and others use the main Publisher Discovery app to enable advertisers to find new affiliates from any network in the world.
Chris also covers how to reach out using multiple channels and not just the standard recruiting email template.
Top Tips
Key advice for any affiliate manager is to remember that your affiliates not just websites; they are people and partnering with them is entering into a relationship.
Recruiting isn't a "one and done" task, you have to keep optimising (as the podcast suggests!). Your program is like a leaky bucket - affiliates will drop off or move attention to other areas, so you need to keep recruiting.
Publisher Discovery is of course the ideal tool to help - and save hours of Google search pain. Read more in the article about Finding Affiliates in Search >
Listen to the Episode
You can listen to the full episode on the Keep Optimising Podcast website - play the recording on the page here...
Keep Optimising
Listen to other episodes from Chloë and Keep Optimising across all areas of digital marketing. You can find these on the Keep Optimising website, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram.
Related Articles
Other Podcasts
You can also explore some other great podcasts for the affiliate industry on Affiliate Podcasts >
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