1. Competing With Your Affiliates.
This is by far the worst mistake made by companies that offer affiliate programs. I often see companies for products I am trying to promote compete with me in the search engine rankings and pay per click advertising programs.
Why companies invest money and resources in competing with their affiliates is beyond me. By competing with me, you’re trying to put me out of business. Have marketing directors ever thought of it in that way? Because if you succeed, you will no longer have an affiliate network to speak of.
The money would be better spent on supporting your affiliate network by creating a better product, providing more referral statistics, higher commission payouts, faster support, and more, fresh promotional creatives.
2. Not Providing Your Affiliates With Useful, Real-Time Statistics.
All marketers rely on statistics to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Yet most affiliate programs only provide their affiliates with basic statistics such as number of visitors sent, number of sales, and commission earned. These statistics aren’t much help to affiliates who want to measure the effectiveness of a particular pay per click campaign.
3. Not Compensating Your Affiliates Fairly For Their Hard Work.
The #1 incentive for any affiliate is cold hard cash. Money sells! So tell your marketing director to fire the search engine optimization firm and advertising department, and redirect the resources to paying your affiliates a higher commission rate.
4. Not Providing Enough Fresh Promotional Creatives.
Most affiliate managers seem to give their promotional creatives little thought. All they offer is a handful of 468×60 banners, buttons and text links. What happens is that affiliates end up using the same ads on hundreds, even thousands of web sites.
5. Not Providing Fast, Quality Support For Your Affiliates.
This is the 21st century. Don’t make your affiliates wait longer for an email reply than it takes to send a letter by snail-mail post.
Don’t outsource your affiliate support work. If you have to, then at least train your support staff so that they understand the ins and outs of your products and affiliate program. I’m often dumbfounded by affiliate support staff who can’t give me answers to simple questions.