Relationship Manager Needed

May/June 2006 Issue: Page 112

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Connection, communication and commitment are the cornerstones of a good affiliate marketing relationship.

I'm looking for someone to share my life with. My life is busy, complicated and filled with people who are looking to me for advice on relationships. I spend all day helping others make meaningful relationships, only to come back the next day and start all over again. I'm not in it to make a match for myself, but to help everyone around me make a match. Why, you may ask. The answer is quite simple: As an affiliate manager, that's my job.

I manage affiliate marketing relationships for an online personals site. I've managed affiliate relationships for a number of years, and I've come to realize that what I do for work feels a lot like dating. For instance, every day I search for someone special who shares my goals and is willing to work as hard as I am to reach them. I look for someone who knows that an affiliate relationship must be built on communication, and sometimes compromise. I want to find someone with whom, in the end, I hope to make a successful match to ensure a long-term commitment.

As an affiliate manager, I recruit people and companies to join my program, and these affiliates recruit others to join the site. These two objectives are inexorably linked. The stronger a bond I create with my affiliates, the harder they will work for me. I believe in my affiliates and, above all else, I believe that I should invest as much as I can into establishing quality affiliate relationships.

I would like to share five essential tips that have helped me build successful and profitable relationships with my affiliates.

Provide Attractive Creative

It is important for an affiliate program to have fresh, well-designed creative in a variety of sizes and styles. Many affiliates judge the value of a program by the way its creative looks. It's important to remember that a program's creative reflects not only on the quality of the program, but also on the quality of an affiliate's site. After all, affiliates' sites are your first line of defense, and establishing trust and rapport with their visitors is vital.

In a lot of ways, this is like searching through your closet and picking out your best-looking outfit, getting a haircut and washing the car before you pick up a date for a nice night out. If you don't look like you care about how you present yourself or the way you feel about your affiliation, it's going to be difficult for your relationship to take root and bloom.

Communicate

Communication is the cornerstone of any great relationship. Not only does communication take patience, it also requires that we listen to the needs and concerns of others; it's a two-way street. Affiliate managers need to make sure that they ask their affiliates for tips and suggestions and give advice accordingly.

If something is working well for your company, share it with your affiliates. If you're an affiliate stuck in a rut, call your affiliate manager and talk to them about looking at your site to find ways to push the needle. In the words of recently retired Loyola University Chicago professor John Powell, "Communication works for those who work at it." If you work at communicating with your counterparts, you will be able to increase your earnings and give your affiliates incentive to remain loyal to your program.

If you work with a network that does not share affiliates' personal contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses, this may be a little more difficult. However, you can still make sure that you provide affiliates with the easiest ways for them to contact you. Give them all of your email addresses, phone numbers, instant message handles and, if you operate a blog, the blog's URL. But don't let that be all. Most networks still allow you to send out emails, newsletters and promotional offers, so take advantage of this. It is important to make sure that your communication is of the highest quality and will add value to your affiliates' promotional efforts.

Be Available and Accessible

I am constantly receiving email and phone calls from affiliates who are so grateful that we make ourselves available to them. Nearly every night before I go to bed, I check my email; when I have new messages, I try to respond to them as soon as possible. A number of our affiliates run their sites as a side business and usually work on them after-hours. Therefore, if I can expedite my responses and make an affiliate's work easier, our program will benefit.

Be Honest and Up Front

Never make promises you can't keep. This is the quickest way to destroy relationships. When you are honest and up front about expectations and goals, both sides will be more willing to foster that perfect team of manager and affiliate. Give More Than You Receive In a very real way, being an affiliate manager is like being a big brother to hundreds of people. My job is to fight for the needs of my affiliates. If an affiliate needs more creative, then it's the manager's job to make sure the affiliate gets it. Above all else, managers should always be looking for ways to give more to affiliates - more time, more commissions, more of whatever they need.

Gone forever are the days when affiliate managers and affiliates could ignore one another and remain successful. Relationships in the affiliate marketing world take a lot of work and must be managed well in order to succeed. If you want your affiliates to work for you, start working for them. Do more than send monthly newsletters or mass emails, although those are a good start. Constantly review affiliates' sites and look for ways to improve them or to help affiliates with any errors they may not be aware of. Then call each of your main affiliates and those with potential to be top affiliates. Develop that personal relationship and help them to grow their programs.

We would be smart to keep in mind the words of entrepreneur and author Dr. John C. Maxwell: "If your focus is on what you can put into people rather than what you can get out of them, they'll love and respect you - and those attributes are great foundations for building relationships."

JAMES GREEN is customer acquisitions manager and heads up the affiliate program for MingleMatch, Inc., a division of Spark Networks plc. Originally from Utah, Green formerly worked for 10xMedia and 10xMarketing.

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