10 Things to Look For in an Affiliate Management System

There are many different affiliate management systems available. You have to select the best one so that you can get good profit and your affiliates are also happy. This article explains 10 most important things that should be present in a great affiliate management system, so you would be able to run your affiliate marketing business easily:

1) Complete control over recruitment of Affiliates:

This is the basic requirement of any affiliate management system because if you don't have control over the number of affiliates joining and promoting your affiliate program you might be soon end up in loss or some spammers or your competitor may try to break down your affiliate system and create loss in your business. So, wisely choose the affiliate management system which provides complete control over the affiliates so you would be able to contact them, offer them help, request information and keep in-touch.

2) Offer multiple payment options for your customers and affiliates:

Your affiliates are distributed geographically all over the world. In one region particular payment option will be available and the same will not be available in some other region. PayPal is a good option because they are almost present in all countries but you can't withdraw the money in some countries like Egypt where you can use MoneyBookers to withdraw the money. So, your affiliate management system should enable your affiliates to receive the payment via lot of payment processors else they will not work for you. Offer as much affiliate payment options as possible and then you will have no problem getting your product promoted!

3) Affiliate visitor and sales tracking is a must - track as much details as possible:

The affiliate management system should be able to provide you the ratio between the number of visitors and the sales made by them. This can help you to find out your best affiliate and reward your best affiliate every month it will create a healthy competition among your affiliates and you will enjoy the benefits of it. You must be able to track all details of your affiliates activities: views and visitors that your affiliates bring, the number of sales, conversion rates of your promotional partners, refund rates. Some systems even allow you to track the websites referring sales to your website and even keywords used on search engines to find and buy your products.

4) Affiliate reward system based on their performance:

The affiliate management system should not give the same amount of commission to all your affiliates i.e., it should provide more commission to those who bring quality traffic and make good sales and should give somewhat less commission to poor performers. So, that your good affiliates will try to work even harder to get more commission per sale. Make sure to select the system that allows you to set custom affiliate commission percentages for each certain affiliate. Then you will be able to reward your best performing ones!

5) Ban the affiliates if they use illegal methods - Affiliate BAN mechanism :

Some of your affiliates may bring traffic to your site by spamming or by redirecting their browser in malicious manner and some may buy your product if they like it but more than 95% visitors will consider your site to be malicious site and trying to spam them. So, it will bring bad reputation to your business hence, your affiliate management system should identify these affiliates and ban them. Your affiliate management system should allow you to identify these scammers - by allowing you to track number of visitors, websites used by affiliate to refer visitors - and then ban if you feel that certain affiliate hurts your reputation.

6) Be in contact with your affiliates - always stay in touch with them:

Money is the main factor for which your affiliates are working for you, but it isn't the only factor which helps you to retain your affiliates. More or less all the affiliate programs offered by different product sellers are almost the same, so you can have an advantage if you do something different than what others do, you can do this by being in contact with your affiliates try to understand their problem and help them whenever they need your support and get their suggestions to improve your product. Always help your affiliates by contacting them personally, asking if they need some help. This way they will reward you with a lot of sales!

7) Keep track the refund rates of each certain affiliate:

When your customer is not happy with your product they request you to refund the money and you have to do this to maintain good reputation. There are basically two reasons for which your customers will ask you to refund: first is when the product is not really worth the other reason is they might be given some wrong information about the product by your affiliates and when they didn't find that feature in your product they will request you to refund. So, your system should be able to track down those affiliates and ban them if they bring too many sales that ends up as a refund request - in order to protect your product and online reputation.

8) Track all websites that bring you visitors and sales via affiliate links:

Tracing down the source from where visitors arrive. Your affiliate management system should be able to trace out from where your customers are coming from i.e., the source which directs them to find the sales page and buy your product. After pinpointing it you have to focus advertising there to boost your sales. Such tracking capabilities allow you to identify the most profitable 'traffic sources' and concentrate on them (if it's an affiliate - offer additional help, etc.). This way you can easily make your profits soar!

9) Flexible affiliate training capabilities:

You should provide training to your affiliates about your product so that they can understand what they are selling, its advantages and disadvantages. This will help them greatly to convince their visitors to make them buy your product. Provide all possible promotional materials - banners, pre-written articles, e-mail letters and other content for your affiliates. Your affiliate management system should allow you to place and manage all promotional tools and thus enable your affiliates to access them easily whenever they need to.

10) Track all keywords that bring you visitors and sales and manage affiliates effectively:

Your affiliate management system should be able to find out the keywords used by the visitors to find your product on search engines like Google, yahoo or other search engines. This report can be used to stress these words more in other search engines by using the Meta tags and using ad services of Google, yahoo or other ad service providers. You should be able to track all keywords that people use to find your product via pay per click campaigns such as Google Adwords or Y! Search marketing or regular search engines. Once you find keywords that bring sales, you can easily concentrate on them, bid higher to get even more traffic and sales.