Affiliate Management Programs Cost Effective Smart Marketing

The internet is the new frontier for running a business, with countless people setting up online and taking advantage of a potential worldwide audience. Naturally, many retailers are setting up websites to sell products, using their site as an extension of their bricks and mortar business. Others are moving purely online and selling products from home, or from small premises, without the overheads and high costs of storage and warehousing.

One of the biggest problems faced by any retailer operating online is marketing. The huge retailers can afford to spend vast amounts of money on advertising and increasing brand awareness. However, one unique aspect of marketing that most businesses use, in an attempt to reduce costs, is affiliate marketing. For those of you new to the idea, this is simply a case of a business creating a partnership with an affiliate marketer, using their expertise to sell products and drive traffic to their site, then handing over a percentage of the profits.

A New Affiliate Skillset

For successful affiliate marketers, the most important attribute is spotting unexplored niches and exploiting them to the full. However, this is not a guarantee of success – in the old days, affiliate marketing used to involve creating sales pages and enticing people to click through for a sale. Successful affiliates set up programs, recruited other people, and tapped into their expertise.

Now, the rapidly changing internet is making things more difficult, because techniques that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Affiliate marketing in the current era is not just about understanding sales and customer psychology – it is about management. A merchant now has to know how to set up tracking codes, sign up other affiliates, set commission levels, test recruiting pages, track orders, and a host of other little tasks that eat into a merchants’s most valuable resource: Time.

With all of these tasks, how can a merchant find the time to concentrate on the core business, of selling and recruiting?

The answer is to subscribe to an affiliate management program, employing a specialist with experience in the day-to-day tasks of running a program to take care of the engine room, letting you concentrate upon steering the ship.

The Importance of Value

Naturally, the first question is ‘can I afford it.’ Firstly, this question should really be ‘can I afford not to.’ One thing that many merchants underestimate is the value of their own labor. How much are you worth per hour – $10, $20, $50? Your time is valuable, and you should be focusing on the high-value tasks rather than micromanaging and wasting effort on repetitive tasks.

Another way of looking at it is how much would it cost you to hire a secretary, personal assistant, or manager to take care of these small tasks – $200 per week, $400 per week? Add in insurance and taxes and your profits will soon disappear.

By using an affiliate management specialist, you can find someone who will take care of the daily tasks for a very low monthly fee, ensuring that the rest of your sales are pure profit. Imagine having someone:

Offer merchant support,
Send out daily emails
Provide daily and weekly reports for all of the major affiliates
Send out weekly newsletters
Recruit new affiliates
Provide support for new affiliates
Help you start or take over and existing program
Most importantly, use a mixture of old and new techniques to generate sales

If you are new, Shopimar provides full support, guiding you through the process, from uploading your first page through to finding recruits and improving sales, in just three easy steps.

Subscribing to Shopimar’s Affiliate Management makes perfect business sense, cutting your costs while driving sales and recruitment. For a small monthly fee, and a program tailored to suit your exact needs, you can soon revive a struggling affiliate program or set up a new opportunity.

Most of all, subscribing to Shopimar’s program frees up time, time to relax and actually enjoy the money you make.