After 2 years as an affiliate manager using Tradedoubler they finally got round to giving me some training in what to do.

Better late than never, and it was actually very useful. Even though I’ve been an affiliate manager for 4 years, and an affiliate for a lot longer than that, I picked up a few good tips that will make my day run a bit more smoothly and help focus on what matters.

One of the very simple things given out was a checklist of what you should be doing as an affiliate manager, and how often. If you employ an affiliate manager, or an agency to run your programme, this is a useful checklist to see if they’re doing the job properly:

Daily:

• Check your tracking is working
• Check for new affiliates, screen and approve / disapprove them to run your programme
• Check your product feed is working and is up to date

Weekly

• Ensure all creative is up to date and showing the latest offers.
• Monitor top affiliates to ensure their sales do not drop off.
• Get feedback from Top affiliates on successes and failures of the program to carry forward to driving more affiliate sales. Set individual targets to carry forward.

Monthly

• Talk to affiliates about the offering and promoting the best products
• Keep affiliates up-to-date on latest promotions , and on incentives for making sales on the program.
• Check your program commissions and EPC’s are competitive with other similar programs
• Check affiliate offerings are in line with other online & offline marketing
• Make sure invoices are being paid on time
• Replace poor performing creative and record learnings about best performing offers & incentives
• Check that enough new affiliates are being recruited to the scheme
• Check sales against previous months and year-on-year, communicate any forecast highs & lows to affiliates.

If this seems like a lot, maybe you should consider hiring a full-time affiliate manager, or looking for someone experienced who can run outsourced affiliate management on your behalf.