Affiliate marketing can be one of the best ways to generate revenue for your business. The problem, though, is that you may end up with some affiliates that are going to damage your brand.
Thankfully, there are some strategies you can use to protect your brand from rouge affiliates.
Keep reading and I’ll share some tips that will help you find good affiliates. Use these tips and you can enjoy affiliate marketing, without falling victim to problematic affiliates.
Let’s begin!
Take Your Time
You may have heard that affiliate marketing can be one of the fastest ways to grow your business. Because of this, you may be overly aggressive when recruiting affiliates.
This might sound like a good strategy, but it is not. It can lead to you working with people that are going to tarnish your brand or use marketing strategies that are harmful.
As long as your offer is good solid and it has the ability to make good money for affiliates, there will always be people willing to promote for you.
Following this, do not feel as though there is a rush to get your affiliate program out there. Take things slowly, and you’ll be able to prevent situations where affiliates might cause irreversible damage to your brand.
Vet the Affiliates You Work With
If you want to work with good affiliates, you need to make sure you vet them. This is perhaps one of the most effective things you can do to work with good affiliates.
How you vet an affiliate is going to depend on your own particular circumstances. For the most part, you’ll want to keep an eye on how they’re generating traffic.
You might want them to only generate traffic using certain methods. You want to make sure they’re not using traffic generation methods that are going to lead to your brand being affected. An example of this is bidding on branded keywords when running search campaigns.
Have Rules for the Marketing Material
You might also have some rules in the marketing material they use. You may suggest that they don’t use any testimonials from your site. You could also ask that they don’t use any kind of ‘fake testimonials.’
You could even suggest that they don’t use marketing messages that are overly pushy or rely on using fear to drive action.
If you want to be really thorough here, you should think about creating a terms and conditions document. This will detail all the requirements you have. You should then make sure that affiliates ‘sign’ this document before they become an affiliate.
If you have little to no experience creating a terms and conditions document, you may want to work with a lawyer. It might be a good idea to work with a lawyer that has experience with affiliate marketing. They’ll have a good sense of what needs to be included in your document.
Keep an Eye on Your Affiliates
You should also think about monitoring your affiliates. In doing so, you’ll be able to see how they’re generating traffic. You’ll then be able to see the ‘creatives’ that they’re using and what kind of marketing methods they’re using to send you traffic.
One of the ways you can do this is by checking your Google Analytics accounts. You can then source the traffic using specific URLs, and find out which affiliate is driving traffic. You can identify an affiliate using their specific affiliate codes.
In some cases, if you’re using a specialist affiliate platform, then you may be able to do this in a manner that is much easier. If you’d like to find out more about such tools, you might want to visit Be An Affiliate Marketer. There you’ll be able to see a list of tools that’ll help you manage your affiliate marketing efforts.
Don’t Feel the Need to Work with a Lot of Affiliates
One of the common misconceptions about affiliate marketing is that you need to work with a lot of affiliates. The more affiliates you have, the better right?
Taking this approach, however, can create a situation where you’re working with too many affiliates. This can make it hard to manage everyone and you may run into a situation where a rogue affiliate slips through the cracks.
The more you engage in affiliate marketing, the more you’ll learn that there are generally 20% of affiliates or so, that drive most of your revenue. If you’re in a situation like this, it can be a good idea to fire the rest of your affiliates. You can then focus on working closely with the remaining 20%.
Because you’re now working with a smaller pool of people, it becomes easier to figure out what you can do to help them make more money. It also becomes easier to run quality checks to make sure there is no form of marketing that goes against your brand guidelines.
Use Tools to Track Your Brand Across the Web
If you’re finding it difficult to keep track of your brand and how it is being promoted online, think about using some tools to help you.
One of the most basic, but effective ways you can do this is with the help of Google Alerts. You can simply create an alert centered around certain keywords that relate to your brand. Google will then send you an email at an interval of your choosing. You can then review where and how your brand has been promoted/discussed across the web.
You might also want to manually search social media platforms using keywords and hashtags that are relevant to your brand. Keep in mind that there are specialist tools that’ll help you do this too. But these tools can cost money. Thus doing things manually can help you keep costs low.
Is Affiliate Marketing a Good Idea for Your Brand?
Affiliate marketing can help you get your brand out there. But you need to be careful when choosing the affiliates you use to help promote your brand. Otherwise, you risk damage to your brand reputation.
In this post, we’ve taken a look at some of the things you can do to protect your brand when using this form of marketing. You need to think about writing some terms and conditions for your affiliates. You also want to focus on working with only a small number of affiliates.
It also helps to be proactive. Make sure you keep an eye on how your brand is being promoted across the web. This’ll help you gain a better understanding of the methods being used by your affiliates.
Want to learn how you can use testimonials to boost your online reputation? Check out this post to learn more!