The JAR Group goes West: Affiliate Convention 2009
Last week, The JAR Group headed to Los Angeles to present at Affiliate Marketing Convention, a 2-day conference focusing on how to optimize and improve your affiliate marketing business. Our V.P. of Strategy/ social media maven Debbie Bookstaber spoke as a panelist on the topic “Affiliate Marketing and Social Media.” She had a lot of valuable insight about best social media practices for affiliates and affiliate managers. I’ve shared with you a few great nuggets from her presentation below.
Things to remember about social media as an affiliate or affiliate manager:
- Strategic Recruitment is Key: Affiliates succeed in social media when there is a match between a brand and their passion. Affiliates make sales through social media channels when they have established trust with a prospective customer or given them an personal product recommendation. Because social media is about engaging in conversation, affiliates need to like your product because their genuine opinions are valued and will shine through. Recruitment is hard work, but both affiliates and affiliate managers should look for matches that will have a high impact and increase revenue.
- Personalize your Communication: Despite all the communication tools available (Twitter DMs, Facebook messages), many expert bloggers agree that email is still their preferred method to be contacted. Avoid sending generic or poorly targeted recruitment emails about products that are completely unrelated to their website. This is a waste of everyone’s time.
- Be Relevant: Take the time to understand the needs of affiliates. Before reaching out to affiliates, determine what they need to be successful: do they do giveaways or review products? Do they require specialized coupon codes? Tell them about your new products and if you have one available for a review.
- Tools make a difference: Make sure you have provided social media users with the right tools to promote your affiliate program. For example, there are wordpress plug-ins for many affiliate networks that enable affiliate links. If there isn’t a tool available, consider developing them yourself. Also, Twitter tools like Twittergrader , Nielson netratings , Postrank can help affiliate managers find the most influential social media affiliates for their brand.
- Be Creative: Whether you have a big budget or you’re on a shoestring, always be thinking about ways you can make it easier for affiliates to promote your brand. Can you offer video or podcast tools? Can you build a Twitter integration tool? If you have limited resources, Try adding a “Twitter” section to your newsletters and affiliate resource centers. You can make it easier for affiliates to promote your site by including 100 character promotional messages when you upload links. This is basic…but effective.
How will the new FTC regulations affect the Affiliate Space:
- The FTC has published explicit guidelines regarding how bloggers must disclose any “material connections” they have to the companies they endorse.
- How do you protect yourself? As program managers, you can add terms to your T&Cs to require your affiliates to follow proper FTC disclosure regulations. And as affiliates, you can disclose when you have a material connection. While some affiliates label every link as “affiliate,” others perceive this as overkill and use a general site disclosure.
- A useful resource in understanding the FTC regulations is www.blogwithintegrity.com. This Blogwithintegrity paper provides some useful tips on disclosures for your website.
Debbie was also invited to moderate the session titled “Affiliate Marketing in Travel” at Affiliate Convention. She is a tourism industry veteran with extensive knowledge of the travel niche of affiliate marketing, and has experience managing strategic affiliate marketing partnerships at Travelocity.com, Expedia.com, and Site59.com under her belt. The JAR Group team has a deep understanding of the travel market, with the combined experience of successfully managing online marketing campaigns for the Aruba, Puerto Rico, The Bahamas, and Bermuda tourism boards, as well as luxury hotel chains such as Fairmont, Hilton, Marriot, and the Ritz Carlton. To find out more about our affiliate marketing team can help build, optimize, or manage your affiliate program, contact debbie.bookstaber@thejargroup.com. She really knows what she’s talking about!
As a wrap-up to Affiliate Convention, you can also listen to keynote Tim Ash’s presentation on How To Repel Super Affiliates With Crappy Landing Pages. We hope to see you all at Affiliate Summit West 2010 in Las Vegas!
