Tutorials
Don’t take basic marketing tenets for granted when managing your affiliate program. There are a lot of folks out there who can use help. They are anxious to improve their sites and earn more commissions, but they simply don’t know where to find the information. You can improve the quality of your affiliates, and therefore the performance of your program by educating your affiliates.
Provide tutorials on relevant subjects to your affiliates and you will have increased loyalty, as well as a better critical mass of affiliates. Some topics that would be helpful to your affiliates are how to rotate banner ads, buy your own domain, and create an HTML newsletter. There are tutorials and other educational materials available for free distribution at www.affiliatemanager.net/education.htm.
Of course, good placement in the search engines is a hot topic among affiliates. There is a free e-book called Search Engine School from the United States Affiliate Manager Coalition (www.usamc.org) that you can share with your affiliates. This e-book is a collection of tutorials that focus on optimizing a site for the search engines, and it can be downloaded at www.usamc.org/sesebook.htm (see Figure 12.1).
Figure 12.1. Search Engine School is a collection of tutorials that focus on optimizing a site for search engines.
