A lot of people ask the same questions when they are trying to learn about affiliate marketing, so I have tried to compile all of the answers here in one place.

Q. What Is An Affiliate Program?

A. An affiliate program is a system where your website posts a link to another website, and if a visitor to your website clicks on that link and then buys something you receive a commission. It is a great way to share in the revenue generated when you drive traffic to someone else’s site and works best when you have content that is relevant to the product being sold. For example, let’s say you have a site all about dogs, and you are an affiliate of Petco. Bob the dog owner comes to your site to do some research on a rare breed, and sees the link to Petco. Realizing that he could sure use some more dog food, he clicks on the link, goes to Petco.com, and buys $100 worth of dog food. Since you are the affiliate that sent Bob to Petco, you receive a commission of $10.

Q. What Kinds of Companies Offer Affiliate Programs?

A. There are literally thousands of companies with affiliate programs, ranging from big ones like Amazon.com and Best Buy to smaller niche retailers.

Q. How is my affiliate account managed?

A. The vast majority of affiliate programs are managed by a third party “network” such as ShareASale, Linkshare, DoubleClick Performics or Commission Junction. These networks will get you registered as an affiliate and then let you apply to individual programs. On the network site, you will have access to tools to add banners and links to your site with your tracking id. The network will also offer real time reporting and handle payments and tax forms. That way, if you earn commissions from 15 different vendors in a month, you won’t get 15 small checks. Instead, the network will consolidate all of your commissions into one payment. This system makes it much easier to track your income and adds an added layer of protection because you are paid out of an escrow account at the time of a sale so that the merchant cannot run out of money before you are paid.

Q. Are there any start-up fees or other costs associated with joining an affiliate program?

A. No. It is free to sign up, and free to add banners and links of your affiliates to your site. Web merchants are looking to gain traffic and sales– they are more than willing to not charge you anything AND pay a commission for your help.

Q. Do I need any special qualifications to be an affiliate?

A. Not as a rule. However, individual merchants do have the power to approve or turn down your affiliation application, and some are looking for specific qualities in their affiliates. Often, merchants will not approve sites that are sexually explicit, violent, violate international property laws, advocate discrimination, promote radical religious or political views, or advocate or promote any illegal activities. If you do not do any of things and are turned down, you may want to check with the merchant you are applying to to see what they are looking for.

Q. Do I have to have a currently operating site to become an affiliate?

A. No. You can usually register a site that is not live as an affiliate, as long as you own the domain name. Just make sure that you use an email address associated with the website-in-development, otherwise it will be very difficult for you to get past the affiliate fraud screening process.

Q. How much are commissions?

A. Commissions range largely based on the margins for that industry. 10% is probably the average, however, this can vary. Big ticket items like TVs may carry lower commissions, while high volume affiliates (those who refer a lot of customers and generate a lot of revenue) can get 15% or even 20% commissions. Check with your affiliate program to find out the specific commission available as well as their performance tiers.

Q. How often will I get paid?

A. Most networks will aggregate your commissions and then send you a check or make a direct deposit somewhere in the middle of the month for the previous month’s sales. If you enroll in direct deposit, you will generally receive your money a few days earlier than you would get a check in the mail.

Q. What is a cookie?

A. A cookie is a small piece of data that is transferred to a computer in order to mark it for a later transaction. Affiliate programs are based on cookies. The way they work is that when a user comes to your site and clicks on the link of a site you are affiliated with, a cookie is placed on that user’s computer. Then, even if they leave the site and come back a week later to make a purchase, you will get credit for the purchase and receive a commission. A merchant can make the duration of a cookie as long or as short as they want, depending on their needs and strategy. Some are a year long, other only a few days. Generally, smaller and more specialized vendors will have longer cookies, while big consumer companies like Wal-mart or Best Buy will have very short ones.

Q. What is a product feed?

A. A product feed is a system by which you are able to easily able to choose, manage and modify the products you offer on your site on behalf of a merchant you are affiliated with. Product feeds are only important for online stores and other sales sites– if your site just has a banner linking to a merchant, you do not have to worry about it.

Q. What is an RSS feed?

A. An RSS feed is a system that allows your site to be easily and automatically updated based on the banners, links and products you display.

Q. What does EPC mean?

A. EPC is an acronym for “earnings per hundred clicks.” Think of it as a way to measure one program against another. If a program has a $20 EPC, that means that for every 100 people you sent to their site, you should net $20 in commissions on average. This number takes into account the programs conversion rate, commission level, etc. Generally, a $20-$30 EPC is considered strong.

Q. How much do I need to know about computers to become an affiliate?

A. You or someone you work with should be familiar with HTML, so that you can copy and paste banners and links from merchants onto your site. If you are uncomfortable with technology, this is not an industry for you.

Q. Do I have to live in the US to be an affiliate?

A. No. The great thing about the internet is that it makes geography irrelevant

Q. If I have multiple websites, do I need to create multiple affiliate accounts?

A. Most affiliate programs and affiliate managers allow you to register multiple websites under one central account, allowing all your commissions to be aggregated. However, you should check with your individual affiliate programs and affiliate manager.

Q. What is a sub-affiliate?

A. A sub-affiliate is a website that you have recruited to become an affiliate of a merchant. Many affiliate programs offer rewards for bringing in sub-affiliates–either payments or increased commissions.

Q. Do I have to have a website to be an affiliate?

A. No. If you do not have a website, you can create special text links and either use those directly yourself to place orders on behalf of clients or you can e-mail the link to friends, family or customers.

If you run a small services business, you spend a lot of time thinking about where your next customer will come from. Given the time you invest in building a sales pipeline, you might be surprised to learn that almost everything you have been told about the sales process is wrong. Traditional sales thinking puts all the emphasis on stuffing the funnel with prospects. If you cast your net wide and slowly percolate your prospects, you’ll ultimately distill fully fledged customers—or so the thinking goes. This could not be further from the truth.

Fortunately, there is a better way. Working with our friends at Fresh Tilled Soil, we have discovered a strategy that will work for almost any service business. The catch is that it requires patience and flexibility. This is not a quick fix. It’s based on the understanding that saying no to the wrong clients can do as much for your business as getting the right clients. We call this strategy “The Sales Lens” and, executed correctly, it is more powerful than any other strategy we have discovered from driving and sustaining profitable business.

Defining the Lens
The Sales Lens, as the name implies, is a way to focus all your sales and marketing efforts. The most successful organizations are not those chasing multiple customer audiences. They focus on only one audience, the one that delivers the most profit with the least aggravation. They whittle down the distractions so that the definition of the customer can be drawn through the eye of a needle. Creating your Sales Lens starts with analyzing who your ideal clients already are. If you are a new company and don’t have any existing clients, then create a profile of the ideal client and be prepared to modify it once you have real data. As an example, ask yourself:

• Is our ideal customer new to the market or an established business? Which do you prefer?
• Who will be making the decisions? Do you want to deal directly with the founder or CEO? Or, would you rather work with big brands and deal with line managers and mid-level decision makers?
• How much experience does this client have in your field? Are you more comfortable with novices or a client who’s an old hat at the game?
• What communication style do you prefer? Are you a quiet introvert who likes mild-mannered clients, or do you prefer fast-talking extroverts? Is email or phone better for you?

Go back and look at your best engagements and figure out what the successful projects/clients had in common. Also analyze what happened with the projects that did not work out well. Use this data to further focus your Sales Lens. Also, make sure you are aware of what economic drivers keep you profitable. You should communicate your payment terms clearly and seek clients who respect and agree to these terms without haggling.

Putting the Sales Lens To Use
An example of the lens that we use to determine whether to take on a client or project is divided into three parts: client qualities, sales process, and other considerations.

Desirable Client/Project Qualities
• Client has worked with another service firm successfully or values an outsourced relationship
• Client knows what they don’t know
• Client agrees with our methodologies/philosophies (in areas where you have strong opinions, get those out early in the relationship as a litmus test)
• Communication style mimics our own (i.e. online and fast)
• Our deliverables are not tied to people that we can’t control

In addition, if a major operational effort is going to be required from our company, the project needs to have a high mandate from client management, and the implementation team needs to understand what we are doing and be able to keep up.

Ideal Sales Process
• Client values our time and demonstrates this in the proposal process
• The sale proceeds quickly (an endless back and forth is a big red flag)
• Client signs contract on time and makes timely deposit (we have found this to be a high predictor of future payment issues)
• The project meets our financial criteria

Other Considerations
• A repeat client is worth much more than a new one
• A referral from a trusted person usually makes for a better client.

Your Sales Lens will have to be adjusted over time to remain effective. After a disaster, figure out what went wrong and adjust the lens. Take a project that worked out flawlessly and add those qualities as well. Keep in mind that the outliers—the best and worst potential clients—are usually easy to identify. What will really make a difference is if you can learn to discern the pros and cons of companies that are on the fringe. Although your gut will often tell you that something is not going to work out, unless you get comfortable with the borders of your lens, the inclination is often to move forward. Our biggest regrets have coming from engagements where we overlooked or ignored the warning signs or decided that we could live with one or two qualities that were outside our lens because we didn’t want to turn down work. Most of those engagements were regrettable and unprofitable.

Saying no to people and business outside your lens is what will make your business successful. In the pharmaceutical business, the most profitable companies aren’t those with the publicized blockbusters, they are the ones with the best yield, spending the least amount of resources on the drugs prospects that never make it to market. Said more simply, they are quick to kill what’s likely to be a loser. Difficult clients and bad projects offset more profitable jobs and waste energy. Using the Sales Lens will ensure you spend more time doing what you do best.

Which is better, the business plan or the executive summary? Academic institutions and the marketplace appear to be moving in opposite directions on this question. While many business students are required to develop 30- to 50-page business plans, we’ve found that these lengthy documents are used less and less in the real world, with the exception of more mature businesses in private equity or M&A transactions. For most early-stage businesses, 95 percent of a business plan is projection and conjecture, more akin to a work of fiction than an outlining of facts. And, deluged with plans, most investors have very limited time to spend reading. Most will look at a few pages and make a decision in a matter of minutes. If they cannot quickly figure out what the business does, how it is different from everyone else’s and why they should be interested, your plan is dead in the water.

A business plan/summary cannot be too short, it can only be too long. When plans are too long, they simply aren’t read. But, if you are able to pique investors’ interest with even a one-page summary, they are going to reach out to you for answers to their questions. And remember, this conversation is the primary objective of your written materials. No investor is going to write a check on the strength of the business plan alone. Other elements of a traditional business plan—such as financial projections, market research, detailed competitive analysis, and intellectual property and technical or product schemas—can be delivered after the audience’s attention is captured. (It’s also much easier to keep these detailed pieces up to date when they are separate from the fundraising piece.)

Our recommendation is that you focus on creating a three to four-page, detailed, executive summary that can be made into a PDF. The first paragraph should succinctly deliver your value proposition and explain why this is an attractive opportunity for an investor. In the next three to four paragraphs, provide the logic behind this assertion with key high-level data as supporting evidence. This summary should be your primary document when approaching prospective investors. If someone wants to learn more, ask for a call or a meeting, but don’t send additional information to someone who won’t take the time for either of these activities. If you do get a meeting or a phone call, we recommended that our clients have ready a 10- to 15-page PowerPoint presentation as well as backup documents, including sales projections, a financial model, any technical or intellectual-property documentation and any detailed market research available.

Developing an executive summary can be hard work. One of the processes that we undertake in developing a summary is to break the content up into distinct sections. This process of separating out and addressing key investor issues individually is often eye-opening, and entrepreneurs often find they need to rethink some of their assumptions. Certainly, it’s easier to obfuscate gaps with density in a long business plan. But that’s one reason why the summary is better. It brings to mind a quote we are fond of: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

In my career, I have probably read over 2000 business plans from entrepreneurs seeking their first round of investment capital. I tend to cringe (as do all venture investors) a little bit when folks ask me for an NDA simply to hear their idea. As a general rule, I believe the entrepreneurs who are taking this approach have been given bad advice and often tend to be putting too much focus on the idea itself. They are often hunkered down holding onto the belief that their idea is proprietary, when in reality, what will make them successful is their ability to execute on that idea. This has more to do with the team, key business relationships, intellectual property, etc. An NDA is really more appropriate if you are trying to protect specific information such as a trade secret, real financials (i.e. historical), etc. or to protect your core information as part of a formal relationship with a service provider. However, if you ask for an NDA just for someone to hear your pitch, you may create a negative first impression. Very few repeat or serial entrepreneurs will ever ask for an NDA as a prerequisite to hearing their idea, mostly because they know that their competitive advantage lies in their unique ability to execute.

The advice I always give to entrepreneurs is to tell everyone what they are doing, because it can lead to important discoveries, new resources and/or learning about a well financed competitor who has a significant head start. I can promise that it’s better to know this information before making the decision to quit your day job. If you are starting a new business, resign yourself to the fact that someone has the same idea and instead focus your energy and resources on winning the execution game. As a prominent venture capitalist once said at a conference I attended “We don’t consider ideas proprietary, we consider execution proprietary.” Make sure that you focus your business on the “how we do” as much as the “what we do”.

Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing segments of online commerce. Many people often ask me, what is affiliate marketing exactly? The easiest answer I can give is that it is the process by which online businesses give other websites access to tools and marketing collateral to sell products from their website on the company’s behalf. Just to get the terms right, an “affiliate” (i.e. Mike’s Tech Reviews) is a website that sells on behalf of a business, known as a “merchant” (i.e. Best Buy). These affiliates receive a performance (usually 5-10 percent) commission on each sale sent from their affiliate website to the merchant. These days it’s hard to find a major online store that does not have an affiliate program and now smaller companies are getting into the mix. Merchants love affiliate marketing because it creates an online sales force motivated by performance based commissions, costs effectively extending a merchant’s reach to a whole new client base. Websites with a lot of traffic or a targeted user base see affiliate marketing as a great way to convert visitors into revenue without having to carry products or fulfill orders.

Sounds easy, right? Well, it’s not! This is not a “get rich quick” scheme as many are led to believe. There are many nuances throughout the industry (such as rampant fraud) that you should understand before you take the plunge. To help get your business started, I have created my Do’s and Don’ts list for affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Do’s

Do Join an Affiliate Network
For most top affiliates, it’s just too difficult to manage thousands of one-to-one relationships. The affiliates also worry about getting paid fairly and on time. Joining an affiliate network will give you credibility with top affiliates because the network acts as the escrow agent, providing consolidated reporting and payments to affiliates for multiple programs. They also take care of tax forms and complacence testing to ensure orders are being properly credited. The networks charge a set-up fee and then take a percentage of the commissions that merchants pay to the affiliates, typically 20-30%. You can certainly set up a direct program, but once you have even a handful of affiliates, administering these tasks yourself is just not worth the time or effort. The most popular affiliate networks are Shareasale.com, LinkShare, Commission Junction and Performics.

Do Assign a Dedicated Manager to the Affiliate Channel
Helping others effectively promote your business requires focus, attention and a deep understanding of the nuances of affiliate marketing. This marketing channel is very different from marketing directly to end consumers. It’s a great opportunity to reach new customers, but there are many pitfalls that can threaten a merchant’s selling potential. A dedicated affiliate marketing manager will serve a merchant’s business much the same way a franchiser helps franchisees to perform better. Most small companies find that it’s better to outsource their program to a firm that manages multiple programs simultaneously. It’s not a full-time job, but this ensures a dedicated focus and responsive service for your affiliates. More on this later.

Do Attend an Affiliate Summit
It’s a great way to meet a lot of interesting affiliates and merchants. Simply stated: this is where deals get done. Networking and personal relationships are important to success in affiliate marketing. Check out AffiliateSummit.com for more information on attending.

Do Reward Your Affiliates With a Tiered Commission Structure
The top performing affiliates will want a better commission level and the smart merchants will be set up to reward them with higher commission rates.

Do Be Patient
It can take up to six months to develop meaningful traction through your affiliate program, so don’t be discouraged if results don’t come right away. A lot of the legwork is upfront. However, the rewards come over a multi-year period. Over the long term, merchants should expect affiliate marketing to account for about 10 percent of overall sales volume. Keep that in mind if you are a merchant that is just starting to generate revenue, it could make the payback period even longer. However, once you have productive affiliates, they tend to remain that way for years.

Affiliate Don’ts

Don’t Automatically Assume Big Affiliate Networks Are Better
Affiliate network sites such as LinkShare, Commission Junction and Performics are really suited to larger established merchants (Home Depot, Best Buy, et al). A smaller company (less than $10 million in sales) often becomes very frustrated by their upfront charges, minimum fees and lack of customer support to affiliates. Smaller networks such as Shareasale.com (my favorite), AvantLink and KowaBunga! are great alternatives when starting a new program on a limited budget.

Don’t Get Screwed by Coupon Sites
As mentioned above, there is rampant fraud in affiliate marketing. While some affiliate coupon sites can help create new buyers for merchants, many just take advantage of their natural search engine positions to attract buyers who are already committed customers – even at the point of a sale. They may also bid against you in paid search ads (using clever tricks to make these ads go undetected) and drive up your own marketing costs.

Don’t Assume All Sales Are Good Sales
At Acceleration Partners, we have learned through experience how to identify fraudulent behavior and we carefully monitor our client’s programs to catch bad behavior early on in the relationship with the affiliate. A good “terms and conditions” policy is a critical first step in combating fraud. It also helps to know which affiliate sites are reputable and which ones you should avoid. Outsourced firms who have this knowledge base can save merchants time and aggravation down the road.

Don’t Focus on Quantity of Affiliates
This market exemplifies the 80/20 rule. Most merchant sales will only come from a handful of good affiliates. Don’t get excited about hundreds of websites joining your program, because over half will never send you any leads. Many of the less sophisticated affiliates will actually just waste time and resources. Focus on the big fish. An affiliate who doesn’t start producing traffic within the first few months will likely never become productive. Time should be focused around making good affiliates better and this will drive a large portion of the merchant’s growth. Also, proactive outreach to a targeted affiliate audience is important, because some of the best potential affiliates may never find you.

Don’t Make Unnecessary Mistakes
Consult with someone who has experience setting-up an affiliate program before you launch. There are many repeatable best practices and avoidable pitfalls. Experience with the mechanics of the marketplace can matter more than experience in your specific industry.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our affiliate marketing or performance marketing services, please visit our website or contact us