Super Affiliates and their Characteristics

The concept of super affiliates is soon catching up. While it was once believed that adding on affiliates would help the online merchants reduce their marketing spends, the new data shows that it is only the top 20 percent of the affiliates that bring in 80 percent or more of the revenue for the merchant.

In addition to that, while adding on affiliates may not seem to suck in upfront cash, training and managing the affiliates takes up time and effort, both of which can be converted into potential loss of revenue. Therefore the affiliate marketing industry is seeing a shift from quantity to quality.

The best affiliates for a merchant are called super affiliates. These are the business partners that have high traffic sites that have customers that are similar to the merchants target audience. Super affiliates tend to have some specific characteristics that can be used to identify them. If one wants to ensure that only serious affiliates are added onto the affiliate network, then ensuring that the affiliate recruitment process is not automatic is the first step.

Some of the characteristics of super affiliates that set them apart are listed here:

-       Email marketing – Super affiliates are great email marketers. They have a large database of contacts and updated email addresses since they take pains to keep the mailing lists updated. These are generally lists that they create with opt ins or newsletter subscriptions. Super affiliates use this robust database to market new products, announce new merchant schemes,

-       Different options – Super affiliates are entrepreneurs who know that they have to keep improvising as they move along in the Internet marketing arena. Just when one starts to get the handle of a particular technology and idea, there is another one that starts to surface. Staying abreast with the trends and ensuring that they think of new ways of doing things is a unique characteristic of super affiliates.

-       Training – Since the success that super affiliates get in a few months, the one thing that they become immensely capable of is grooming new affiliates for the merchant. There are many super affiliates that have actually created their own sites to sell and share their capabilities and experience in affiliate marketing. Others have gone on to become part of the two tier model where they have affiliates under them so that they can be groomed to become self sufficient. The two tier model allows the super affiliates to earn a commission based on the revenue that the newbie gets in.

-       Affinity model – A large number of super affiliates have been seen to use the affinity model. This really means that super affiliates tend to focus on one particular program. While the merchant may have different categories, the super affiliate may try and market the merchant’s products in various different and more targeted categories.

An increasingly larger number of merchants are realizing that unless they are careful about the quality if affiliates that they choose, the hidden costs of recruiting, training and managing the truckloads of affiliates will only start to prove unprofitable for an organization.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.