In a twisted, fortunate kind of way, along with news on the economic crisis, recession, however you want to call it, bombarding us for the past few weeks, there’s also hope and help – a myriad of tips, to do lists, practical advice on how to survive the crisis. You cannot apply everything ad-litteram to your business, but at least it’s a starting point, an idea that generates ideas applicable to your own business. And this is good, it helps disperse panic, it helps you focus on a plan.

One article that I particularly liked was “What the recession means for the software business: five things to think about” by Dan Nunan. Although written back in April, it is so very up-to-date.

This morning I’ve got an interesting email in my inbox, apparently from someone that has read one of my articles (so after all someone is reading what I write). I think it was one of these: 6 Tips for Affiliate Managers or Affiliate Merchants Mistakes. I’m going to copy paste the email below because it’s actually raising some good questions:

Hello there, I read several of your articles. In one, you mentioned wishing that people would ask for advice on how to become better affiliate marketers, and that there are so few people asking for advice.

Well, I want to put my product on affiliate networks and do it right, in a way that treats my affiliates well, where everyone is happy and makes a profit. While there’s a lot of information of varying quality on the internet about how to be a good affiliate marketer (as in selling other’s stuff through affiliate networks), there is very little information about how to be a good affiliate manager (using affiliates as a way of driving your business).

Do you have any advice on how to set up good affiliate programs that will increase my sales and make my affiliates happy?

How can one get a channel distribution as conflict free as possible, that generates both online and offline software sales and in the end it makes everybody involved happy – resellers, distributors, affiliates and vendors?

First of all, in case you are wondering why am I writing about selling software offline on an eCommerce provider blog, well, it’s because unlike other providers,  we also have ARMS (Avangate Reseller Management System) – a standalone Partner Relationship Manager system.

I will try to keep it short (I’m running out of coffee) and not write about ARMS (ARMS does this and ARMS that. You can read this on our website anyway).

At a first glance, online sales and channel distribution are competing over the same customers so I want to focus here on when is good to use offline resellers and distributors, potential conflicts with online sales and give you an article to read about solutions to these conflicts.

On Friday a lot of new people made it to the ISDEF conference. In the morning we had a presentation about doing business with Nokia. Smartphone/PDA software might just be a good development area in the next years.

In the afternoon I had a round table with other eCommerce providers where we answered questions about the software/shareware industry.

We have discussed about the differences between the affiliates and resellers, mainly explaining that affiliates work best when you only need online sales and promotion, while the resellers are better for longer term business developments and offline distribution.

The next question that came up was about the conflict when both affiliates and the software vendors are bidding on the same AdWords keywords. While the positions expressed where very different, the conclusion was that some niche affiliates (especially if you are talking about local markets) might be able to do better AdWords and take advantage of the long-tail. So the decision to let affiliates do AdWords should really be based on efficiency.

Me with the lovely ladies from SoftPressrelease.com

The Avangate team arrived in Moscow yesterday around noon. I soon found out that the traffic is very busy, and although this year the conference takes place at an excellent location at Holiday Inn, it’s still outside the city.  Hopefully we will have time to do some visiting – at least Moscow’s Red Square on Sunday evening.

Now, the conference started with the Barbeque party – a very good occasion to meet with some of our friends and partners (plenty of competition here as well).

For me, the highlights of the evening were meeting with the nice ladies from Softpressrelease and chatting with Anna – Affiliate Manager at Movavi. That reminds me I still owe her a beer! See more Avangate pictures from ISDEF Autumn 2008.

Today at 15:00 we will have the Vendors Panel, where we are going to answer questions coming from software vendors. I think it will be very interesting to see how things have evolved in the industry since the last year event.

We are preparing to leave for ISDEF (Independent Software Developers Forum) where Avangate will participate as a GOLD Sponsor. ISDEF is a networking and professionally enlightening initiative in Russia, one of the main opportunities for software professionals to share experiences, valuable business knowledge, and keep up with latest software market trends.

My colleague Eugen Rosca will have a presentation “True?! or False?!eCommerce Myths“. We will post it online if we will have good feedback on it, although it’s in Russian.