If you’re running an affiliate program or at least considering to do so, I think you agree that education  is very important – seeing the best practices, getting to know where and why some were not so successful at this and so on will help take the best decision in order to maximize your affiliate program performance.

A couple of weeks ago, our close friend Geno Prussakov announced the launch of a new conference series dedicated especially to affiliate program managers. So, naturally, I had to know more about this. Geno was very kind to answer to a few questions regarding the event.

1. Geno – congratulations for this brand new event! What were the things that inspired you to do this?

Thank you, Cristian. I am excited, and very much looking forward to our launch event in San Francisco on March 8-9, 2012. To answer your question two main things have moved me towards starting Affiliate Management Days:

• Widespread and largely unsatisfied demand for face-to-face affiliate management education (and important element of studying process which got eliminated by the specifics of the context),
• Absence of an affiliate management professional forum, an event where digital marketing managers and online merchants could gather on a regular basis — to share affiliate management knowledge and experience, and work out solutions to common problems and challenges.

2. Affiliate Management Days is primarily aimed at affiliate program managers. Do they need to have prior experience to join this?

The answer to this question will, actually, also address the statement you’ve started it with. No, attendees do not need to have any prior experience in affiliate marketing (or affiliate program management) to benefit from the conference. In fact, as mentioned not too long ago elsewhere, the 4 keynote speeches that we will have will be of use both to affiliate marketing-savvy managers, and to novice. As for the 24 breakout sessions that we’ll run over the course of two 10-hour days, the attendees will have a choice of two tracks, and will always be able to pick the better-fitting session depending on their particular situation and readiness level. It is on this reason that we are neither limiting our audience to affiliate managers only.

Anyone involved in e-commerce on the merchant’s end (be it the owner of the business, company’s executive officer, digital marketing manager, and affiliate manager specifically) will come out with a portfolio of actionable and immediately-applicable knowledge to implement for the betterment of their affiliate (and other!) marketing campaigns.

3. Why should software merchants affiliate program managers attend this event?

Regardless of your vertical (retail, software, services, digital goods) or target audiences (businesses, or individual consumers), the principles, situations and case studies covered will enrich your marketing strategy.

If you have a look at AM Days San Francisco 2012 agenda, you will see numerous sessions that will benefit an online merchant regardless what they sell. We have sessions on affiliate marketing analytics and attribution, landing page and checkout optimization, combating fraud, digital payments, mobile, social, and many other cross-vertical subjects.

4. What are the key elements that differentiate this event from other shows where affiliate program managers are within the target audience?

As mentioned at the outset of our conversion, AM Days will (a) have the heaviest focus on education, and (b) be unique in terms of professional networking. By the way, speaking of education: our San Francisco 2012 sessions will be conducted by folks who graduated such top schools as Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, University of Chicago, Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), Kellogg (Northwestern University). If you register and come, you won’t regret it.

5. Thank you for this short interview and looking forward to a successful show in March!

We look forward to seeing Avangate there, and happy to extend a special 10% off to all Avangate customers and your blog readers. The coupon code to use is AVANGATE.

Thank you for the opportunity, Cristian.

Part Two – PAD Files

This is the second part of a series of blog posts about making the affiliate sales channel bring revenue to software vendors. In the first post I focused on the importance of the affiliates information page and how it helps you recruit affiliates. In this post, I will talk about another important component of the affiliate sales channel optimization process: PAD Files.

PAD Files – what are they good for?

Short for Portable Application Description, PAD files are special XML format files that contain information about a software product, from software vendor contact data to product description and price.

The main plus point of PAD files as a standard in the software industry is they offer a more simple way for webmasters to automate product listings, without having to manually edit every minor change the software vendor makes to the product price or description. This works best especially when dealing with download portals which aggregate lots of software titles.

Lots of software vendors ask themselves this question and, unfortunately, I’ve seen cases when the conclusion they reach is that “affiliate marketing doesn’t work” or as Joel Spolsky says, in his case, it’s “ a big waste of time“.

Both for these vendors and for the ones that think their affiliate sales channel could be improved and seeing the positive feedback I got from our software publishers regarding the issue of vendor involvement to motivate affiliates, I’m starting a series of posts with a more hands-on approach. I hope you will find them useful.

Affiliates Info Page

The first thing I’m going to talk about is what you can do in order to help potential affiliates find you and join your affiliate program, thus maximizing the chances to sell more using this channel.