Affiliate Marketing is not “as easy as 1,2,3″. But I guess you know that by now. It needs constant efforts and taking advantage of all the opportunities in order to succeed in a significant manner.

You may have already done some of the things we will talk about here or not; the important thing is to try to use these resources for your benefit in 2011. They can bring you a lot of business:

1. Customize your shopping template – build up trust for your visitors by personalizing your shopping cart in order to have the look’n'feel of your website. This will reduce the shopping cart abandons and will increase your visitor-to-customer conversion rate.
   As an Avangate affiliate, you can easily customize your template from the special section in the admin interface.
2. Use automatic tools to populate your site – this is especially important if you have large volumes of information on your website (you have a download portal, a coupon website etc.). Most of the affiliate networks provide data feeds with all product details you need in various formats that you can easily import on your website. This way, you can be sure the information is constantly updated with the latest changes.
   Here at Avangate you can also create custom XML data feeds according to your requirements by using filters to narrow the results (e.g. create a data feed with the discount coupons offered by our software vendors).
3. Create and use discount coupons – convince your customers to buy from you by throwing in an incentive in form of a discount coupon. But don’t think that if you’ve done this, all the customers will flock to your website – you also have to bring some unique value along with that coupon (e.g. a product comparison sheet, a review etc.)
   You can generate discount coupons yourself or you can use the ones supplied by the vendors if you’re a member of the Avangate Affiliate Network.
4. Promote your business via social media – Facebook and Twitter are a must. Promote your deals via social media channels and see the feedback you get from the market. Reach out to millions with a simple tweet / post and create a community around your website. Tell your audience about special deals you have on your website (exclusive bundles, promotions) or about new published reviews.
5. Take part in affiliate events – this is the best chance you get for creating new business opportunities with vendors across the globe. Nothing compares to a face-to-face meeting where you can discuss about new partnerships and arrange future deals.  Affiliate Summit and A4U Expo are two major events in the affiliate industry that are worth going to.

As a bonus, if you’re an Avangate affiliate, just take a consultation with our Affiliate Doctor – he can offer a few pointers to you for optimizing your affiliate business. Use the live chat feature from the Avangate Control Panel for Affiliates.

So, to wrap this up, first of all be sure your website is attractive to visitors and generates sales; after that, you can go ahead and find new opportunities for it. And don’t forget to constantly test and improve your business.

Continuing our first article on this series, in which you found out how to make sure your affiliate partnership request is approved by the vendors, let’s see some tips on how to promote software products online and the ways in which vendors motivate affiliates to sell more (we hope this post is also helpful to software vendors who are starting to use affiliate marketing).

A big thanks, once again, to the people we got the answers from:

• Claire Waledisch, Commercial Manager at VSO-Software,
• Frank Chang, Marketing Manager at DVDFab,
• Keros Tudos, Relationship Manager at IObit and
• Alex Lamba, CEO at RSJoomla!

How to make sure your affiliate partnership request is approved by the vendors

Before an interview for a job, university acceptance, membership to a super private club or whatever else you may want to obtain, it’s always ideal if you can talk to an insider, to properly prepare yourself for success :). In a similar manner, this article aims to offer you inside information about top vendors that are open to partnership requests from Avangate affiliates.

We asked some of the top vendors in the Avangate Affiliate Network about their expectations from new affiliates: how can they be convinced to accept you, what turns them off and what is their number one advice to you as affiliate to sell more of their products.

We got some great answers from:

• Claire Waledisch, Commercial Manager at VSO-Software,
• Frank Chang, Marketing Manager at DVDFab,
• Keros Tudos, Relationship Manager at IObit and
• Alex Lamba, CEO at RSJoomla!

So, here are their tips on how to make sure you will be accepted as an affiliate (can be applied to most software vendors):

1. What are 3 qualities you look for when analyzing a partnership request from an affiliate?

• VSO: The main thing we look at is the website associated with it.  Does it look clean, does it have any traffic and would the targeted traffic be interested in our products?  This means nothing however, as we have good affiliates in the past that either do not have a real website or haven’t yet finished it at the time they requested to be an affiliate.
• DVDFab: Affiliate website; Affiliate IDs (normally – the smaller, the better); Potential.
• IObit: We will firstly analyze his website based on three aspects:  the  category, the traffic rankings and the source of the traffic. This will allow us to provide the best suitable plan accordingly and calculate the affiliate’s earnings prospect.
• RSJoomla: The website has to be related to IT/software. Creating your own text about our products rather than copying it from our website really improves the chances to be found by greater audience. Product reviews and blog posts usually are the best ways to do so. Targeted communities or local communities that use our products usually get the most of the affiliate partnership.

2. What are the most common reasons for rejecting an affiliate partnership request?

• VSO: We do not reject affiliate partnership requests, we have not yet needed to.  However, if an affiliate does not go by the rules we have outlined, we will lower their commission.
• DVDFab: Spam promotion or violating our affiliate policy.
• IObit: Websites containing inappropriate content, malicious websites and illegal websites will be rejected. Affiliates without clear profiles will also lead to a rejection.
• RSJoomla: Websites that share false discount coupons or warez get rejected.

3. Do you have any special policies regarding pay-per-click advertising done by affiliates?

• VSO: We request affiliates not to use our brand name when doing pay-per-click advertising, i.e. VSO or VSO-Software. Eventually this will also be applied to product brand names. Affiliates should have the role of making the product known, offering it as a solution when user is looking for a tool to use to do a certain task. If a user is looking for “Product Name XYZ” because they already know of it, then the affiliate here does not really have a role in terms or advertising unless of course that vendor site is not appearing in an organic search. If the affiliate is providing added value then this argument could be contested. Added value content would be landing pages in specific languages that do not exist on vendors site, guides, coupons, etc.
• DVDFab: Currently, we don’t allow our affiliates to use PPC program on search engines to promote DVDFab products
• IObit: Our affiliates can promote our products through PPC, but it is not allowed to use our trademarks or any IObit product names as PPC keywords, for this is against our policy and the law.
• RSJoomla: We don’t have any special policy on the pay-per-click thing. Affiliates can use any politically correct marketing strategies to get more sales.

So, to put this in a nutshell, when requesting partnerships with software vendors, make sure your website has relevant content and it doesn’t violate the vendor’s affiliate policies, especially if you’re running pay-per-click advertising campaigns. If you don’t use a website for your affiliate marketing business, let the vendor know this.
Also, always communicate with the vendor – let him know how you’re promoting their products and ask if you have certain requirements.

We have more to share: stay tuned for the next part of this Behind the Scenes series!

We’re preparing for a trip to the US during August 15-17 – to New York City, to be more specific. I’m pretty excited to attend Affiliate Summit East 2010, a major event of the affiliate industry, together with my colleagues Adriana and Casey. So this is your chance to meet me in person:) and of course my other colleagues.

So why go to Affiliate Summit other than to meet our partners there and find new opportunities? To tell you the truth, we have some solid reasons to be there – here are the most important ones:

• since the beginning of 2009, our affiliate marketing network has grown rapidly, now having over 17,000 active affiliates that promote software products online;
• merchants have become more and more interested in a dedicated software affiliate network that gets them targeted sales all over the world;
• the latest survey sent to our affiliates allowed us to see what we’re doing OK, what affiliates need from us and how we should further develop the network.

So, long story short – we’ll be in New York during August 15-17 and we’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Unless you’ve been on holiday these past weeks, I’m sure you know by now that we are off to China again. Yep, we loved it so much last time and the feedback was so good, that we’ve decided to re-visit this fascinating culture (one of the oldest in the world!) that just happens to have to offer some of the best dishes on the planet :).

This time we are heading to Shenzhen, an area considered “The Valley” of China. Yep, that’s the center of the Chinese IT & software market.

So on Saturday, 5th of June, I’ll be sharing the conference floor with Tina, Avangate’s finest Asian market sales consultant;) and Andy, our coolest Chinese colleague. What am I saying here… if you are a software vendor from China, you might know these guys probably even better than me.

The debate topic this year: Conversion Rate.

Are you already a member of the Avangate Affiliate Network? Then consider this post as “What’s New” type information. If you aren’t convinced yet, I hope you will become an affiliate after reading this post. :)

The beginning of this long awaited spring of 2010 came with a an important update to our Affiliate system – the new version of the management interface for affiliates. Its aim is to maximize the revenue generating opportunities both for affiliates and software vendors.

Affiliates Save Time and Effort

Enough with the big words – let’s see the highlights of this update:

- redesigned dashboard with essential information at your fingertips, including sales statistics and featured products