As an affiliate manager, it is important to always be supporting any affiliates whether they are new to the program or have been around for a long time. Often, affiliate managers will forget to connect with affiliates from the moment that they sign up to the program and this can result in them losing interest or feeling as though they are not valued.
Affiliate managers must learn to mine their long-tail in order to build partnerships and run a successful affiliate program. In this week’s episode of Affiliate Drive Time, Lee-Ann touches on the importance of mining your long-tail and offers some tips. Check out the video and read on below to find out more.
What does mining your long-tail mean?
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of mining your long-tail, then you should know that Lee-Ann is specifically referring to the period of time between when you take on a new affiliate and when they become actively managed.
Typically, affiliates will get a lot of attention during the on-boarding process and once this is complete, they will simply be notified via newsletter until the affiliate manager is able to dedicate some more time.
By neglecting to mine your long-tail, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities to build a lasting relationship and give the affiliate the best possible start as a partner.
What can you put in place?
This period of time needs to be filled with a much more personalised approach if you really want to improve the relationship that you are building with the partner? Personalisation is vitally important as every partner is different and there is no real one size fits all approach.
Typically, sending out a newsletter to all affiliates isn’t really an effective way of mining your long-tail so you need to think outside the box. Is there some kind of automation that you could be putting in place to improve this relationship from the get-go? There are tons of tools that can be used to help you save time but still offer a great service to affiliates.
Get more tips on mining your long-tail
This strategy is something that Lee-Ann has recently covered in episodes of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast. We recommend checking out the episodes with Matt Frary and Evan Weber to hear more on how this can be effective.
As an affiliate manager, you need to make sure that the service you are creating with your affiliates is just as good as the one you are giving to your customers. You need to be able to rely on your affiliates and by offering them a personalised experience, you can make sure that this is possible.
Don’t forget to check back next week for more affiliate management tips in our next episode of Affiliate Drive Time. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode!
