Small Business Grants - Affiliate Manager Guide to Creative

Of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants, affiliate Manager Guide to Creative, this is chapter 5.

But I'd say it should more correctly be called something along the lines of Affiliate Manager Guide to Creative, and I don't recall why I would have used that title, " I wrote this book a long time ago. This chapter was originally called "Choosing Your Program Model.

I would suggest polling your affiliates on what they want and need, as far as the types of creative to provide to your affiliates. Affiliate program creative can come in all shapes and sizes, anyhow.

You should consult with this list of ad sizes to be sure you are conforming to the standards. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) provides guidelines on ad units.

Too, be sure to make static options available. One complaint I hear frequently from affiliates is that there are only animated banners available through an affiliate program.

There are a number of other creative types that may apply to your affiliate program, in addition to providing banners and text links to your affiliates.

But there is not a universal format, the various affiliate networks have their own formats for data feeds. You should have a data feed, if you have a line of products.

You might want to make those available to affiliates, if you're running an affiliate program for a brick and mortar company and have some existing commercials. Video as affiliate creative is gaining in popularity.

They enable you to create a branded video viewer and to make the video clickable with affiliate links. One vendor to take a look at is WebVideoZone. You might consider investing some funds into creating some video for your affiliates, otherwise.

Mobile affiliate creative will an area worth focusing some attention, as we get more progressive with smart phones as marketing vehicles.

Companies such as LashBack and UnsubCentral enable advertisers to control and safeguard the process. But this is an area that's bouncing back, cAN-SPAM had a significant impact on the number of affiliate programs offering solo e-mail creative, a few years ago.

As well as if you permit them to use trademark terms in title and meta tags, state whether affiliates can bid on trademark terms. You should also have policies in place for search engine optimization and affiliate bidding practices on pay per click search engines.

In order to avoid duplicate content issues with the search engines, you will want to warn affiliates off of putting up content from an affiliate program on their site, generally. Which affiliates can use in newsletters, content can be a great type of creative.

Don't wait for affiliates to ask for these odd sizes - ask them if there are sizes they want that you don't current offer. The format for some blog templates or themes is suited for ad sizes unique to blogs. But won't necessarily work for blogs, these apply to "traditional" sites. I mentioned the guidelines for ad units from the IAB, earlier.

This is helpful for your affiliates to be able to create short versions of affiliate links for text newsletters. Htaccess redirects. Such as meta tag or , let your affiliates know how to create redirect files, lastly.