One thing that you see on almost every SEO blog is that companies and SEOs say that your in house or outsourced SEO company needs to communicate with everyone in the company. What I don’t see on many sites is the same for your Affiliate Managers. Although it is a bit different for Affiliate Managers and Affiliate Management Companies, your Affiliate Manager can actually help to boost many other outbound sources and channels including SEO, PR, PPC, Email and more. Because your Affiliate Manager is an outward facing person for your company, you should really think about how you are utilizing them and if you could be doing more. Here are a few examples.
SEO:
Your Affiliate Manager and your SEO are both reaching out to relevant sites. Both of them are asking for links or promotions, so why not combine the two efforts and have them work together. Your Affiliate Manager builds long term relationships with site owners and when the relationship is strong enough, they could easily offer to write an article for the Affiliate in return for one backlink that is not for a competitive term for their site. For example, if you run tours to Europe, but only England and Spain, and your Affiliate focuses on France and other tours, why not give them an article about all of western Europe and get the link off of England while they can have free content and use Affiliate links for Spain and haven’t given up any rankings for their main audience which are people traveling to France.
PR:
Because your Affiliate Manager is in contact with Bloggers, Authority Sites and Communities within your niche, when your PR department is about to drop a press release, they should send it to the Affiliate Manager as well. Not only can the Affiliate Manager help to get a better pick up within the target communities, but they will be helping to build links, and get the word out where a normal wire or email list may not be able to reach. Affiliate Managers are an amazing source of distribution for your PR department.
PPC:
If you have some terms that convert extremely well, your Affiliate Manager will have some Affiliates who may do PPC for them. By sharing the list of terms and making sure that the Affiliates don’t direct link to your site, you can not only increase your exposure for these terms and knock your competitor out, but you can gain more sales for your company. If the Affiliate commission is high enough and the margin can work in favor of giving it to Affiliates instead of in house which means that your company could actually save money by having Affiliates bid on these terms and then reallocating the money used on the old terms into other channels where they make more margin.
Email:
Suppose your email list needs a lift. One great way to help it grow is to have your Affiliate Manager run a promotion on pay per sign up for newsletters and lists. You may not always get the most targeted sign ups, but if you use the right partners who have relevant traffic and loyal readers, you could potentially build an extremely solid email list to market to.
Other Channels:
Your Affiliate Manager can help with a ton of other channels too. They can have Affiliates help replace negative reviews and help with your ORM, they can create fun and informative videos about your products and make sure you are covered and found on video sites and in video searches. Affiliates can increase your budgets for paid channels and even build out new ones that you hadn’t thought of. If you have excess inventory and need to push it fast, you can go to your Affiliate Manager and have them run 50% off specials, newsletter drops, etc… and start to move the excess or old inventory faster than just letting it sit on your shelves.
If your Affiliate Manager isn’t communicating with the people across your company and in your Marketing and PR departments, you could be missing out on a ton of revenue. Your Affiliate Managers are outward facing employees and they can easily help other channels grow if you show them how to do it. Just like SEO, Affiliate Managers should be talking to everyone and seeing how they can help grow other channels.
2 thoughts on “Using your Affiliate Manager to boost SEO, PR, PPC & More!”
Love this post and completely agree. A successful affiliate program needs to have open communication. Many times the affiliate program is treated as an after thought when it can be properous tool for driving initiatives. It helps the company and strengthens the affiliate program. Win win in my book. Hopefully more companies will see the light.
I hope so too. There are so many ways that the Affiliate Channel can grow a company and some companies are now only starting to learn the additional benefits of a good Affiliate Manager.