Building an affiliate network can be a very effective way to promote your products. But while you do have the potential of having thousands of affiliate marketers promoting your web site for you, it does take a lot of work and planning to get it done right. There is a back-end infrastructure that has to be set up to keep track of the affiliate marketers, the sales, the clickbacks, and the commissions due. You need to create marketing article content to send to your affiliate marketers, and to establish a regular communication channel with them to keep them excited and interested in what you have to offer.
Article Marketing Automation Solutions
But like everything else, much of the process of affiliate marketing can be automated with existing software solutions. It is not necessary to create an affiliate database completely from scratch as there are plenty of ready-made affiliate tracking tools in the market already that let you get right down to business. You will also have access to conveniences like project management tools and e-mail blasting tools, many of which you can access at a much lower cost by third party software-as-a-service providers.
However, the most labor-intensive part of running a good affiliate network is creating and distributing fresh, original article content to all of your affiliate marketers. Article marketing, or creating keyword-driven articles that link back to your sales page, is always effective, but creating all those articles and sending them all out does take time, energy, and money. WordPress users do have it a bit easier here as there is Affiliate Unique Article Feeder, a WordPress plug-in that for the first time, fully automates the article marketing process.
Affiliate Unique Article Feeder automates the entire process. Once AUA Feeder has created multiple unique versions of your article content, it inserts each unique affiliate marketer link in each one in the appropriate place, and then allows you to automatically and transparently send a unique article to each and every affiliate marketer in your network. Through the affiliate marketers RSS feed, you can automatically publish those articles, with links included, directly into the affiliate marketers web blog or web page.The process is very cost-effective. The plug-in itself cost just $39, and can save hundreds in copywriting costs, and at the same time, ramps up your marketing process to the sales start coming in faster and on a more regular basis.
Affiliate Unique Article Feeder is currently available as a WordPress plugin at www.thethefly.com/wp-plugins/affiliate-unique-article-feeder/.
If you’re not using WordPress your job becomes a bit more complicated. You could develop a system where you can import an RSS feed to pre-load articles; or use an RSS script to simply display the RSS feed of an article directory; build your own article feeder script connected to whichever blogging/cms software you are using; or do it all the old fashioned way and manually post articles.
Regardless of which way you go about doing it – this is where you’re going to spend the majority of your time when you start up your affiliate marketing campaign. Do keep in mind, we’re here to help you every bit of the way.