AffPlan Podcast – AffPlan Strategies Session #2

Welcome to another episode of the AffPlan Strategies Session, a podcast where industry leaders share their expert advice to help you with all aspects of creating and refining your online Affiliate Marketing Plan.

For our second AffPlan Strategies Session we tackled another key component of your Affiliate Marketing Plan:  Recruiting Affiliates.

Recruiting Affiliates into an Affiliate Program takes a lot of time, energy, relationships and effort — and is, for better or worse, a key metric used in determining the success (or potential success) of an Affiliate Program.

During the discussion, our expert guest panelists, Brook Schaaf and Stephanie Lichtenstein, help us uncover some fundamental rules of engaging a new affiliate, the importance of “activation” vs. “raw recruitment”, using social media for recruiting affiliates, wooing super affiliates, the role of networks for recruiting — and the age-old adage of “quality vs. quantity”.

Also, as Affiliate Marketing is “all about relationships”, we spend time discussing strategies for building and developing relationships for long-term success.

Again, the amazing Lisa Picarille moderated this episode and was joined by these two very respected OPM’s (Outsourced Program Managers):

Stephanie Lichtenstein, Affiliate Program Manager, Andy Rodriguez Consulting

Stephanie Lichtenstein is a proud affiliate program manager with Andy Rodriguez Consulting, one of the top outsourced program management firms in the country. She has managed numerous affiliate programs in the ShareASale Top 100 PowerRank and Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. To grow an affiliate program, she believes in maintaining open communications with her merchants and affiliate partners. Her company has been running successful and ethical affiliate programs since 2001.

Stephanie’s other passion is social media. She consults and educates her clients on best practices in social media. She teaches techniques that strengthen personal branding, grow businesses, improve customer service, and gain a competitive advantage. She also uses social media to share her industry knowledge and bring the community together on important matters such as the advertising tax.

Stephanie has become an industry advocate, public speaker, and blogger for what matters in affiliate marketing and social media. She recently spoke at Affiliate Summit on the panel Getting Noticed Fast: networking and social media techniques on how to get noticed in the industry.

http://stephanielichtenstein.com/

http://andyrodriguez.com/

Brook Schaaf, CEO, Schaaf Consulting

Brook Schaaf has been the Affiliate Program Manager for multi-million dollar programs at Zappos.com, Shoes.com, and Edmunds.com, growing one from $25,000 to over $1,000,000 in monthly sales in less than two years. In 2006 he and his brother, Forrest, founded Schaaf Consulting. He has been actively involved in the affiliate marketing community since its early days and most recently was elected to the board of directors of the Performance Marketing Alliance.

http://schaafco.com/

Stephanie and Brook gave us great examples and insight on a number of recruiting tips, including the tools and sites listed below.

Recruiting Tools

• Affiliate Summit http://affiliatesummit.com
• Twitter http://www.twitter.com
• Arelis http://www.download3000.com/download_730.html
• Compete http://www.compete.com/
• Syntryx http://www.syntryx.com/
• PPC Bully https://sales.ppcbully.com/
• Sugar CRM http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/

AffPlan Podcast – The AffPlan Strategies Session #1.

Welcome to the premiere episode of the AffPlan Strategies Session, a podcast where industry leaders share their expert advice to help you with all aspects of creating and refining your online Affiliate Marketing Plan.

For the debut of the AffPlan Strategies Session we tackled a fundamental component of your Affiliate Marketing Plan:  Research.

Research is important to so may areas of online marketing. And having the right tools is vital. The areas we cover in this podcast are research tools for recruiting new affiliates, tools for conducting research on rival’s campaigns and tools for keyword research.

To help us uncover the secrets and tools of this very important topic, we brought on two amazing guest panelists:

Heather Paulson is the President of (PMG) Paulson Management Group,
which specializes in providing affiliate program management, paid
search management, SEO, Web development and e-commerce consulting
services.
http://www.PaulsonManagementGroup.com

Ginette Degner is an independent consultant with many years of
expertise in SEO, marketing and affiliate marketing.
http://AffiliateIdeaFactory.com

Special thanks goes to Lisa Picarille of LisaPicarille.com for hosting this podcast!

Heather Paulson and Ginette Degner both gave us serious insight as to how their businesses, their clients, and their experiences have successfully used the tools we link to below.  You’ll want to have a pen and paper ready for this — it’s jam-packed with ideas and examples.

Thank you again, to Ginette Degner and Heather Paulson for their time, and sharing their expertise with us.

We hope you find this podcast useful in preparing the “Research Section”, of your Affiliate Marketing Plan.

Some of the tools that each of our panelists found useful in doing research are:

Keyword Research

• Google’s Wonder Wheel http://www.googlewonderwheel.com/
• IBP keyword tools http://www.axandra.com/
• eBay Pulse http://pulse.ebay.com/
• Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends
• Raven SEO http://raven-seo-tools.com/
• SEO ToolBook http://wareseeker.com/free-seo-toolbook/

Research for Recruiting

• IBP-the link building tools http://www.axandra.com/
• Quantcast http://www.axandra.com/
• Compete http://www.compete.com/
• Syntryx http://www.syntryx.com/
• PPC Bully https://sales.ppcbully.com/

Researching Rivals and Affiliates

• Spyfu http://www.spyfu.com/lp/us/
• Quirk http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
• Ispionage.com http://www.ispionage.com
• Radian 6 http://www.radian6.com/cms/home
• Word Tracker http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• PPC Bully https://sales.ppcbully.com/
• Twitter http://www.twitter.com
• Facebook http://www.facebook.com