Outsourced Affiliate Management vs. Inhouse Affiliate Managers

Your company’s affiliate program should be a focal point of your company’s efforts to incease revenue. Affiliate marketing is still a burgeoning industry and there are literally thousands of webmasters out there to recruit in to your affilite program. There is a direct correlation between the number of webmaster affiliates in your program and the amount of traffic and sales you will get from your affiliates. Therefore, the more of these types of affiliates you have the more revenue you will generate for your company. There are basically 2 ways of approaching the whole affiliate thing…hire inhouse affiliate managers or hire an outsourced affiliate program management company to handle it for you.
Inhouse affiliate managers can be a great solution or a horribly bad one. A good inhouse affiliate manager is someone that is very outgoing, proactive and not afraid to pick up the phone and call an affiliate directly to discuss affiliate marketing. A good inhouse affiliate manager should also be well versed in HTML, SEO, PPC, keyword research, and basic site building, so they can work with each affiliate no matter the affiliate’s knowledge level or experience. The problems is, there are very few inhouse affiliate managers that have this combination of characteristics. Most are either afraid to make a true bond with their affiliates, because they don’t have the knowledge level to work with the super-affiliates, or don’t want to take the time to work with novice affiliates on how to launch their first site/blog and build some pages. Most large companies with inhouse affiliate management experience stagnation and even a down-turn in their affiliate program production, when their affiliate program should be constantly growing every year.
Outsourcing your affiliate program management duties can be a great idea if you use the right company or a bad idea if you do not. A good outsourced affiliate management company will be proactively recruiting affiliates, taking the time to bond with your affiliates that join, and work with your affiliates regardless of their experience with affiliate marketing. Another great aspects of outsourced management is you can tap into a wealth of affiliates that are currently under managment. For instance, Experience Advertising has over well over 20,000 affiliates under management across all of our programs. Our affiliate universe grows all the time when we take over another program and our current programs continue to get larger. Other affiliate management companies, from what I have seen, do not work with affiliates very intensely. I am an affiliate under management of most of the other companies in our space and they have never once tried to really get to know me…and I’m a pretty good affiliate myself!
To summarize, great affiliate program management is everything to the growth and prosperity of your affiliate program. Inhouse affiliate managers can be good if they are really working it and proactively bringing in new affiliates and partners. Outsourced affiliate management is the best answer (with a company like ours) because we are extremely proactive and we attempt to get to know and work with all of our affiliates regardless of experience. You can hire Experience Advertising for half of what our competition charges, believe it or not. You can also hire us to work with your current inhouse affiliate managers to get them working as productively as possible. I call it the Gordon Ramsey Solution. Anyways, I hope this helped you out, I tried to remain as objective as possible.