Hiring an affiliate manager to oversee your entire affiliate program operations is one of the key decisions you’ll ever make.

A good affiliate manager can do EVERYTHING for you in terms of getting massive sales for your product or service from affiliates.

I guess the best place to begin is to define what an affiliate manager is. 

I’m going to borrow a definition that my own affiliate manager, Nicole Dean, provided in an interview that I include as a bonus in my Sales Army Secrets course.

Nicole defines an affiliate manager as…  “A Contractor, Employee or Consultant who is responsible  for Recruiting, Training, Managing and Motivating  a team of Affiliates for an online business.” 

Basically, an affiliate manager generates revenue for your business through the enlisting, equipping and educating of affiliate partners.  Now, that includes a LOT of different activities that I’ll just briefly touch on here – 

1. Recruiting. 

An affiliate manager actively and continually seeks out new affiliates to join your affiliate program through personal contact, announcement services, directory submissions, advertising and a variety of other methods.  With an affiliate manager in place, you don’t have to spend time finding and engaging new affiliates – she’ll do it on your behalf. 

2. Training. 

Of course, it’s not enough to get affiliates to join your program. They need to be educated in various promotional techniques in order to generate revenue. A good affiliate manager will provide ongoing tools and training so affiliates are able to effectively market your products and services.   

3. Managing. 

A good affiliate manager takes the time-consuming duties of overseeing your affiliate program off of you.  Instead of answering questions, troubleshooting problems, setting up or modifying accounts, dealing with commissions and fulfilling other supervisory tasks, you can be doing creative work (or, if you’re like me, playing more tennis ?) while your affiliate manager takes care of affiliate needs.  Affiliates are directly accountable to your affiliate manager instead of you.   

4. Motivating. 

Finally, your affiliate manager will be responsible for turning passive affiliates into active ones by starting and sustaining relationships with your affiliates.  By regularly communicating with your affiliates, using incentives, giving public praise, and so forth, your affiliate manager will motivate your affiliates to not only be more active, but to be more loyal to YOU and your program as opposed to your competition. 

Some specific things Nicole does for my InfoProfitShare.com affiliate program (that you will likely want your affiliate manager to do for you) include –  

• Distributing my ezine articles to directories and partners.
 
• Setting up and expanding my affiliate center. 

• Formatting, branding and compiling marketing materials.  

• Recruiting affiliates to join the affiliate program.  

• Personally contacting major players on my behalf.  

• Creating and running affiliate contests to boost sales. 
 
• Creating training video tutorials and informative reports.
 
• Establishing and posting to our affiliate program blog. 
 
• Answering affiliate support questions.  

• Helping me plan for short and long term success.  

• Giving me counsel on various affiliate program related decisions.

• Creating affiliate training pages for each of my products.  

• Performing various behind-the-scenes tasks. (Uploading files, etc.)
 
• Submitting affiliate program to various directories.  

• Distributing rebrandable reports to directories.  

• Generating web site traffic to the affiliate program site and product sites. 

I could go on and on, but this just gives you a brief look at some of the things that you can have your affiliate manager do on your behalf.

A good affiliate manager can START your affiliate program from scratch.  A good affiliate manager can SPREAD your affiliate program by actively finding partners to promote you.  A good affiliate manager can STRENGTHEN your affiliate program by constantly updating content, training, contests and more.  A good affiliate manager can SUSTAIN your affiliate program long term through a variety of retention, motivation and interacting techniques.

Bottom line:  a good affiliate manager can bring you a lot of sales!

How would you like to know how to find a good affiliate manager?  And how to convince her to work with you doing all we’ve talked about without spending a penny out of pocket cash for her services?  It’s all explained in great detail in my course at http://www.SalesArmySecrets.com.  And that’s just ONE of the chapters!!  Here’s the best part:  everything in the entire course can be handed off to a good affiliate manager to do for you.  Grab your copy today to learn how to find and work with an affiliate manager to get thousands of other people promoting your products and services for you.