I am always looking for new tools and services for both client and self to gain some intelligence into business. The other day I got an email from a long lost friend through Linkedin, she had a message of affordable intelligence. After a demo and presentation of The Search Monitor I could see dozens of ways this search monitoring tool could help me and my clients.
I was able to quickly get a few campaigns setup, lt takes about a day or so to start tracking everything, but on Day 2 I was surprised to see some data in there. I found violations, discussions on forums and more. Here are some highlights I wanted to point out about The Search Monitor:
- They can monitor an unlimited amount of social networks and blogs, if it has an RSS feed they can hook it in for you.
- Currently only monitors Google. Google regions and cities go live this month. Yahoo, MSN and few other by October.
- TheSearchMonitor can find affiliates that are linking directly to your site, through an affiliate link or other redirect.
- Daily email alerts. You don’t have to login to check on critical violations and alerts.
- Auto-affiliate detection by landing page (coming in September 08), Crawls to the destination page to automatically detect your affiliates and identify them in reports
- “Trusted Affiliates” for those affiliates that are above the law.
- $399 a month, Very reasonable
And of course I always come up with some cool ideas of my own. How could I use this?
- Great recruiting tool. What are your competitors doing or letting their affiliates get away with? No contact information is available but with some networking you can get around that!
- Use the tool to “price match”. Have a cut throat product and need to know when your competitors jockey their price?
- Test the local waters, you can easily see opportunity for products and services in the local markets
If you are interested in taking a look at it, contact me for a free 30 day trial of The Search Monitor. You won’t find mention of this on your website, email me I will put you in touch and get you taken care of.
“Transparency” in regards to affiliate marketing can go so many different ways. Affiliate networks are defining it from a managers/retailers point of view and opening up contact information and details about the affiliates. This enables an affiliate manager to make better choices on promotions, fraud prevention and helps keep the pulse of their program. What retailers are missing in some cases are true business plans and insight into what the affiliate is actually doing. Without the proper click tracking or analytics tools you literally could be getting traffic from any where in the world, from unsavory sources and causing your business more harm than good.
On the flip side, affiliates should be demanding some transparency from the merchants, as most are completely in the dark on a true conversion rate, keyword/coupon performance & other metrics. Not to mention affiliates are at the mercy of inventory, demand and competition. Of course there has to be some protection on key business strategies, but what is stopping merchants from providing some demographics and performance data so affiliates can invest their time and resources accordingly? Turn it into a white paper to help promote your affiliate program, affiliates will eat it up.
Setting yourself apart can be a big job for when recruiting affiliates, whitepapers can act as a supporting document for your emails, advertisements and other listings. There was an interesting article on Copyblogger and how whitepapers can make you filthy rich, not sure about that, but the bottom line is that it presents a level of professionalism, preparedness and a tool for affiliates to determine where to plug YOUR program into their business.
Wikipedia states: A white paper is a report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions. They are used in politics and in businesses.
What questions do affiliates have and need answers to in order to join your affiliate program?
- Is the commission plan lucrative?
- Conversion rate?
- Coupons and Datafeed tools? - Include sample coupons and datafeed schema’s
- Who else is successful with your program? - Get a testimonial or 2 from your top affiliates.
- What 3rd party tools are you associate with? Goldencan, Feedshare, Popshops?
- What tradeshows do you attend?
- Policies (summary)
- Creative & Linking options
- Network options?
- And so on…
I can think of a million things to include in a whitepaper for your affiliate program, roll all of this together with a pretty layout and PDF it. Host it and link to it in your forum signatures, directory listings, email signatures, affiliate network profiles and more. You can leverage this tool in your PPC affiliate recruiting campaigns, ad campaigns and your next Revenue Magazine Ad!
