Promoting and selling a product takes a lot of time, money and effort and often it is horrendous job when you do it on your own. So, some people work through affiliates, i.e. they offer their products to others for selling in return for a percentage as commission. The more affiliates you have the more would your product sell and the more profits you would cull. Sometimes Affiliates Get Out Of Control
In most cases the affiliates bring good business and everything is fine. However, there are times when the affiliates behave unethically which directly affects your product, your reputation and your profits. At this time you need to take some action to stop that particular affiliate from using your product and your name. Unfortunately, in most cases all merchants are restricted – simply most affiliate networks do not give you that freedom.
So what do you do? You have to go the round about the way and approach the network's support or the network to take some action against the spammer which would mean delayed action, which again would translate into more damage to you.
There is yet another scenario – you have a great affiliate member and you want to reward him/ her with some incentive like raised commission, or special reward program. Without a suitable affiliate management tool you would not be able to punish or reward your affiliate members. You would have to follow the "process" without having any say in it – which would be highly frustrating, to say the least.
The Advantage Of Having An Affiliate Management Tool
There are systems which would help to keep track of your affiliates and allow you to manually approve them, track their performance, calculate their commission, punish the culprits who misuse your name and product or use spam to sell them, etc.
Other advantages are that you would be able to be in constant touch with your affiliates, which is not possible without a proper management tool. This way you could easily e-mail your affiliates about all the news of your product – updates, specifications, everything. When you plan to launch a new product to sell and it is related to your current product, you can easily e-mail your existing affiliates and ask them to promote your new product. This way you can gather a lot of new affiliates for your new product, so your launch campaign could easily kick-start. By having an opportunity to e-mail your affiliates, you could inform about changes or updates about your products; you could ascertain about any problems they encounter if at all, and thereby make necessary amends; you could build a relationship with your affiliates to ensure long term loyalty and mutual benefit and lastly keep abreast about how the product is received in the market.
