Are you thinking of starting up your very own affiliate marketing business? Or maybe you already own one and want to know how you can better organise it to make your business run more efficiently and effectively. Well, if this sounds like you then you have come to the right place! In this article, we will be taking you through the different steps that you need to follow to effectively organise your affiliate marketing business to make it a success. Carry on reading to find out more!
What Exactly Is Affiliate Marketing?
First of all, before we get started on how to effectively organise your affiliate marketing business it is important that you first of all understand what exactly affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is essentially recommending a company’s products or services to potential customers. Each time you pass on a sale to this company, you make a commission from it. You will tend to find that as part of this process there are four parties involved which are the affiliate website, the advertiser, the buyer and the affiliate network. There are many great advantages to affiliate marketing and it is used in a wide range of different sectors from retail to online gambling. This business model has become more and more popular over the years and is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Some people tend to think that affiliate marketing is a get rich quick scheme, however, that is not the case! While there is plenty of money to be made from affiliate marketing, it still requires a lot of hard work and one of the most important keys to the success of your affiliate marketing business is how effectively it is organised. A lack of organisation in an affiliate marketing business can spell out disaster for it and be a massive waste of time.
Organising your affiliate marketing business does not have to be hard and here we are taking you through the different elements that you need to consider to make your business run smoothly.
Use a Spreadsheet
This may seem quite basic to some, but it is actually very important and a key way to ensure that you are staying on top of things. Any targets that you have set for your affiliate marketing business need to go into a spreadsheet. What’s more, you will also want to include the names, email addresses and any other contact information of prospective affiliates. This will help makes things a whole lot easier when you then come around to doing follow ups. You can update your spreadsheet as you go. So, each time a new affiliate comes aboard you can change their colour to show that they have been converted. Use colour coding to keep on track of where you are and as your spreadsheet grows, you will be extremely thankful that you started off with this colour coding system! Finally, at the end of each month, we would recommend that you clean up the sheet. Create new tabs for those who have converted and those who have not and then start on a new, fresh spreadsheet at the start of each month.
Use a Task Manager
We cannot stress enough how important it is that you keep on top of things using some form of task manager software. There are loads to choose from and you will need to pick the one that is going to work best for your business. We would recommend that you try out system such as Kanban. Learning how to use a Kanban board is super easy and this is a fantastic way to organise your workflow with ease. Kanban is a task manager that has been growing in popularity over the past few decades and is designed to help you manage the flow of work. This will help you to see what areas of your workflow are working on time and to schedule and which areas maybe need some extra help and where the workflow is being held up the longest. There are now digital Kanban boards which are designed to help you overcome the problems that arise when you are working with remote teams, helping everyone to stay on track and work towards one common goal.
Set Out Time Blocks
As we mentioned before, much of your day will be spent recruiting new affiliates when you run an affiliate marketing business. However, it can be easy to quickly get caught up in these day to day management tasks and forget to block out time to recruit new people. We would recommend setting out specific blocks of time for you to dedicate to recruitment as this will ensure you don’t let potential prospects fall through the cracks.
