How Merchants Could Make An Affiliate Marketer's Life Easier

I've been kept rather busy lately piecing together a year-long auto-responder email series for my subscribers. Let me tell you, it has been a mind-numbing task at times, requiring a lot of ‘suck it up Kim and just get through these next 50 days of newsletters' self encouragement talk.

Luckily, I'm happy with the end result :)

After taking a moment to bask in the relief and glory of having a WHOLE year's worth of emails set up and running (cha-ching!), the memories of exasperation returned. Why oh why do some merchants make it SO hard for us to find the benefits of their product and promote it??

In this post, I'm having my revenge by outlining a few things that merchants could do for us affiliates to make our lives just that bit easier...

Dear Merchants

I have recently spent time hanging out on many of your sales pages and affiliate areas, and I thought it might be useful for you to know how you could make it easier for affiliates to promote your products (we are partners after all):

• If you've only got video sales copy (and no pause button!), we don't really want to listen to your entire video while frantically typing all the fantastic points that you're making. Yes, I'm aware that a handy shortcut would be to Google what others are saying about your product, but I'd like to form my own opinion. Be a Good Samaritan and give us some resources to use, it's a win-win for us both.

• If you have had the good grace to create some affiliate resources, may I suggest that you at least get the content proof-read before pinning them up for all affiliates to use? I don't think you really want your products to be poorly promoted if you can help it. Providing quality resources is of benefit to both parties.

• If your selling point is your own expertise, please supply your name and credentials (I am hoping the merchant I found guilty of not supplying these is a rarity). Firstly, it doesn't inspire much trust from potential customers when you are Mr. Anonymous - I mean, why would anyone want to send him their hard-earned cash? Secondly, it makes it very hard for affiliates to promote your product too - "buy this nameless guru's product" doesn't have a great ring to it.

• Keep your sales page and bonus material up to date. Your bonuses aren't much use to me if they expired last year and don't increase my conversions.

• Just how great are your bonuses? In some cases I felt the bonus was actually more exciting than the product, which is  kind of ok for affiliates because we can place more emphasis on your bonuses when we write our  material, but again, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in your overall savvy-ness if your marketing priorities don't seem right!
  

I'm not sure how many merchants will be reading my blog post, but I do feel much better for getting that off my chest.

Have you experienced frustrations like these when writing promotional material? Share your thoughts below.

Remember too that we have just released our huge problem-solving product, AffiloJetpack. Included in the perks of this package are 100% good to go year-long auto-responder newsletter series for each of the jetpack niches (of which you get 5) - all you need to do is insert your affiliate links.

So if going through the mind-numbing frustrations that I have just been through doesn't sound like your thing, and the several-thousand-dollar outsourcing price tag is out of the question, then you can save yourself, and your sanity, with AffiloJetpack. Be in quick, it's only available until this Sunday August 1^st.