Affiliate Managers

[spazlabz]

The way I see it is like this. The affiliate manager is the public business face of a program. He/she is the one who needs to be professional at all times, but esp when dealing with his customers (the affiliates themselves) its a position where you cant have a 'bad day' when someone comes to you with a problem. You have to get that problem resolved in as quick a time as possible.
They also need to be very quick to respond to anything. Whether it is an e mail, ICQ, phone call or however the affiliate has chosen to contact you. I have a policy. if its in my inbox it gets an answer as soon as I see it. There has been times when i didnt know an answer. I told the affiliate I would find out and follow up. And I did, usually within an hour. I think thats very important.
As far as marketing to attract new affiliates. Thats an important aspect of this job IMO. You have to attract new affiliates or who are you gonna manage? heh heh But something that is missed by some companies out there is the nessesity of a program to afford their affiliate managers with a budget that is fitting for the type of growth they want. There are ways to do this for no cost, but those ways generally take a little while to develop to fruition.
an affiliate manager MUST know, or find out, what their webmasters want/need to help them make money. And get those tools into the hands of the people who can use them to make themselves and the sponsor revenue. But also balancing what they need with giving too much. You can very easily bog yourself down trying to make everyone happy.
You have 2 extremes
1) support affiliates only (answer e mails etc)
2) be all things to the company
I like to think my job is somewhere in the middle there. there is a lot of things an affiliate manager can take on, but i think the responsibilities of any affiliate manager should be clearly defined (with some flexibility) and the salary should be fitting for those responsibilities.


spaz