Our Top Affiliate Management Resources

Affiliate management is extremely under served by educational resources. Why? I can only guess. Maybe some of the more successful affiliate managers are simply too busy making money to sit down and share their thoughts.

I suppose I can understand that affiliates have little interest in educating others on their best kept secrets, but when it comes to affiliate management, there is an enormous market for education. About 98% of the top 100 retailers have some sort of affiliate program, and though many of them basically outsource it to CJ or Google Affiliate Network, we are seeing a growing interest among advertisers to have more control of their affiliate programs. If you’ve ever thought about passing on your knowledge, now is the time. Performance marketing is certainly on the rise, and it is anyone’s chance to be spokesperson and educator for what I believe will be the most valuable advertising channel of the future.

Thankfully, the select few who do share their experience managing performance and affiliate marketing programs are among the cream of the crop. With that in mind, here are a few resources for affiliate management that are up-to-date and extremely valuable.

Affiliate Program Management – An Hour a Day

Geno Prussakov of AMNavigator offers the most up-to-date reference book on virtually every topic in affiliate program management. Though I would have liked a much stronger section on affiliate tracking software ;), I have to say this is the most impressive print resource I have seen to date. If you have not purchased it or passed it on to your affiliate managers, do it now. Geno also runs an extremely prolific blog about affiliate management and covers everything for tips and methods to news and commentary on industry happenings.

AffiliateTip

Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit, has been pounding away at his Affiliate Tip blog since February of 2004. Wow! Looking back over the last few years you’ll find some real gems in there, but it is also a great blog to learn about various companies involved with Affiliate Summit, hear about new tools and techniques, or just get to know some of the personalities in our industry.

Performance Marketing Association

With Rebecca Madigan at the helm, I have to say that the PMA is producing incredible, timely content for our industry. There really isn’t any other resource as thorough and up to date about the political happenings of affiliate marketing. Outside of that, they also do a great job of getting great information from industry leaders. I was happy to do a member spotlight a few weeks ago. They have sections of their blog devoted to best practices, market research, mobile, industry events, European market, and more.

Affiliate Management Trainers

Co-founded by Sarah Bundy, who is also the founder of outsource program management company (OPM), All Inclusive Marketing, AMT offers much-needed training resources to affiliate managers. The AMT team brings years of affiliate management experience to a one-on-one training environment where affiliate managers can advance their skills.

AffStat Report

This is another project by Shawn Collins that has basically served as the only wide reaching report of its kind. Though the big names like Forrester touch on performance marketing through various reports, the AffStat report is really the only internal industry survey focused specifically on affiliates.

GeekCast.fm

Started in January of 2008, Geekcast is great if you love the podcast format. Though it is not completely specific to affiliate management, you’ll find tons of relevant people talking about affiliate strategies, buzz, tips, and conferences. Go ahead and email subscribe just to see the caliber of folks that come down the pipe.

Guest Post — We’d love to hear from you!

For those of you who do have amazing experience and want to share it with others or even if you know someone like that, I hope your contributions to this blog can become another valuable information resource for affiliate management. This is your blog too! Submit your blog ideas to us by emailing [email protected] for more info.

Author

A digital marketer by background, Peter is the former CEO of TUNE, the enterprise platform for partner marketing. In 2018, he sold TUNE’s mobile measurement product to Branch, unifying measurement and user experience. He led TUNE’s efforts to bring better management technology and automation to marketing partnerships, across affiliates, influencers, networks, and business development relationships. Follow @peterhamilton