Publisher development is the lifeblood of an affiliate program. While pushing invites to publishers through networks is turnkey – understanding what resonates with an affiliates audience, educating affiliates on your brand, actively keeping affiliates in the loop with promotions and new product releases, and consistently pulsing affiliates on their own initiatives is a vital piece to affiliate program success. As an affiliate management agency, DMi’s publisher development team uses their industry experience, attention to detail, and creative thinking to help our brands build relationships in the space that get them prioritized for promotions. Here are 4 questions to help you decide if your affiliate relationships are setup for growth:

• How often are you communicating with your affiliates? Communication is key to building relationships. Our team is consistently communicating daily with the top affiliates in each of our programs. They keep our affiliate partners in the loop on promotions scheduled, new product releases, holiday planning, exclusive opportunities, etc. Additionally, they have quarterly calls with top affiliate partners to discuss quarter over quarter performance, upcoming opportunities, feedback and optimizations, and goal setting.
• Do your affiliates know your competitive advantage? Fueling affiliates on information on your brand is key. Do you have a google drive setup that houses your creative assets, your video content, your boiler plate, your key market differentiators, your price points, etc? Educating and tooling affiliate partners with information on your brand will help them understand how to create content that properly aligns with your selling points and gives consumers a true perspective on why they should engage with your brand.
• Are you doing your research on your affiliates? What brands appear to be getting premium exposure on site? What can you do to replicate their success? What verticals appear to be popular amongst their audience? It’s important to understand your publishers core audience, what promotional opportunities are available onsite, what holidays they celebrate and curate content around, and unique and personal ways you can connect with their audiences.
• Are you consistently gathering feedback from your affiliate partners? What does your feedback loop like? Not only does the DMi team gather feedback from partners on regular calls, but they send surveys out on behalf of each of our brands so our publishers get the opportunity to voice their opinion on our creative assets, our CPA/Revenue Share, our exclusives, our promotional calendar, and ways we can better mold our relationship with them to become their best partner.

Without strong affiliate partnerships, your program does not have the foundation it needs to scale. While it may be easy to get publishers joined to your program, the key piece to driving revenue is activating those partnerships. Prioritize your partnerships, and your program is bound to grow.