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Affiliate advertising is a potentially lucrative endeavor, if managed precisely. Or it can just be a giant waste of everyone’s time, and your client’s money. The outcome is mostly dependent on the degree to which you can monitor your campaign, with most of the work going into the initial start-up phase. Choosing a solid and reliable affiliate is essential, obviously, but so is keeping up with their work and maintaining a simple human relationship.

It’s easy to get mired in a two demensional tech-scape of banners, clickthroughs, and conversions in internet marketing. And it can be incredibly easy to treat your affiliates as servile robots, that just recycle content where you don’t have the energy to reach.

But that’s not what makes an affiliate good. You could get ad placement on a thousand pseudo-search engines run though affiliates, and you might even get a decent amount of leads, but are those people really your target? Do you have any way of knowing? Like any other placed Ad, it is important to qualitatively evaluate the potential of the venue, and only pursue those advertisers that are pertinent.

One of the easist and most effective ways to make this call is as a judgement of character. Get your affiliates on the phone, even if you were introduced to them through a larger aggregate network. Offer them advice, but be sure to get a clear explanation of their strategy. They’re working for you, prompting them for their agenda is the least you could do. This kind of attention performs two critical functions that can really put your project ahead of the effeciency curve. First, it allows you to get a big picture view of how your affiliates are performing. Often your only information comes in as a set of granular statistsics on conversions and click rates, giving you the specificity on accounting that you need but at the sacrafice of any kind of forward-looking projected benefit. Knowing what your advertiser plans to do keeps you looking over the horizon, and as you manage a larger network of unique affiliates working in independent sectors, you can step into the role of commanding general in the case of your ads.

Secondly, it lets your affiliate know that you’re watching their performance, giving them greater incentive to perform and less incentive to create fraudulent leads.

The grand lesson here is to manage your affiliates as if they were your employees, because, in effect, they are. Require from them the same frequency of reporting and accountability that you do from the other members of your staff, and you’ll see an increased drive in sales as your collaborations come into fruition.

At face value, a large affiliate campaign has a nearly equal potential for profit and abuse; it’s up to you as a manager to set it on the right course.