Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

The third session I attended was How to Grow a Profitable Affiliate Channel.  I did not have as much of a grounding in this as I probably needed in order to get the full value out of this session but I did garner a few insights:

• One of the values of a good affiliate program is to conquer real estate on search engines - to have yourself and your affiliates in the top spots on a search. Therefore, it is good for both you and your affiliates to have solid SEO strategies.
• Test your affiliate program.
• Make sure your affiliates are getting good value from you just as you test to make sure you get good value from them.
• One good strategy is to use a co-marketing approach where you ‘exchange’ complementary but non-competing inventory.
• Don’t make arbitrary changes in the relationship.  If you have doubts, start out conservative so any changes will be towards leniency.

Your affiliates want to perform - after all, they are trying to make money from the relationship, too. Be consistent, be honest, and if you can make things easier for them and yourselves (like using RSS to let them get updates from you), do it!
One of the things I took away from this that I did not know is that while blogs will tend to bubble up quickly in searches (thereby making them desirable affiliate partners), having them hosted on the same domain or IP block will hinder this performance.