One of the most effective advertisements for a product or service can be a customer testimonial or a review from an objective source. With all of the hyped up advertising copy out there, consumers are skeptical marketing efforts. This can be difficult to overcome, but as an affiliate, your job is to pre-sell the offer and initiate the relationship of trust between the consumer and merchant. And a recommendation from a satisfied client or industry publication serves as a very persuasive sales tool. The testimonial as affiliate text link provides tangible proof to your site visitors and newsletter readers that the company you are promoting is capable of doing what they boast about. This sort of creative can be as short as several words, or as long as a paragraph or full page. If you are a customer of the merchant you are promoting, try writing a testimonial of your own and run it by the affiliate manager.

There's a lot of talk about RSS and the role it is assuming in Internet marketing. Detractors of RSS that embraced a recent report by JupiterResearch. The report from JupiterResearch claims that "RSS will not have a significant effect as a supplemental alternative to e-mail marketing". On the other side of the argument, Rok Hrastnik, author of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, compiled responses to the JupiterResearch report from folks that know a thing or two about a thing or two when it comes to RSS, such as Seth Godin, Scott Rafer (Feedster), and Alex Barnett (Microsoft). Read Rok's report at http://www.affiliatetip.com/rss_the_business_case.pdf

Recently, I compiled lots of data from affiliate managers for the AffStat 2005 Report. In the past, I would provide only definitive options in the surveys, but this time, I decided to add an additional option for the affiliate managers to use in their answers: Do not know. I was surprised to learn that 14% do not know the average order amount for their company, 16% do not know the average conversion rate for their affiliates, 10% do not know how many of their affiliates earned commission last month, 9% do not know if they permit bidding on their trademarks in pay per click search engines, etc. Basically, they don't know much at all, and that makes for a lousy affiliate manager. Know who runs the shop and drop those that don't get it, because they're not working in your best interest.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF BEST TIPS & BEST PRACTICES: Shawn Collins is CEO of Shawn Collins Consulting, an affiliate program management agency, as well as the Webmaster of the AffiliateTip.com affiliate program directory, and a founder of the Affiliate Summit conference. He authored the book, 'Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants' (Pearson Education), and the AffStat affiliate marketing benchmark reports. He can be reached at shawn@affiliatetip.com. You may reprint any article as long as it includes a link to CPA Tipline, (www.cpatipline.com).
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