Best Practices For Merchants With Affiliate Programs Working With Bloggers

 

In the past, Amazon Associates made it easy for bloggers to quickly and easily incorporate affiliate links into their blog posts. As Amazon has made changes to their affiliate program due to COVID-19, this leaves the door wide open for other merchants to partner with blog publishers. To help out, FMTC currently has a beta version of Product Matching.

This may help bloggers find your affiliate program, but in the meantime there are some other effective steps you can take to secure partnerships with the best bloggers.

 

Use a Publisher Discovery Tool

 

As you may have heard, FMTC has recently partnered with Publisher Discovery to allow merchants to find their best affiliate partners through their FMTC dashboard. 

 

This enables merchants to search over two million affiliates to find the perfect fit. Merchants or OPMs can also type in a domain name and see other affiliates that site works with, and use traffic scores and relevance to prioritize which ones are the best fit. 

 

 

Make it Easy For Bloggers

 

Many bloggers chose to work with Amazon because they made the process simple and easy. Here are a few ways you can help streamline the process for bloggers to share your links:

 

Keep your offers up-to-date

 

If you changed your sale category, price or anything else, please be sure to update your offers in the network and also let your affiliates know. It’s a bummer when someone in their audience clicks a link trying to buy your product and it’s already expired.

 

Ensure your links and coupons work every time

 

If a sale page changes after a link is posted, this can result in the consumer landing on a 404 page. If the merchant isn’t careful, sometimes a coupon code won’t work even under the correct circumstances. Little issues like this can be quickly solved with some extra attention, and make a world of difference for your affiliates and consumers.

 

Post offers as early as possible

 

Posting offers early gives affiliates a chance to plan out the best offers to share with their audience. Additionally, FMTC will pull your offers once they’re posted, and posting early gives us a chance to clean it up and distribute to our subscribers by the time the offer is live.

 

Make a Relationship Your Goal

 

A long-term relationship gives you and the blogger the most benefit. A blogger’s audience will be more likely to trust them if they continue to promote the same products and keep using them over and over. This is where affiliate marketing crosses over into influencer marketing. 

 

This relationship strategy works much better with a dedicated audience of fans who see the blogger as a real person, rather than a corporation who aggregates and posts affiliate coupons or deal links. 

 

Relax and Let FMTC Help

 

Don’t have time for the steps above? Relax! FMTC will do the work for you. Merchants and OPMs can access a suite of premium services such as automated deal processing, pushing deals to certain affiliates, and much more.

 

Also, any blogger who both subscribes to our Publisher Toolkit and is joined to your affiliate program will access all your monetized links after they have been cleaned, categorized, and made searchable in our Deal Bank. 

 

Looking for More Information?

 

Stay tuned, we’ll be posting more tips on working with bloggers soon. Want to learn more? Click here to download a PDF summarizing some of the ways FMTC helps merchants successfully partner with their best affiliates and bloggers.