Selecting Your Affiliates
How To Create Your Area of Influence (AOI) in 30 Minutes or Less

In a recent consultation with Mercedes Benz, an interesting term arose which is central to affiliate programs:

Area of Influence (AOI)

Mercedes Benz laser focuses its effort on a geographic, local audience. They analyze the local customer base and build their area of influence, their circle, those customers most likely interested in buying them for a long time.

Mercedes understands that their customers will likely be customers for life if they do everything right. I wish everyone had that attitude. By creating the circles of influence, they embrace the customer and invite them to become a long term customer.

The client could describe his Mercedes owner by age, income, hobbies, related products they enjoyed, where they lived, where they vacationed, and all the other demographic components that lead to a well targeted message.

They know what their customer looks like, where they go, and what they like. You should apply the same logic to your Area of Influence, the related Web Sites, mailing lists, newsgroups, discussion boards, the topics they like, the books the read, their hobbies, their interests, and their passions.

It is quite simple; the more I know about my customer, the better I will do in locating them and finding the affiliates that are giving them what they need. Ezines can be affiliates, sharing information; Web Sites can be affiliates, entertaining and providing services.

Your area of influence on the Internet is rapidly filling up; affiliate programs take these sites and coordinate them into a sales channel. In a few years you will not be able to simply pick and choose; the best ones will be taken and you will be left fighting for survival.

Most people go out and sign up affiliates like they are gathering nuts in the woods. They pile a bunch of them in a bag and go around bragging how many affiliates they have. The result is a random shot at generating sales, when they could be planting these seeds to grow your own forest of long term revenue.

An area of influence is simple; what are the related topics, hobbies, and special interests of your target customer base? What Web Sites do they frequent? You need to create:

A. Market research which reveals the places your customers are meeting, including a list of the best portals, community sites, and niche Web Sites to target your affiliate program towards.

B. List of newsgroups, e-zines and targeted mailing lists which can be used to promote your clients business.

C. Samples of banners, endorsement letters, and testimonials for affiliates to use in promoting your products and services.

As outlined in the guide, selecting your affiliates is the most important part of your online process. Most Web Sites still offer affiliate programs to anyone that signs up. For commodity items like books and musical CD's, this model seems to be working well. Their goal is to sell volumes of product and spread the word.

But comparing the sale of a book to the sale of a loan, or of travel, is like comparing apples and oranges. What works best for your business depends on what you offer; no matter what you do, setting up a sales force that can move product is the most important goal.

But to really get the kind of affiliates you want, it is a good idea to target the interests, hobbies, and related topics to what you are offering. You can approach this two ways; announce your program and open it up to anyone, or carefully build your lean network of effective affiliates.

If you target many affiliates, you bring unique challenges. Usually this leads to loads of affiliates signing up, with the impression that more is better. And that is not necessarily untrue; affiliates have multiple values they can bring to the table for your business. But they also bring along an administrative nightmare at times.

For example, an article in the New York Times reported about a Web site offering lobsters, which had something like 400 affiliates. The owner of the site kept bragging until the reporter found out that he made only 4 sales from those affiliates per week. That is 1% of his affiliates. He kept insisting that having all these people helped his business, and it may have.

He may be generating traffic. He may be getting "branded" with his company name. Or he may be doing something sillyÉonly time will tell. For you to build your Area of Influence, you should begin by understanding your affiliates, your customer base, and find a way to target them and contact them.

The following 5 Phase Plan can help you get started quickly:

Phase 1: Take Ten Minutes to Inventory What Your Affiliates Do (And Hopefully Like to Do) Best

Time: 10 minutes

Goal: Make a list of the following:

• Every job they may have had

• Every hobby they may have, or would like to have

• Every personal interest, hobby, related topic, business, or special interests they may have

High profit ideas can be found with a little fishing. Don't think too hard, just write it down. And limit yourself to 10 minutes.

Phase 2: What Areas Could Yield High Profits?

Time: 10 Minutes

Goal: Take each item from Phase 1 and ask:

1. What are the major problems facing people interested in this subject?

2. What are the important goals that people interested in this subject would like to achieve?

Do this as quickly as possible, 10 minutes only.

Phase 3: Picking the Ideas with the Most Profits

Let's start judging what you wrote. Which ideas are worth your time and which are wasted time?

Go back through your list from Phase 1. Ask two questions of each:

A. Can I write about the solutions or goals these people want to achieve?

People who write about something based on their own experience put out more interesting materials than "experts". Don't think of yourself as an expert, can you simply write their goals and solutions from experience? If you can, customers will pay for it. The real challenge is to provide a new twist to the subject that no one else has.

B. Can I provide products/services to supply my customers and affiliates? Is anyone else doing what I'm doing?

This question is usually assumed by most businesses; if no one is selling what you are, you have to create a market. If too many people are selling what you are offering, your competition may hinder your results. Be honest and don't use your own opinion only; get feedback from others. It is often easier to take part of an existing market than creating your own.

Phases 1 and 2 are for letting your ideas go. Use Phase 3 to sort your ideas, check them out. Do this for yourself and work with a partner. Make sure you are honest in Phase 3 and take only those ideas that are workable, and throw out the rest.

Phase 4. Market Research: Start Thinking About Your Affiliate

The first step was brainstorming exactly what it is you are selling:

1. A solution to the problems your customer has.

2. Supplies to help them solve the problem..

Now comes the simple step; find out who your affiliates are. This is the time to start looking among your current clients, their vendors, associates, and others. Can they generate any leads for you? Where is your target market:

1. At other Web sites, competitive or not?

2. At newsgroups?

3. On other mailing lists?

4. In print media?

5. At trade shows, association gatherings, large group meetings about a specific subject?

6. Are they someone else's clients that you can be endorsed to? How?

Phase 5. Contacting your affiliates

Now that you have targeted your affiliates, you need to invite them to join you. It will quickly become evident that the Internet is broken into several sections

1. Sites with lots of traffic (50,000 plus visitors a month) who are selling advertising: major search engines are an example of this. These sites are tricky to approach.

2. Sites with lots of traffic that are not selling advertising space (the majority); you have to prove that your efforts will yield value for their dead advertising space

3. Sites with medium traffic (10-25,000 a month)

4. Sites with medium traffic and ezines lists they regularly mail to

5. Sites with little traffic, the lemonade stands of the Internet

6. Ezines and email mailing lists that have 1,000-60,000 or more members who read these messages regularly. Even without a Web site, the trust and reach these email publications have can far exceed the power of a Web site waiting for visitors to come.

Once you have defined who your affiliates are, it is time to contact them. You should know the Web Sites they meet at, the mailing lists they frequent, the places they go on the Internet. If you want to sign up lots of affiliates, you can simply invite anyone.

If you want to qualify your best salespeople, measure their traffic and their ability to sell. After all, if they don't have traffic, they cannot generate sales. It is all about extending your reach into your customer base. Take care not to assume that having lots of affiliates means you will get lots of sales.

The Web Sites with traffic are the most valuable, under utilized resource on the Internet. Ezines are another underused form of advertising that few people take advantage of. A good ezine can actually pull more leads and sales than a Web Site if it is read frequently.

An interested audience who wants to communicate with you is essential. Let's continue and investigate how to reach them.