Raven tools is best known for its SEO and social media management tools. But did you know you can also use it to help manage your affiliates and affiliate recruitment efforts?
Raven has become a large part of our affiliate management services. If you have an affiliate program, you may want to think about using it as well.
Here are a few of the ways that you can use Raven software to help with your affiliate management and recruitment.
Managing Partners
Raven’s CRM software makes managing affiliate partners simple. It’s a great way to help keep everything moving and not let anything fall behind. Here’s our process.
The first thing to do is to input a URL for the program you are managing. You could do myurlaffiliates.com – it’s OK if it’s not real. This is just the umbrella under which all your information will go.
Once this is set up, click on the contacts button for the CRM system. On this page you can enter in all of your affiliates, their websites, pages they have you listed on and notes about promotions they have run that have worked (and things that have not worked).
You can keep track of the last time you reached out to them and whether they responded or not.
If you owe an affiliate content, banners or even a follow-up, you can assign yourself (or others on your team) tasks and reminders to help make sure that you are on track and don’t forget what is due and when.
Following Up With Recruitment
While you are recruiting new affiliates, it is always a good idea to enter their contact information and the email copy or conversation you had when trying to recruit them.
It is important to keep non-joined partners in the leads section and current affiliates in your contacts so you can separate the two.
If you do a two-week follow-up for the people you’ve reached out to, you can assign yourself a task to reach back out to them. If you are a larger program with multiple managers, you can also assign tasks to each individual person.
This can be a lifesaver with keeping track of how your efforts are going, what has been effective and what isn’t working. When the affiliate does join your program, you can then add them to your contacts list.
If they’d rather give you a link instead, you can always pass it onto your SEO team to work with in Raven’s Link Manager. Likewise, your SEO team can always pass potential affiliates to you if the person would rather become an affiliate than give a backlink.
Contacting Potential and Current Partners
Raven’s CRM also offers a great way to contact current and potential partners to make following up with them easier.
The first thing to do is to create a message template for each type of contact. You could have one for a first follow-up, a second follow-up, contest and bonus campaigns or whatever else you send on a regular basis. This helps to cut down on time and also helps to keep track of what you’ve sent and when.
Having this data helps you know what types of emails potential partners respond to and the best ways to reach them.
It also helps you understand how best to reach them when you need extra promotion or need them to change something on their site.
Finally, it helps new people managing the program better understand the relationship with the partner and how to best contact and work with them.
Monitoring Social Media
One thing that every manager needs to do is monitor social networks as well as possible. Raven’s Social Monitor can help. Here, you can track keywords like your trademark, specials or deals you are running as well as hashtags, links and URL extensions.
Once you have your searches set, you can add channels like Twitter or Facebook to customize your own stream and see who is using the trademarks in general, as hashtags, etc. If you see a link, click it and find out if it’s an affiliate link. If it is, and they need to have an FTC disclosure, you can now reach out to them and let them know.
Although no monitoring solution is 100% accurate, Monitor it is a good line of defense if you are managing a program or your agency is supposed to be monitoring social media channels and FTC disclosures for you.
Recruiting Affiliates
There are two ways that you can use Raven to help recruit affiliates.
The first is to take a competitor’s affiliate link and run it through Raven’s Backlink Explorer, powered by data from Majestic SEO.
If your URL starts with the same base URL and the Merchant ID is the first parameter, you can plug this in. If it is done correctly, all the links that match should be returned as a list. It is the same as checking for backlinks for a specific site.
One thing you need to know is when the URL is displays a product ID or an affiliate ID, the link is no longer the same and thus will not return the results you are looking for.
The second way that you can use Raven to recruit affiliates is to type a competitor’s website address, or a specific product page, into Backlink Explorer. When you get the list of backlinks coming into their site or their pages, you now have a list of people with direct links to them.
This is a great, targeted list that you can approach. Help the webmasters make money by offering them the opportunity to change the links out for affiliate links. It’ll drive sales to your company and help take away the authority passed to your competition.
Your SEO team will be happy that you have been able to help them rank easier and your company will enjoy any of the sites that have traffic and can send you sales.
There are a ton of other metrics and reports within Raven that can make affiliate management easier. Raven Tools is an amazing collection of SEO and social media tools. With all of your data in one place, it’s easy to help SEOs build links, find influencers on social media sites and grow and manage your affiliate program.
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