Affiliate marketing done right - Fiona Robertson

I've been in affiliate marketing for pretty much as long as I’ve been in search. Search came first. It was a hobby. Affiliate marketing came along shortly afterwards as a way to let me turn that hobby into beer money.

At one point, before I joined bigmouthmedia, I even ran an (unofficial) TradeDoubler group in the UK because I was annoyed the network wasn’t telling affiliates when new merchants joined up.

Needless to say, as a keen affiliate, I noticed when MediaCom Edinburgh appointed the highly regarded Fiona MacPherson from the Glasgow based Equator. So did the NMA as the move was covered there.

A little while ago Fiona Robertson (nee MacPherson) started working for bigmouthmedia. She's heading up our growing Affiliate and Performance channels. Frankly, it's a position I expect many people to be jealous of! It’s in the trade press today so I thought I’d blog about it today as well.

What matters to me is the ability to run good affiliate campaigns. A good affiliate campaign is one which is fair to the affiliates and also successful for the merchant. I chatted about this with Fiona when she joined and found that we shared very similar views.

I really think that too many affiliate campaigns are badly run today. The affiliate networks have made great improvements. I think they’ve saved the reputation of the industry.

The next step, however, are affiliate campaigns that work wonderfully with Search, Social Media and Display campaigns.

The next step are affiliate campaigns that are designed so that as they grow they help merchants/brands get those sales they would not have otherwise have made or protect those sales that they would have otherwise lost. I call think Reach Marketing.

I knew Fiona would do well in her new role when I saw her get annoyed at how badly a big brand was letting their affiliate program be mismanaged by a traditional agency. You see the same sort of reaction when a good SEO stumbles into a horror of an SEO campaign from an agency utterly incapable of the task.

You can follow Fiona on Twitter as @fi_robertson or bigmouthmedia’s own affiliate team as @bigmouth_aff. I encourage you to do so. Especially if you’re looking for top class insight.