Ever felt intimidated about running an affiliate program? Guess what, we guarantee you are not alone. Even publishers who now bring in millions of dollars each month start out small – in living rooms, on laptops with dreams of what could be. Your success will come from taking a series of regular, if not small steps toward your goal.

Here’s a list of the steps you should strive to complete on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis to reach your affiliate goals. This publisher checklist has become one of the most used and accessed tools on CJU and it will help you maximize your results.

Daily
Start each day with the following tasks to ensure they are accomplished.

• Dedicate at least one hour to responding to email in your CJ Account Manager™ Mail tab or other one-to-one advertiser emails
• Review any advertiser communications for new special promotions they are targeting to you and your visitors
• In addition to reviewing your site traffic or email statistics, run a Performance Report in the Run Reports tab and review click-through rates and conversion rates on the ads you are currently using
• Run the custom report “Invalid Links Generating Traffic” in the Run Reports tab and remove any invalid links from circulation
• Run a Transaction Report for the previous day to determine what volume of sales you are generating and what transactions have been reversed
• Review any new program terms being offered by advertisers in the Get Links tab, By Relationship sub-tab, Pending Offers section
• Go into your site and make minor adjustments as needed, based on your findings

Weekly
Choose one day per week to accomplish the following tasks.

• Review new advertisers on your CJ Account Manager homepage for potential partners
• Review the Advertisers With Promotions area on the Get Links page
• Apply to programs that show potential for your business
• Review top-performing advertiser partners’ ad inventories for new offers
• Compile the results from your daily reporting and look for trends - what types of ads, what types of offers, and which of your ad spaces are strongest and weakest
• Move potentially strong offers with good commission rates to top performing spaces and low performing offers to a different location or remove them completely
• Consider removing offers that have high click-through rates but low conversion rates
• Increase the promotion of offers that are converting and paying well
• Follow up with advertisers that have not yet approved your application by sending them an email through the Mail tab
• If you have repeat site traffic or an opt-in email list, look for areas for improvement in your content and update it or replace with new content as needed

Monthly
Choose one day per month to accomplish the following tasks.

• After 30 days of partnership with an advertiser that is converting well for you, request the addition of a performance incentive to your current commission
• Review the EPC of each of the advertisers and ads you’re using to find out if they’re trending up or down in the network
• If the EPC of one of your advertiser partners is trending down significantly or they are not converting well for you, try one more promotion, in a top selling location or a special email promotion before pulling their ads
• Update your program description to account for any changes to your promotional methods, and reflect any positive changes to your site, audience, traffic volume, etc.
• Between the 15th and 19th of the month run a Transaction Report for the previous month to get an accurate accounting for any batch transactions or extended transactions that have been added to your account
• Find out if any of your advertisers are extending or reversing a large number of transactions that you are spending marketing dollars or top inventory on and determine if you need to contact the advertiser or pull their ads

Quarterly
Choose one day a few weeks before the next quarter to accomplish the following tasks.

• Determine what product-related events or holidays are coming up and begin planning and working on content for additional site pages, mini sites, emails, and search marketing promotions; allow two months of preparation before major retail opportunities
• Contact advertiser partners to request content and custom or seasonal ads you may need for the quarter
• Contact top ten advertiser partners that generate strongest revenue with you and discuss how you can work together better, what content you could use, commission rate, etc.
• Review reporting for the previous three months and look for additional opportunities to promote successful offers or to expand your site or emails to capitalize on your successes
• Review your account information and ensure it is correct, including bank information for direct deposit or mailing address for checks, and your email address