Foreword Word of mouth. Referrals. Pay for performance. There is hardly anyone who isn't in favor of making money on the efforts of others. This is the basis for affiliate marketing. However, it isn't as easy as it sounds. Affiliate marketing requires solid planning and smart work to yield the optimal results. Amazon.com, which captures approximately 25 cents of every ecommerce dol- lar in the United States, is the poster child for affiliate marketing, with well over a mil- lion affiliates. Amazon.com developed a program that made it easy for people to share the products they enjoyed, recommend their network to that product, and direct that traffic to the Amazon.com website, where those people would buy the product and the affiliate would get paid for sharing. You may not become the next Amazon.com, but plenty of others are making a lot of money from affiliate marketing. In a June 2010 Harris Interactive poll, when asked what sources "influence your decision to use or not use a particular company, brand, or product," 71 percent claim reviews from family members or friends exert a "great deal" or "fair amount" of influ- ence. Fifty-three percent of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their tweets, with 48 percent of them delivering on their intention to buy the product, according to the ROI Research for Performance from June 2010. And according to a 2009 Manage Smarter report, 83 percent of online shoppers said they are interested in sharing information about their purchases with people they know, while 74 percent are influenced by the opinions of others in their decision to buy the product in the first place. Do you have a plan in place to take advantage of these trends? Don't worry. Geno Prussakov will give it to you in Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day. I've known Geno for years, and he eats and breathes affiliate marketing day and night. Geno was voted the "Best Outsourced Program Manager of the Year" for three years in a row (2006, 2007, and 2008) by the largest online affiliate marketing com- munity, ABestWeb.com. His blog was voted the top affiliate marketing blog in 2010. Follow Geno's plan to understand what it takes to develop a program that affili- ates want to participate in, no matter what your competitors may be doing in the same space. Learn how to recruit affiliates who will bring you oodles of traffic, how do develop creative and persuasive communications that keep them motivated, and how to give your affiliates the tools they need to maximize their efforts. You'll also learn how to spot what you are doing well so you can keep doing more of it, and you'll learn how to avoid the costly mistakes that most merchants with affiliate programs make. Trust me, invest an hour a day in Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day before your competitors do. b ryAn e isenberG New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, Call to Action, and Always Be Testing, as well as popular speaker xxvii F O R E WO R D