The best partners that will bring you new customers over the next 3-5 years need invitations. You can spend months trying to figure out who they are, but Apogee already has that list ready for recruitment in new programs.

Congratulations! Your merchant account has been approved. Now what? Here's the reality of what comes next and how to increase sales with a new affiliate program.

I've published two ebooks on affiliate management and spoken at many affiliate-related conferences, giving other managers tips and tricks on how to succeed. Nine years since the first management-related blog post on this site, my goal here is to distill all that into ten commandments that all affiliate managers should follow.

This is a quick case study based on one of our Apogee clients. I want to prove to other merchants that growth is possible when the right strategy, a content-focused affiliate strategy, is put in place. I'm deliberately choosing a summer month, June, because this is the typical low point for this client. We still showed growth. Q4 numbers account for 59% of the overall sales all year. Let's see how June did.

Holiday preparation in Q3 is the key to winning Q4, and with Q3 only about a week away, the time to start thinking about it is now. Apogee is looking for a repeat of a great 2015, and we're not procrastinating.

In September 2015, I met with NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton, a man with a larger than life personality and one of the stars of a show I watched religiously in the early 1980's: That's Incredible. It was an honor to be in his presence and to listen to him talk about business and life. To say that I’m a fan is an understatement.

A quick scan of the ShareASale Top 100 PowerRank will show you a handful of programs that are on Auto Approve. It makes sense that this is possible but I'd like to share the hazards of this type of mismanagement. It's like having 32 cavities behind a pretty smile. It's not something to brag about.