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.