Being innovative with motivating your affiliate base is key to motivating more affiliates to become producers.
Advertisers still aren’t doing a good enough job at managing and working with the affiliates on the grass-roots level. Too many companies focus on the big affiliates and don’t give a crap about the little guys, which is where the broad-base of sales volume can come from. We do very intense affiliate management and I can tell you that I hear all the time no one reaches out to the affiliates to really help them. More free tools and techniques should be provided.

Advertisers should be investing money and resources into growing their affiliate programs, instead of focusing on possible lost sales. Advertisers should make it as lucrative as possible for affiliates in order to inspire them to producer more. The big networks have never really catered to affiliates which is why affiliate marketing isn’t actually bigger than it is now. They want to fucus on creating publishers out of web properties which is good, but they have historically have neglected smaller-time publishers.

No you can’t just use one search affiliate and go from there because other affiliates will find out and want in, its a bad strategy.

CEOs always want more performance-based revenue but they usually aren’t willing to payout more, work to increase site conversions, liveralize their search policies, or doing other things that can increase affiliate production. Especially in this current economy, more needs to be done to grow affiliate programs. I love it how company just expect their affiliate channels to grow on their own or with lame management.