Ditto! James, thanks for this blog! As an affiliate manager, I wonder that all the time. Would it be good to provide top of the line dental floss? Truthfully, I do know one reason is to actually be able to speak to a LIVE person when there is a problem or when there are questions, but I know there are many other reasons....

I personally prefer a program that has lots of reporting capabilities that can enable me to better track my efforts.

Insureme's affiliate program is already really good. You have co-branding , fast reliable payments and tracking. Your affiliate managers are good at communication, etc. The blog is really helpful. To add some more suggestions... periodic contests for each level of affiliate instead of an overall top 2 contest. Other programs occasionally have gifts for top affiliates. Some of my advertisers also have in-house people to assist affiliates in landing page/ template design. These are just a few things that I could think of at the moment. You guys are still doing a great job though!

Great comments so far everyone! Thanks for taking the time and please keep them coming.

As our COO likes to say, "together we are better." :)

I think your program has most of the tools an affiliate would need, but...
Some programs let you earn points that you can trade in for prizes. That's kind of fun, and I could start planning for the next holiday season now! :)

As an affiliate I have to rely on the advertiser to provide the creatives. I really prefer to work with advertisers that provide many different, and useful, graphical advertisements. I always want a greater variety: messages, illustrations, formats, color schemes etc. In my best affiliate dream I get a DIY banner kit with lots of great images that I can use to build my own unique creatives while still adhering to the advertiser's guidelines.

In many affiliate agreements, I am prohibited from using more content from the advertiser's own site than provided in the form of advertisements. I don't understand why so few advertisers at least provide a free image library for affiliates - photos, charts, anything that adds value to a presentation of the product - and perhaps something extra like a few Flash movies, an online calculator of some kind, something downloadable (if only just an eBook or a self-estimation form).

But my real number one is campaigns. I really love it when advertisers run periodic campaigns with unique creatives that I can honestly place under "special offers". This makes me spend much more time on an advertiser, even if it's just "get $5 off when you buy two or more before March 1".

And one more thing I'm sure you've already thought of. You don't reward us for sending affiliates to you. I think a system to reward us for sending affiliates that produce would be great. I participate in a program that rewards us with a small percentage of earnings of affiliates we recruit. It is an incentive to recruit productive affiliates, and also to help them to get started (which would take some work off of you).

Oh, and a few more... Come up with online insurance tools/ calculators such as a life insurance needs calculator that we can link to either on your site or allow us to add them to ours. We could have our affiliate ID somehow attached to the use of these tools. Also, "deep linking" to content on the Insureme site while allowing us to pass our Aff. ID's would also be really nice.

Sorry.. one more thought. An idea I had once was to allow affiliates to be "co-publishers" for InsureMe by allowing us to add informative insurance related content to InsureMe's site (..after editorial review and approval of course.. ) while allowing the affiliate to somehow get credit for those visitors that come to these pages and then proceed to get a quote. It could add to the depth of your site and search engine SEO reach as well while benefiting affiliates. A "win win" situation.

WOW! What great feedback about our program. This kind of thing will really help us out as we continue to develop our programs and procedures. It’s our goal to have the best affiliate program available – so keep the comments coming.

As I'm sure you can imagine, implementation of many of these ideas will take some time...but I can certainly see some merit in all of them.

You guys/gals rock!

If it means anything, Chuck's idea about the tools was my favorite. I was actually just looking for things like an insurance or a financial calculator to add to my site. Great minds! :)