Keeping your product’s affiliates motivated is the biggest challenge you face while running your own affiliate program. While many people may sign up for your affiliate program, a good number of these will not aggressively promote your product, no matter what you do to motivate them.
There are those however, who sign up and follow through, with a goal of becoming successful. These are the affiliates that require your attention, and you must work to keep them motivated.
Provide Affiliate Marketing Tools
In order to help your affiliates sell your product effectively, you should have ready, all the necessary tools to successfully promote your program. Provide them with banners, ads, sales letters, ebooks they can re-brand with their affiliate links, and articles that they can re-brand as well. If your affiliates are an army of sales people willing to go to battle with other products and win customers, you need to give them the right bullets and ammo to go to war with.
Provide Information and Training
Give them information they need that ensures their success, teach them how to really market online. These materials that enhance your affiliates selling skills can be in the form of ebooks, audio or even video tutorials. Several product owners spend much for support videos and training videos that affiliates can access. If you do not want to spend for these videos, you can simply do it yourself by giving them step by step guides using screen video capture software like Camtasia.
Communicate
Always be in constant contact with your affiliates. Send them newsletters that suggest new ways to promote the product. Provide them with marketing related content that they can use. Update them on new marketing tools, creatives, and new promotions such as sale prices and bonuses.
Incentives
Once in a while, come up with contests, giving the affiliate who makes the most sales in a given period of time a worthwhile prize. The more valuable the prize, the harder the affiliates will work at promoting your product. In fact many product owners simply just give out cash like this affiliate program for a new product, where the owner is giving $1,000 on top of commissions earned. That is for a product called One Minute Sites.
Send personal notes to those affiliates who are giving you the highest sales; recognize these people in your newsletter. When high sales are being made, it means the affiliate really knows what they are doing, and they may have tips or ideas to offer to other affiliates.
Likewise, when you have an affiliate who is obviously trying, but not making many sales, contact them personally to give them tips and advice. Help your affiliate be successful, for their success is actually your success too.
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June 17th, 2008 at 4:20 am
This is very important, when dealing with affiliates, you want to provide them with as much promo tools as possible, making it easier for them to promote your products.
The easier you make it for your affiliates the more they will promote your, meaning more commissions for you.