Get Them Promoting |

Get Them Promoting

Affiliate Management Advanced, Affiliate Marketing Training October 14th, 2008

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Get Them Promoting

Our next most important factor, and that’s what to do with your affiliates once you have some in the system as a result of your product promotion, joint ventures and a well linked site (which we talked about above). So we have our affiliates, we’ve given the relevant information already, we’ve got them to sign up, so what’s next? Getting them promoting, and keeping them promoting is what we need to get sorted.

Now there’s a lot of methods that can be used to both get affiliate promoting and keep them promoting. The problem is when deciding what’s going to be appropriate is that you can’t only do one of them. There are generally two types of affiliates, the ones who know how to sell and are going to make you money and the ones who don’t know how to sell and aren’t going to make you money. It sounds harsh, but that pretty much sums it up.

Educate Those That Don’t Have a Clue

So the first thing we should be looking at is educating those affiliates that don’t know what they’re doing, something that the people talking about low sales figures from affiliates overlook. There’s plenty of ways to do this, for example, producing your own mini-guide for them, or giving away a small training course. If you’re really stuck you could always get your hands on a mini e-book, but if you’re going to go down that road, please make sure that it actually makes sense, and wasn’t published in 2001. Education is a good way to go, because these people who come into your affiliate program, if they make their first good amount of cash with you, they’re going to love you for it, and most likely promote for you again in the future, especially if it’s your guide that taught them how to do so.

Promote When You Need Them To Promote

Next along the line you want to be thinking about little tricks, offers and promotions you can run to have your affiliates promoting for you at a particular time. There’s nothing more powerful than an army of affiliates by your side ready to promote for you, except that is, an army of affiliates by your side, ready to promote for you, that know how to promote and do so when you most want them to.

Look at things like seasonal bonuses. An extra percentage push near Christmas time is always a good performer, despite the lower visit to sales ratios in the holiday season. Remember we mentioned we’re not just after sales here? It doesn’t even have to be a special occasion. If you need more cash quickly you can always set a deadline for a month or so down the road, and offer a big bonus to the top performing affiliates or affiliates. In fact this is something that worked real well back at my old site, and was probably one of the very first affiliate offers I put out early in my online marketing career.

I offered the first affiliate to reach 50 sales a $50 bonus on top of their monthly earnings, and they seriously went for this. I had all sorts of traffic coming in from all over the place. Now be careful with this. Don’t go offering $5000 at the end of the month to your top affiliate if you’ve never tested this before. What we don’t want to happen is you having to pay 5k out to your top affiliate who was the only one to make any sales. Go about this in a smart way, and set a hard target on the number of sales or amount of earnings needed from an affiliate to earn the additional winnings. This way at least you know how much you’ll be making with a particular amount of sales and won’t make any big losses, or any losses at all for that matter.