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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.

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Sell It Like A Product

Still concentrating on the selling aspect of getting your affiliates, we need to plug some more gaps. Mistakes, mistakes everywhere, it’s not easy to sign up for some affiliate programs even if you wanted to. Don’t be one of those people. They’re losing thousands and they probably don’t even know it. So here’s another little tip for you. Sell your affiliate program.

If I click on your ‘Affiliates’ button on your website, I don’t want to be presented with a form that asks for my details. I see this all too often. Write a mini sales letter that explains some things to the potential affiliate. Information you must include can be as basic as how much they’ll earn on how many levels, and for how long, and any bonuses they may get for a particular amount of sales in any given time, and of course, how often you pay out.

Once you’ve got the basics down you can start getting a little more complex and bringing out your tracking figures if you have any. I’d be happy about an affiliate program that pays me $500 per sale, but I’d be even happier with an affiliate program that pays me $500 per sale when the sales letter has been proven to have a targeted click through to sales ratio. It’s like the creation of your sales letters. Eliminate risk, and build confidence in your product, only this time around, your affiliate program is your product.

Don’t Hide It

On a similar note, one more little tip I’d like to give you before moving on is to not hide any information in terms and conditions. Sure put up a terms and conditions, but don’t small print any of the important information and leave it out of your sales letter. After all, these people signing up to your affiliate program aren’t people you want to annoy in any way. They’re going to provide a good chunk of the backbone of your business in the future. Again, like your list, and like your previous customers who will buy from you again and again, these affiliates are at least as important as looking after them. Ok moving on now.

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Big Mistake 2 - Dead Ends

Next up, we’re going to look at the final part of the actual set up of the affiliate program. It’s something that’s really important and fundamental in online business, not just for affiliate programs, and that’s to link it up, and give your customers a path to follow. Ok that might sound amateurish and maybe a little patronizing, so my apologies for that, however the other day I was browsing around checking out the competition and what they’re up to related to my next product, and what I found was many of them, both in their sales letter (if there was one) and in their affiliate signup pages, they dead ended me.

What I mean by that is, I go to signup for their affiliate program, and they have this great sales page that tells me how much I’m going to earn per sale, a really nice bonus scheme for top affiliates etc, and I got to the bottom of the page, and guess what I found? Well, not much actually. They sold me on this affiliate program, but the page just ended. No click here to sign up, no nothing.

Now that’s an extreme example I have to admit, but lets be honest here, if you’re seriously getting into affiliate marketing you can’t afford to do that. If you have an affiliate’s button that leads to a page that explains a little about your affiliate program, try to fit the form in at the base of the page, or at least have a click here to sign up. Granted, normally I wouldn’t have mentioned this, but looking around it’s definitely worth it. So never forget, a nav bar is good, but you have to show the customer where to go, with click here’s, or forms that tell the story for themselves. You’re still selling yourself here, and getting the all-important affiliates can be more profitable than making the sale yourself. Don’t overlook small things such as this, pick through your setup with a fine toothcomb and make sure no page has a dead end anywhere…

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