5 important things an affiliate program owner must do are outlined below. Implement them in your program and you’ll have an army of affiliates who will bring in many sales for your business.
1. Offer competitive and attractive commissions that are better than your competition. Highly rewarded affiliates are motivated to work hard and drive more traffic to the merchant’s website, and they will remain dedicated to promoting your products for many years. Pay correct commissions and pay on time!
2. High quality promotional tools. Marketing on the internet is very competitive, depending on your niche. You must provide your affiliates with marketing tools that will make generating sales easy for your affiliates. Hire a ghostwriter to write some high quality and informative private label articles which your affiliates can customize and rewrite for submitting to article directories with their affiliate links. Write some high quality solo ads or classified ads which your affiliates can modify and refer to so that they write their own ads that pull in many sales.
3. Provide real time reporting and email notifications about sales generated. This boosts your affiliate’s morale and motivates them to generate more sales. Provide cooking tracking, and offer a long duration for these cookies.
4. Continue to improve your product or service. Affiliates want to promote high quality products that have a huge demand in the market since it makes it easy for them to generate sales. Affiliates certainly don’t want to waste their time and energy promoting products that are ‘stale’ and that fail to meet the current needs of the customers.
5. Provide bonuses and commissions that match your affiliates’ performance. Offer some bonuses to your affiliates for reaching certain milestones of sales. This will motivate the whole team of your affiliates and will result in more money in the bank for you!
5 Important things an affiliate program owner must not do are outlined below. If you commit these mistakes you will fail to recruit any affiliates, and your current affiliates will leave your program and go to your competitor.
1. Don’t compete with your affiliates in the same advertising channels particularly Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. This is unfair because you the merchant may have more capital outlay for advertising than your affiliates. This could discourage your affiliates. Competing with your affiliates in PPC may result in the merchant and his affiliates driving each other’s advertising costs.
2. Don’t under-pay your affiliates or cheat them in any way. Some merchants are very stingy with their affiliates and are not generous enough to their affiliates.
3. Don’t have customer management practices that could damage your reputation as a company. Affiliates want to promote products and websites that are professional and are of high integrity. If you tarnish your reputation as a merchant, you risk losing your affiliates and getting negative reviews which will make any potential affiliates avoid joining your program.
4. Don’t have a poor quality sales page that doesn’t convert. Never neglect your sales page, and keep looking for ways to improve it and make it convert better.
5. Don’t neglect your affiliates. Some merchants don’t keep in touch with their affiliates, which makes the latter feel neglected and not valued. Always communicate with your affiliates and help them when they need help. Be available by email, on a forum if you have one, or by telephone. Very quick emails or short chats with your affiliates makes a huge impact in motivating your affiliates.
Well-managed affiliate programs can bring a merchant vast amount of success. However, it takes efforts in looking after your affiliates so that they will stay in your program, remain devoted and bring many sales. Avoiding the common mistakes which merchants make will help you to grow your affiliate program.
Bio: Brent Rotto “The Bull Marketer” – 18 years as successful marketing consultant. Offering products for resale that even the novice webmaster can make money from. Website: http://newbieseproducts.com