Attracting Power Affiliates
©Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.
In amongst all the little things, there are 5 Key elements you must have in place when trying to recruit power affiliates and super affiliates. While finding and retaining these sales-generating machines is not rocket science, it’s easy to overlook some aspects if you’re new to managing an affiliate program. Here’s an affiliate marketing program manager primer to help you in your efforts to attract power affiliates and super-affiliates to your affiliate program…
High quality affiliates and web masters are now very discerning and fussy about the websites and products they affiliate with. These top quality super-affiliates can significantly publicize the merchant’s website, create a flood of traffic to the website and generate a lot of sales for the merchant. Many affiliate managers pay particular attention to what super-affiliates want and provide them just that and more, otherwise they will leave your program, join your competitors and drive traffic to your competitor’s products!
Although building a stable of affiliates appears to be an easy and low-cost way to generate sales, in reality more attention to details of the affiliate program is important if you want affiliates to sign up and grow to super affiliates who generate loads of sales for you. The key to recruit and retain affiliates who will explode your sales is to have an affiliate program that gives affiliates what they want so that they are highly motivated to generate many sales and increase your profits as well as earn large affiliate cheques themselves!
Here are the important essentials that super affiliates want from an affiliate program:
- A high quality product, a professional well-laid-out website that converts and a company with good reputation and ethical business practices. Affiliates want to promote first-rate products or services which they can be proud to be associated with and can recommend to their lists and prospects. Affiliates invest their time and money to drive traffic to the merchant’s website. It is therefore very important that the merchant’s website and sales copy converts well. Affiliates with good websites work hard to keep their content unique and fresh so they can draw visitors, and they want the merchant’s website where they will drive some of their traffic to be worthwhile with appealing products or services. Affiliates want to be associated with a reliable company that will provide or deliver the products purchased by the buyers and pay its affiliates their commissions.
- An attractive payment structure, residual commissions, punctual payments and payment options. Your affiliates are in business as much as you the merchant are in business. After they have done their work and bring in sales, reward them generously and quickly! There are many payment structures and options which your affiliate program can use. Payments per click, paying a fixed amount per sale, or paying a specified percentage of the sale are some of the options you can choose from. Make sure that the payment structure you use is suitable to the products you are selling so that you make it worthwhile and appealing from the affiliate’s point of view. The main attraction of affiliate marketing is the opportunity to earn passive residual income. To make your affiliate program even more attractive, try to provide some form of residual commissions. Having an online business means that you will have affiliates from many parts of the world. You the merchant must ensure that you provide payment options that can suit all your affiliates. Be generous and remember that if it were not for your affiliates, it would take you a lot of time, effort and money to bring in half as many sales as your affiliates can generate collectively.
- Promotional materials. Your affiliate program is your main promotional tool and you must invest in it by providing all the necessary promotional tools which your affiliates will use to bring in sales. Some of the marketing tools that you must consider providing are banners, codes, PLR articles, solo ads, classified ads and many others. All your affiliates will need to do is to personalize and customize these, and they are ready to drive traffic to your site!
- Accurate tracking and reporting of the affiliate sales statistics. This is very important because affiliates don’t want to feel cheated out of their efforts, and they want to keep a close eye on their commission earnings as well as assess whether their advertising efforts are brining in the results they want. Most affiliates and all super affiliates are savvy internet marketers, and they know that most people whom they direct to your website do not purchase immediately. Many people will buy the product or service after it has been advertised to them several times. A merchant must therefore have a good cookie tracking device so that affiliates are rewarded accordingly and get credit for all sales from people they’ve referred to your website.
- Affiliates also want true partnership and communication. It is important for the merchant to regularly communicate with his or her affiliates. If there are any problems, let your affiliate know as soon as possible. If your affiliates have questions, answer them promptly. If you take your affiliate program seriously, it is worthwhile to have a newsletter where you can keep in touch with all your affiliates on a regular basis. Use the newsletter to announce any up-coming products or special offers as well as motivate them. Ask your affiliates about what they would like to have from you (the merchant) so that they bring in as many sales as possible!
Prospective affiliates know what they want – and they expect the above and more from an affiliate program – Supoer affiliates will demand them or promote for your competitors instead. Never lose track of the fact that there are an awful lot more products than there are good affiliates, and super-affiliates are that much rarer still. The difference between success and failure, especially at a launch, can often come down to one or two super-affiliates pushing your launch. Not only do they sell a lot of units themselves, but many aspiring super-affiliates only promote the products they see the big-dogs pushing.
Do yourself a major favour – be sure you’ve got everything in place before you approach potential super-affiliate JV partners, then double-check with them to make sure there’s nothing you’ve forgotten. Then sit back and count the sales as they roll in!
=============================================
Doug Champigny walks both sides of the affiliate marketing road – as a well-known super-affiliate and as the co-operator of the affiliate program for all of the ChampignyWeb web sites. Learn more from Doug at his Internet Marketing Blog and through his daily Marketing Domination E-Zine.
=============================================
Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliates, super affiliates, Doug Champigny, Marketing BlogZine
Stumble it!
