Marketing your products and services alone can become expensive and overwhelming, but with some products and even services you can create an affiliate program that will springboard your sales to the next level.
First, if you’re not sure yet what an affiliate program is – essentially you attract people who want to earn money within your niche promoting your products and/or services to their audience for a percentage of sales. Usually, this process is run using affiliate management software such as aMember, 1shoppingcart, ClickBank, eJunkie, or the multitude of others depending on your products, goals and the amount of control you need to have over your affiliates.
Ingredients of a Good Affiliate Program
A good affiliate program will work better if it provides:
* Regular communication – Set up an email list just for your affiliates so that they can communicate with you and you with them.
* Awesome marketing materials – Supply your affiliates with graphics, banners, and easy-to-use marketing materials that they can be proud to use.
* Brandable content – One of the hardest parts of marketing a product is coming up with content to market it. Provide content that your affiliates can rewrite and rebrand for their audience easily and quickly.
* Excusive webinars – Allow affiliates with a certain number of sales to plan an exclusive webinar that you’ll attend to help promote your products, speaking directly to their audience.
* Specialized training – Some affiliates need extra help learning how to market products and if you offer them that, they’re going to be more likely to market yours.
* Incentive discounts – Your affiliates can be great sources of customers too. If you offer exclusive discounts that they can either take themselves or pass on to their customers, you’ll encourage more sales.
* Creative marketing collateral – Not only should you offer the basic marketing collateral but you also want to consider being more creative. Offer video, product training, infographics, easily customizable graphics and more.
* Easy-to-use technology – One of the most important choices when starting an affiliate program is the choice of technology. Choose wisely based on the functions you want to have for both your affiliates and your customers.
If your affiliate program provides all that to your affiliates, then you’ll have an easier time attracting good affiliates. But, the real key to a supercharged affiliate program is attracting affiliate programs.
Attracting Affiliate Programs
To attract super-affiliates you’ll need:
* Top-notch products
* Customer-centric service
* Continual creation of new products
* Excellent follow-up
* Lifetime cookies
* High payout
* Fast payouts
* Fair policies
If you provide these things, you’ll be able to have an affiliate program that truly springboards your sales to the next level because you’ll have more people out there talking about your products. Having affiliates, in many ways, is like duplicating yourself. Since you don’t pay affiliates unless they have made sales, affiliate programs are relatively low cost and the incentives to sell are built right into your affiliate program.