Designing An Affiliate Program To Attract Lots Of Affiliates

You spent a lot of time and money setting up your online presence. But if you don't take advantage of affiliate programs then you are not optimizing your investment. With today's 3rd party management companies there is really no reason not to offer a state of the art program. They make it so easy. Imagine loads of people and web sites saying beautiful things about your products and your company. You'd pay them if they brought you real paying customers, right? One thing for certain, your competitors are. So you need to get with the times and set up some affiliate marketing.

The number one thing affiliates want to have is a product that sells like hotcakes. If you have a great product then you will attract a ton of affiliates. If your product sucks you will only get low quality of non-performing affiliates. For each sale an affiliate makes you should reward them well. Probably want to be a little overly generous here. If they make a lot they will promote you more; and that leads to even more free traffic and sales for you. Give them lots of banners they can use to advertise your product. And don't just pick one or two sizes; give them 10 different sizes. Spend a few hundred on banner designers and give your affiliates lots to work with. Lastly, be sure and pay them on time. Nothing motivates affiliates more than a regular paycheck every month.

When setting up your program you have to decide if you want one tier or multi-tier. A multi-tier program will help you sign up more affiliates (the top tier earns a commission on whatever the second tier gets paid). It's a good idea but don't go nuts with the number of tiers or it starts to look like a pyramid scheme (many directories will only allow 2-tier or 1-tier programs). You have to figure out if you want to pay per-sale, per-lead, recurring (for subscription products), or a % of sales on everything. You'll also need to promote your affiliate program by posting it in places that affiliates hang out (ABestWeb AssociatePrograms are two of them). And if you don't want to set up and manage the program personally then use a third party provider like ShareASale or LinkShare who make the whole process as simple as can be.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to treat your affiliates like people. How would you want to be treated? You'd want to receive your paycheck regularly, and get occasional emails so you know the merchant knows you exist. You'd also like to receive new graphics from time to time that you could use to promote the merchant's products.

Having an affiliate program is crucial for merchants selling on the Internet. Amazon was one of the first and they have executed their plan amazingly well. Today they have 10s of thousands of affiliates sending them new customers. Imagine one thousand other sites all giving positive reviews and promoting your products and company. It can happen with a good affiliate program.

By: Mike Scanlin

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To sign up for a good investment affiliate program, please take a look at Born To Sell's web site.