Affiliate levels
It’s important to keep in mind that your affiliates will be at various levels of marketing experience and have varying levels of marketing knowledge. Not all of them are top-performing affiliates when they join you.
However, this should not discourage you from accepting all of them into your affiliate sales force. After all, every affiliate, even the super affiliates, started from the same level: A low-level, inexperienced, regular affiliate who didn’t know how to sell anything.
Your challenge is to try to get all your affiliates to become top-performing affiliates. It can be done, but you need to be committed to them and provide them with the proper training and resources, as well as some patience, in order to have the best chance of doing this.
That is why having a forum or blog where affiliates can ask you questions when they need help would be very beneficial in helping you train your affiliates. Providing pre-made email advertisements, banner ads, and other promotional advertisements that all of your affiliates can use can also greatly enhance your affiliates’ ability to earn from your products. Once they get the taste of making profit online, this may encourage them to learn more strategies on their own to help sell more of your products, and in the process, boost their abilities as an affiliate.
Conversely, you can also provide some training guides to help your affiliates learn effective affiliate marketing techniques – this can also be an effective way to teach your affiliates how to market your products. However, you need to keep in mind that your affiliates will be of different skill levels, so what one affiliate might consider a useful guide may be considered boring and useless by another affiliate.
To learn how to overcome this problem, as well as learn other strategies to help boost the capabilities of your affiliates, check out “Managing Your Affiliates.”
Keeping your affiliates enthused
To make your affiliates happy and productive, you sometimes have to be willing to sacrifice your short-term profit. It may seem counterproductive to your goal of obtaining the most profit, but giving up a little profit can go a long way toward enhancing your ability to make substantial long-term profits.
For instance, one idea you may want to consider implementing for your affiliates is to allow them to add a one-time offer of their choice to your product offer page for a specific time period – if they can successfully sell your product, they’ll be able to show their one-time offer and have a chance to make additional profit.
Another idea you could try is to allow your affiliates to earn 100% commission from your product for a specific time period, but in return, a one-time offer of your choosing will be added onto the product offer; if the one-time offer is successfully sold, then the affiliates will only receive a percentage of that sale (say 50% or so).
Essentially, you need to come up with creative ideas to keep your affiliates happy and productive. After all, selling someone else’s products the exact same way for the exact same commissions all the time can get pretty boring, and boredom can lead to unproductive affiliates, and even lead to affiliates leaving your affiliate program for another, more exciting and profitable opportunity.
Therefore, never allow your affiliates to get bored – challenge them with new, creative contests to see who can win these contests. And, of course, the more they’re able to sell, the more profit you’ll gain in the long-term.
For more information on keeping your affiliates enthused and eager to sell your products, read “Managing Your Affiliates.”
Value what your affiliates do
While focusing on recruiting top-performing affiliates into your affiliate program is vitally important to boosting your profits to new levels, this does not mean you should not care about your smaller affiliates. Even one extra sale from a small affiliate is one more sale than you would have made on your own.
Therefore, you should always respect and value highly all of your affiliates and the work that they do. You should never ignore any of your affiliates, even if they don’t provide as many sales as your more established and top-performing affiliates.
If there are specific affiliates who never earn enough to take home the bonus awards you give out to those who make the most sales during a certain time period, you could compensate for that by rewarding your affiliates with lower-valued gifts, such as gift cards or a smaller monetary amount. In fact, you could run two affiliate contests – one for the “big earners,” or top-performing affiliates, and one for the “smaller guys,” or your regular affiliates.
This way, everyone will have a realistic chance of earning a bonus. Of course, the bonuses for the regular affiliates should be smaller than the bonuses you provide to your super affiliates, but should still be substantial enough for them to try their hardest to produce the highest number of sales within that specific time period.
While this will cost extra money for you, you will also show that ALL of your affiliates matter and that you appreciate all of them, even those who aren’t super affiliates.
For more information on keeping your affiliates happy and productive, read “Managing Your Affiliates.”
