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.”

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.”

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.”

Like writing compelling ads and email messages, the first key to getting your proposal read is to come up with a terrific headline that will compel the prospective affiliate to open up your proposal and read it.

You definitely want to write a headline that is compelling and stands out from the crowd of emails that is likely in your prospective afiliate’s inbox.  Utilizing any swipe files and ebooks you have on compelling headlines would certainly help you create an appropriately compelling headline.

Without that compelling headline, you have virtually no chance of getting that prospect to open your email and begin reading your proposal, so just like a sales letter, writing a compelling proposal with a poor headline will be virtually a waste of your time, so focus on that headline first.

After you’ve come up with several compelling headlines, then you can focus on the rest of the proposal.  In it, you should tell why his/her promoting of your products would be great for him/her and his/her subscribers and why your affiliate program is one program they cannot afford to pass up on joining.  You’ll have to promise big benefits and opportunities in order to get them to successfully join and then deliver on those promises, and more, to successfully keep them.

For more information on sites you can check out to help you write compelling headlines and more information you need to include in your proposal, check out “Managing Your Affiliates.”

This means that you need to be committed to your affiliates for the long-term, not just for your current product launch.  After all, you’re not likely going to get rich enough to retire from one product launch, so to gain more substantial profits in the future, you need to enlist the abilities of your affiliates for all future product launches as well.  In addition, it’s quite easy for affiliates to jump from one affiliate program to the next, promoting another Internet marketer’s products.

Therefore, it is essential that you keep your affiliate program top-notch and up-to-date, as well as ensure you have a good working relationship with your affiliates.  This includes being courteous to them, answering any questions they may have, assisting them whenever possible, and making it as easy and as profitable as possible the task of promoting and selling your products.

The more positive relationships you can develop with your affiliates, the harder they will work for you and the more profits they will bring in for you.  Additionally, they may also put in good words with friends of theirs, who are likely affiliates for other Internet marketers.  If they find out that your affiliate program is a quality program and that you appreciate all the hard work your affiliates do by presenting them with bonuses, gifts, advice, and encouragement, chances are that you will gain new affiliates without actively searching for them.

The old saying goes, “Relationships open up opportunities,” and that goes the same for recruiting affiliates as well.

For more information on increasing the size of your affiliate sales force, read “Managing Your Affiliates.”

Just like with buying a product from a new Internet marketer who you’ve never heard of before, it’s likely most people will be overly cautious when hearing about your affiliate program, since they are not familiar with who you are and what your products are all about.

It would be helpful if you had some publicity about your reputation and ability to deliver quality products in the past.  This would include some publicity on forums and blogs that relate to your industry and target market.  Additionally, if more prominent Internet marketers are willing to vouch for your reputation and the quality of your products, it will likely be easier to obtain quality affiliates.

Therefore, before you begin promoting that you have an affiliate program, it would be wise to spend some time building a quality reputation and delivering quality products over a period of time so that you are not so “brand new” out there that most affiliates don’t just ignore you or overlook you because they are concerned over your lack of experience or their lack of information about the type of business you are running and the quality of products you are delivering.  Essentially, you need to have a bit of a track record before you begin your own affiliate program to have the best chance of recruiting the best affiliates available.  Just “coming out of the clear blue sky” will likely not net you any quality affiliates who can boost your profits.

For more information on building a quality affiliate program and recruiting top-performing affiliates to it, check out “Managing Your Affiliates.”

Acting with a superior attitude to potential affiliates, including acting like they should be grateful for you asking them to join your affiliate program, is NOT the way to get prospective affiliates to join you.  Affiliates will not care about your reputation or your perceived reputation; they’re going to join an affiliate program that will benefit them and their lists, including whether it can make them a good amount of money for a fair amount, but not an overabundance, of work.

Presenting a superior offer and showing genuine interest in their abilities and their sites is a much more effective way to get them to join you.  After all, no one likes to be talked down to, and the top-performing affiliates you want to recruit into your affiliate program have many offers to join several affiliate programs.  The problem is, they only have time for so many – the question is, will your affiliate program be one of the few they join or not?

The answer to that question will be determined by whether you can present an attractive-enough offer to entice them to join your affiliate program, as well as whether you can clearly express why joining forces to promote your products will be beneficial for them and their subscribers.

For inside information on how to properly formulate your offer and proposal, read “Managing Your Affiliates.”

Preferably, you want to find affiliates who have large lists and who have experience and/or have the ability to learn and apply proven affiliate marketing techniques so that more of your products are sold and so that your profits will increase.  Finding these top-performing or super affiliates can be done in a logical manner, not just by getting “lucky.”

Some marketers think that only a select few get “lucky” enough to find the super affiliates and add them to his/her affiliate sales force.  If this is the way you are thinking it works, then you will likely always have to resort to picking up any kind of affiliate you can find, and the ones you will find will mostly either not know how to market effectively online and/or will not have the persistence to learn and apply good affiliate marketing techniques online, thereby adding little to no extra profit to your business.

There are legitimate ways to find those super or top-performing affiliates if you know where to look and know how to approach them.  This is how other Internet marketers successfully recruit top-performing affiliates into their affiliate programs and how they substantially boost their profits and live that lifestyle that many dream about.

If you want to find out how marketers can routinely gain those super affiliates and substantially boost their profits, check out “Managing Your Affiliates.”

For instance, if you see that the affiliates are being offered a 60% commission rate for each sale they make, you could offer a 70% commission rate for each sale of your product.  That would be one tweak you could make.

Another tweak can involve whether the marketer is giving his/her affiliates special bonuses for selling a specific number of products within a certain time period.  If there are no added incentives for selling that marketer’s products, adding incentives to your affiliate program is another positive improvement you can make.

Additionally, if the marketer is not giving special offers to the subscribers of his/her affiliates, providing special offers to your affiliates can be another way you can make your affiliate program better and a compelling reason why this marketer’s affiliates would be willing to promote your products instead.

Essentially, you should gain access to your competitor’s affiliate programs and figure out the key components that make that affiliate program work, then improve upon them so that those same affiliates will find your affiliate program more attractive and be willing to promote your products instead.

For more information on making your affiliate program a more attractive choice for affiliates, especially for top-performing affiliates, check out “Managing Your Affiliates.”

Offering a high commission rate is one way to begin an appropriate proposal.  It almost certainly has to be over 50% though, as virtually every affiliate program offers at least 50%.  To further accentuate how much you value the Internet marketer’s involvement in your affiliate program, you should be willing to give him/her a higher percentage than your regular affiliates.  If you offer your regular affiliates 60%, you might consider giving the Internet marketer 75% or even 80% from each sale made.

You should also be willing to provide special bonuses that only his/her customers can receive for ordering through his/her link – this will help to encourage the marketer’s subscribers to purchase your product, thereby giving him/her more profit, which will make the marketer all that more eager to promote your product to his/her list.

However, the perks you give to this Internet marketer may not end when your product’s popularity starts declining.  Being that the marketer likely develops new products from time to time, he/she may require or request that you return the favor and promote his/her product to your subscribers.  Of course, you should confirm that this product is of high quality before committing to present it to your subscribers, but you should certainly be willing to entertain that possibility – it’s much like ezine advertising where one publisher will present another marketer’s ads in his/her newsletter to his/her subscribers in return for the other marketer presenting the first marketer’s offer in his/her newsletter to his/her subscribers.  It’s definitely a give-and-take situation, but can be well-worth it to add a potential super affiliate to your affiliate sales force and increase your profits.

For more information on recruiting top-performing affiliates into your affiliate program, check out “Managing Your Affiliates.”

Even those Internet marketers who prefer to sell their own products likely recommend other people’s products from time to time – that’s also why joint ventures are highly-valued and often seen in the Internet marketing community today.

Therefore, it makes sense to consider those Internet marketers who are selling their own products in niches similar to yours as being possible super affiliates as well.  While they may not rely on affiliate marketing as their main means of income, they almost certainly promote other people’s products from time to time.  Therefore, if you present a convincing enough proposal that your product will be highly-valued by that Internet marketer’s list, it’s likely that Internet marketer will be willing to promote your product to his/her list, likely resulting in a high number of sales for you.

Finding the Internet marketers in your industry who have large subscriber lists aren’t always easy to find, but there are methods you can utilize, particularly in regards to ClickBank and the search engines.

To find out more on how to use ClickBank and the search engines to find Internet marketers with large lists and catering to your target market, check out “Managing Your Affiliates.”

Additionally, though, you need to find out more about them, their sites, how they go about earning those commissions (i.e. do they like to promote high-priced items or low-priced items, what kinds of niche markets do they like to work in, etc.)  This can help you greatly in convincing them to join your affiliate sales force.

After all, just like a person who is interviewing to be hired by a company, it makes sense to find out as much about this potential affiliate as you can – after all, if this affiliate wouldn’t be a good fit for your products and your company, you’ll just be wasting your time (and his/hers as well) in recruiting him or her to join your affiliate program.  You want to add affiliates who will be beneficial to your affiliate program and to your profits, and that can only happen if they have experience and passion in selling products that relate to your niche market.  Otherwise, they will likely not be productive affiliates for you.

Plus, if you can mention certain aspects of the affiliate or the affiliate’s website(s) in your proposal, this will convince the affiliate that you actually took the time and interest to check them out and see that they were a good fit for your company and not just seek them out because they are a top-performing affiliate or because you happened to see or hear about them from some forum or blog.

For more information on how to find the best affiliates for your affiliate program, consult “Managing Your Affiliates.”