How to Turn Affiliates into Marketing Powerhouses

One of the very best ways to market online is to create a legion of loyal cheerleaders and fans, who at your command tell everyone they know about your products, services, sales, and information. Word-of-mouth marketing has always been the very best form of marketing and creates better and longer-term relationships with customers. Keeping customers long term saves money. Here’s how to get affiliates to help you with your marketing.

* Use Well-Known Affiliate Tracking Software – If you use unknown affiliate management software, you may have trouble getting strong affiliates to sign up to promote your products and services. Currently aMember.com and 1ShoppingCart.com are very popular systems. Don’t try to get by with a free program because you won’t be taken seriously.

* Provide an Excellent Product – Super affiliates aren’t going to promote a poor product because they are marketing things to people that trust them. They are seen as experts in their niche and promoting a problematic product will make them look bad.

* Give at Least 50% Commission – This is especially important if your product is low cost. It takes work to promote products so it needs to be worth their time. It needs to earn them enough to entice them to promote your product. Also, ditch the minimum sales; pay your affiliates for every sale in a reasonable amount of time.

* Offer True Lifetime Cookies – One poor habit of those who want affiliates is not offering true lifetime cookies. That means that once they attract the lead to click through, they will always get the credit for sales from that lead.

* Provide Top-Notch Tools – Graphics, content, reviews, and more should be available to your affiliates so that they can promote your products as quickly as possible. They shouldn’t be charged with creating graphics as well as promoting. Give them all the tools they need and they’ll work harder for you.

* Have Contests with Prizes – Encourage your affiliates to make more sales by offering prizes and having contents where you share the leaderboard and who is doing best during the time of the contest. Offering prizes like iPads if the market is right is a good incentive to most affiliates.

* Provide Excellent Customer Service – If someone buys the product and has issues, it’s important to address those issues right away. Word gets around if you have a bad reputation about not taking care of your customers.

* Provide Product Information and Training – You can use videos, PDF files and more to provide product information and training to affiliates so that they can use the information to market to their audience better.

* Offer Affiliate-Only Webinars and Calls – Affiliates really appreciate the opportunity to talk to product creators. What’s really great is that you can get more feedback about the product and what their customers think about their recommendations. Plus you can use the feedback to help you make your affiliate program more effective.

Finally, be sure to pay your affiliates on a regular basis. It’s reasonable to wait to pay until after potential returns go through, but it’s not reasonable to hold a certain amount of money to require payments. Affiliates will work harder when they’re seeing results. If you want your affiliate marketers to be marketing powerhouses, treat them well.

In case you're curious, I started working online in 1997 - in the dinosaur days of the internet. My purpose here at HomeFreeMedia is to help YOU build the business of your dreams by developing and recommending top quality products and tools. This will also result in profit and affiliate commissions for me, so we both win!
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