How to get other people to promote your business

If you have been on the Internet for more than one day then the chances are you know about Affiliate Programs. Those who have missed the concept may want to start by reading the article "What is an affiliate program?" available on elsewhere on Merchant Site.

Essentially an Affiliate Program creates the opportunity for commissioned sales people to represent your products or services as non-employees.

Run effectively an Affiliate Program can generate many more sales, with a much lower up front cost, than any other form of advertising.

The key concept here, however, is "run effectively". The problem is that there are so many Affiliate Programs on the Internet that they are beginning to lose their effectiveness. What good does it do for you to have hundreds or thousands of affiliates who are not generating any sales? Unfortunately, that is the case with many merchants.

The trick to running an effective Affiliate Program is to differentiate it so much from your competitor's program that affiliates will line up for an opportunity to join. Here are some tips on exactly how to achieve that goal.

Launch your site WITHOUT an Affiliate Program.

That's right. You don't want to have an Affiliate Program when your site first launches. You need time to tweak the sales content, get the pages laid out right, get your product or service into the hands of customers, and evaluate your advertising and marketing strategies. This critical period is not the time to add the burden of managing affiliates.

In addition, if you have some serious deficiencies in your site, content, advertising, or product, you may end up alienating your affiliates and driving them away. Wait until everything is running smoothly, and you've made a few hundred sales, before adding your affiliate module. In fact, don't even mention that you are planning to have an Affiliate Program until you are ready to implement it.

Launch your Affiliate Program in stages

Start out by offering the opportunity to become an affiliate to a targeted list of site owners. Pick sites that compliment your own products without competing with them. Contact the site owners via email and explain that you are starting a "Marketing Partner" program. Don't use the word "affiliate program". That's a worn out phrase and makes you sound like everyone else. "Marketing Partner" sounds more exclusive and, in fact, it will be more exclusive if you follow the remaining tips in this article.

In this stage, don't open the doors to every web site loosely related the products that you are offering. Pick some arbitrary number, such as 25 or 50. When you contact potential affiliates explain that you are only accepting that number of marketing partners in order to maximize the potential revenue that each partner is capable of earning. Invite them to fill out an application to become a marketing partner. Explain that you will evaluate each application and select the 25 most promising partners from all that apply. Manage their disappointment, in advance, by explaining that you expect to receive hundreds of applications but that only that particular number that you choose will be able to be accepted for now.

Put a section on your partnership application form for the applicant to explain why they should be accepted. Have them point to past Affiliate Program successes and make sure that they enter the URL of the site that they will be hosting your links on. Do not select anyone, regardless of their history, that does not have their own web site or does not run a web site that you think is a good match for your product or service. The goal here is to create an air of exclusivity and, in fact, actually be exclusive. A few well-placed affiliates will sell much more than hundreds of email spammers and people with unprofessional web sites ever will.

Don't have an automatic script to process the application and instantly accept it. Send a response thanking them for their application and tell them that you, or someone from your company, will respond within x days.

Maintaining the Relationship

Before you select your first group of marketing partners, make sure that your affiliate membership control panel is ready to go. It should have been fully tested to ensure that all tracking codes work and the payment processing script should be 100% functional.

Make sure that all of your banners, text links, and articles are in place so your new partners will have a wide range of marketing collateral to choose from.

Update the materials regularly so you always have fresh marketing content available for use. This way your partners can change their message regularly, a tactic that is proven to bring in more sales.

Create Incentives

Stay in regular touch with your partners. Recognise individual successes by mentioning highly successful affiliates, by name if they agree, in your marketing partner newsletter. Marketing partner newsletter? Yes, you will need to write a newsletter and send it out at least once per month. The goal is to make your affiliates feel special and informed. Give them advance notice of new products and share other information with them first before you tell the rest of the world. This elevates them from the ranks of a common affiliate and makes them truly feel like a "partner".

Build and maintain your team

As time goes by remove the non-performing affiliates from the group and replace them with fresh names. There is no benefit to keeping non-performers on the roles and, who knows, there just might be a superstar waiting to join your team.

Once you have a good core group of affiliates you can expand the size of the team, a little at a time, until you have a manageable sized group of good performers.

Follow these tips and you'll see a slow and steady growth in your affiliate-generated sales along with a corresponding increase in the return on your marketing costs.

- 14th September 2004

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