Effective Affiliate Program Management Part05
Friend, welcome back to our new article series " Effective Affiliate
Program Management " which will help to improve your business. Last time
we talked about how well you analyze the affiliate profit potential of your
products. If you missed it, click here to get it.
Overview of Affiliate Management
● To show you the number one mistake
many marketers make when they're creating their own products and running their
own affiliate program.
● To introduce the concept of linking
your affiliate system to other resources, such as your list, joint ventures, and
your previous customers.
● To demonstrate how dead ends occur
all over unfinished marketing sites, and these people are losing affiliates,
money and customers. Lets plug those dead ends right now.
● To help see things from the
affiliates point of view. Your affiliate system needs to be quick, snappy, and
instant, not long and complicated.
● To show you how to provide your
affiliates with everything they need to promote, removing the problem of
distractions and ‘I'll promote this later’ syndromes.
● To help you understand how to keep
your current affiliates flowing, and how they're going to pull you in a bundle
of cash over multiple products over many years.
● To show you how to treat your
affiliates, and how not to treat them with regards to future contact and
advertising. Something which if done incorrectly will lose you everyone who's
previously been promoting your stuff. Not good.
● To show that no matter how slow the
growth when you first start attracting affiliates, it is exponential and will
snowball real fast, but only if you let it.
Ok, so we've had a good look at aspects relating to the
selection of percentages, levels, and whether or not to run an affiliate
program. Right now, we're going to jump ahead a little bit, and start talking
about how to actually manage those affiliates once you have them.
Friend, the most important factors that
we're going to address will be related to keeping your affiliates promoting,
keeping them loyal, promotion spurts using offers, and at the same time, take a
look at some of the biggest mistakes I still see people making every day whilst
running their affiliate program.
Big Mistake Number One – Recycling
First up, lets look at how many people manage their
affiliates. Here's the situation that I come across most. Person A sets up
their website, their product and sales system, and integrates an affiliate
program.
They go ahead, launch the product, and have their affiliates
promote for them. That's all very well, in fact there’s nothing wrong with this
until you consider what happens when this person goes on and creates a second
product.
What you'll likely see is they'll create the product, put up
the sales letter and sales system and go about things the same way as they did
with their first product.
The problem is many marketers don't seem to utilize the
affiliates they gathered through the previous product in the promotion of their
new product. What a waste.
All that promotion and affiliate gathering, and you're just
going to throw it all away by starting all over again when you come up with
your next product. People say to me, well that’s common sense. Sure, but how
many are actually doing it?
This is definitely a big no, no. For affiliates being such a
great part of online marketing, if you do have several products, you'll want to
remember all your affiliates.
I wouldn't expect you to get a list of subscribers from one
website, then throw them aside and not mail them when your next site launches.
The same goes for affiliates. Utilize this powerful tool.
Friend, there's several ways of doing
this of course, you may want to send a mail to your affiliates and let them
know about this new promotion opportunity. Your best bet however is to keep all
affiliates in the one system for all your websites, and hit them with
introductory offers every single time you launch a new product.
Now I know some of you may not have the budget or software
to do this, and if you're doing it manually it can take some time. If you're
running affiliate promotions though, you'll need to figure out a way of doing
this effectively, even if it's just a manual import of all previous affiliates
into a second affiliate system, and a mailing that tells them their account is
already open, and ready to go, along with an ad they can use, complete with
their promotion URL to get them started immediately.
Whilst we're talking about this in fact, I'll let you in on
a little something.
Big Mistake 2 - Dead Ends
Next up, we're going to look at the final part of the actual
set up of the affiliate program. It’s something that's really important and
fundamental in online business, not just for affiliate programs, and that's to
link it up, and give your customers a path to follow.
Ok that might sound amateurish and maybe a little patronizing,
so my apologies for that, however the other day I was browsing around checking
out the competition and what they're up to related to my next product, and what
I found was many of them, both in their sales letter (if there was one) and in
their affiliate signup pages, they dead ended me.
What I mean by that is, I go to signup for their affiliate
program, and they have this great sales page that tells me how much I'm going
to earn per sale, a really nice bonus scheme for top affiliates etc, and I got
to the bottom of the page, and guess what I found? Well, not much actually.
They sold me on this affiliate program, but the page just ended. No click here
to sign up, no nothing.
Now that's an extreme example I have to admit, but lets be
honest here, if you're seriously getting into affiliate marketing you can't
afford to do that. If you have an affiliate’s button that leads to a page that
explains a little about your affiliate program, try to fit the form in at the
base of the page, or at least have a click here to sign up. Granted, normally I
wouldn't have mentioned this, but looking around it's definitely worth it.
So never forget, a nav bar is good, but you have to show the
customer where to go, with click here's, or forms that tell the story for themselves.
You're still selling yourself here, and getting the all-important affiliates
can be more profitable than making the sale yourself. Don't overlook small
things such as this, pick through your setup with a fine toothcomb and make
sure no page has a dead end anywhere.
Sell It Like A Product
Still concentrating on the selling aspect of getting your
affiliates, we need to plug some more gaps. Mistakes, mistakes everywhere, it's
not easy to sign up for some affiliate programs even if you wanted to.
Friend, don't be one of those people.
They're losing thousands and they probably don't even know it. So here's
another little tip for you. Sell your affiliate program.
If I click on your 'Affiliates' button on your website, I
don't want to be presented with a form that asks for my details. I see this all
too often. Write a mini sales letter that explains some things to the potential
affiliate.
Information you must include can be as basic as how much
they'll earn on how many levels, and for how long, and any bonuses they may get
for a particular amount of sales in any given time, and of course, how often
you pay out.
Once you've got the basics down you can start getting a
little more complex and bringing out your tracking figures if you have any. I'd
be happy about an affiliate program that pays me $500 per sale, but I'd be even
happier with an affiliate program that pays me $500 per sale when the sales
letter has been proven to have a targeted click through to sales ratio.
It’s like the creation of your sales letters. Eliminate
risk, and build confidence in your product, only this time around, your
affiliate program is your product.
Don’t Hide It
On a similar note, one more little tip I'd like to give you
before moving on is to not hide any information in terms and conditions. Sure
put up a terms and conditions, but don't small print any of the important
information and leave it out of your sales letter.
After all, these people signing up to your affiliate program
aren't people you want to annoy in any way. They're going to provide a good
chunk of the backbone of your business in the future.
Again Friend, like your list, and like
your previous customers who will buy from you again and again, these affiliates
are at least as important as looking after them. Ok moving on now.
To be continued
Friend, next time we'll find out
how to educate your affiliates. See you there
