Building Lasting Relationships with Your Affiliates

Getting new affiliates to signup for your affiliate program is only the beginning. In order
to keep them highly motivated and eager to sell your products for you, you will first need
to establish a solid relationship with them. We’ve come up with some solid tips that you
can use to make sure your affiliates keep on raking in the big bucks for you, day in and
day out.

Train Your Affiliates Well
Most affiliate programs on the Internet think that by giving your affiliates a couple of
banners and some text links, they will then go out and start making massive loot for you.
This is just not the case. Many of your new affiliates will not know what to do when they
first sign up for your program. All they know is that they like your product and they
want to promote it to make a few extra dollars. Additionally, many of them will have lost
their motivation to sell your product for you if there aren’t any clearly defined
instructions as to what they should do to promote it.

If you think about it, a salesman isn’t going to get too many sales if he doesn’t go through
some sort of training seminar on the ins and outs as well as the type of customers they
should sell to would they? This is where your affiliate training course comes in.

Your Own E-Training Course
You really should invest some time in putting together a good 7 to 10 day training course
via email. This is quite easy to do, and follow up to your affiliates every day. You can also utilize a third-party Autoresponder for this as well.
( My suggestion for autoresponder is here )
SeoAftermath AutoResponder Hosting

How Do I Create a Training Course?
Creating your own email training course is fairly simple. You’ll want to start by creating
an outline of what you want your affiliates to know about you, your company, and your
products. Here are some suggestions:

Affiliate Welcome Email – Your Initial Contact
This is the first email that gets sent to your affiliate after they have signed up to your
program. It welcomes your new affiliate member to your program, and gives them the
details of his account. These include such things such as his unique affiliate link, login
information, and account details.

In the Welcome Email, you should take some time to introduce your company’s products
as well. Since this is what they will be selling, give them a brief description of how well
it works, and how it can really benefit the customers who buy it.

Finally, give them a few simple instructions on getting started with your promotional
tools. If you have some banners and text links available in your members’ area, give
your affiliate step-by-step instructions on how to copy and paste them right away on their
home pages. This will make it easier for them to begin.

Introduction to Your Promotional Materials
For each of the next training emails, focus on instructing your affiliates about how to
promote your products. You can probably send them an email each day on how to
promote your product using a particular type of marketing strategy. For instance, you can
focus on teaching them how to market your product using Pay-Per-Click on Day 1, Using
Ezines on Day 2, Creating Articles for Submission on Day 3, and Using Traffic
Exchanges for Promotion on Day 4.

Make sure you are explicit in how you want them to market your product. Give them
example code or even copy and paste text that they can use right away for submitting
articles or creating content on their site. The less work that your affiliate needs to do, the
better it is for you because you alleviate them of the stress needed when creating
marketing material.

Always Keep In Touch
We already suggested that you create your own e-training course to prepare your
affiliates for marketing your product. But other than that, you should also keep in touch
with them on a regular basis. Sending them a weekly or monthly newsletter with updates
on your products and services, as well as news regarding your company or affiliate
program will help keep you in your affiliate’s mind.

Affiliate Contests
Another way to motivate your affiliate members is to run regular contests. Offer up some
prizes for affiliates who generate the most sales or commissions in a given month. This
is a very simple and inexpensive way to drive your affiliate’s competitive spirits going.
We’ve seen affiliate programs online giveaway things such as an iPod for the top selling
affiliate, and even cash prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. You can even add these events as
part of your regular affiliate newsletter that goes out to your members.

Your Partner in success
Dan Cochran