Chapter 13. Supporting Your Affiliates

Chapter Summary

Affiliate support doesn’t end with the signing of the agreement and placing links on an affiliate’s site, nor does servicing your affiliate’s program marketing needs and educating him or her on your products, services, and program. Treating your affiliates like true business partners means not only helping them make your program a success but also helping their Web sites succeed as well.

Building a long-term, interactive relationship with your affiliates with their success in mind is critical in building a successful affiliate program. That means helping your affiliates not only reach your sales goals but also achieve their full potential. You have to work with your affiliates not just to grow your sales but to also grow their sites by teaching them how to market successfully on the Net, not just market your program successfully.

Encourage your affiliates to know your product so they can seriously recommend it to their site visitors. In addition, provide affiliate support pages on your site that

  • Help them create a successful Web site

  • Point them to resources on the Net that help them improve their site design and content

  • Help position and market their site

  • Build a newsletter mailing list

  • Well-position their site in the search engines

Using the resources of the Net is a great way to offer marketing and promotional help to your affiliates. Finally, encourage affiliates to build an opt-in e-mail list that they can use to periodically stay in contact with their site visitors who subscribe and to constantly promote your product or service offer.

Just as it takes work to successfully run your affiliate program, it also takes work for your affiliates to earn decent revenue from it. Simply creating a Web site, putting up your offer links, and waiting for the commissions to roll in is not enough to earn money for them and increase sales for you. Keep in mind that the bulk of Web sites that join your affiliate program have little know-how about how to market their site on the Net.

Affiliates need to work hard at developing and promoting their sites and convince people to visit them. And you can help. After all, the more successful your affiliates are at generating traffic to their sites, the more impressions your offer will make and the more click-throughs and sales you will receive. Putting it simply, the more successful your affiliates sites are, the more successful your affiliate program will be.

This doesn’t mean you have to go into the e-commerce consulting business to help your affiliates become a success. Far from it. But there are some things you can do to help your affiliates optimize their sites and merchandise your offers that will increase their commissions and your revenue. Affiliates are your business partners and are a direct arm of your sales department. And just as a new employee has to be brought up to speed, your affiliates cannot be expected to perform at their highest level without training and guidance. This can take the form of both offline and online guidance—offline with direct one-to-one contact and online with access to resources on your site.

The formula for a successful affiliate program is simple. Increase the number of potential customers who view your offer on your affiliate sites, increase the number of sales they produce, and increase the number of times they return to buy again. To do that you need to service your affiliates properly, support and train them to sell your offer, and help build a list of prospects and customers to encourage new and repeat sales.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
18.221.47.203