In Guide #4 you learned about doing joint ventures with other marketers in your niche. Now in this guide you’re going to learn another way to partner with others for mutual benefit: namely, by setting up an affiliate program. This is where you offer affiliates a commission in exchange for every paying customer they send your way.
How do you set it up for maximum success? Check out these 17 tips, ideas and insights…
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1. Pick the Right Platform
Your first step is to pick an affiliate platform that meets your needs. You can use a third-party system (like ClickBank.com, JVZoo.com or similar), or you can install an affiliate script on your website and run your program that way.
Which to choose? If you’re already well-known in the niche, then you can certainly run your own program. If you’re just getting started, then using a platform like ClickBank.com is great choice, because affiliates everywhere trust the company and know they’ll always get paid.
2. Understand the One-Tier Vs. Two-Tier Program
A one-tier affiliate program is where affiliates get commission for every sale they make. A two-tier program is where affiliates get commission for every sale they make, PLUS they also earn a smaller commission when affiliates they’ve recruited into their downline make sales.
What’s the difference? In a two-tier program, affiliates will help you grow your affiliate program. The problem, however, is that some affiliates focus on recruiting others, to the point where they never promote your offers themselves.
When in doubt, create a one-tier program, as doing so avoids potential legal programs as well as growing a program where no one is actually promoting your offer.
3. Decide Your Commission Rate
Your next step is to decide the commission rate for affiliates when they sell your product. A good way to do this is to research what others in your niche are offering. In general, you’ll pay 50% commission for digital products, and usually you’ll reserve even higher commissions for your best affiliates.
4. Determine Whether You’ll Offer Backend Commissions
If you’re offering upsells and other products on the order form, then it’s a good idea to offer commissions on these products as well to your affiliates. This gives affiliates an extra incentive to promote, as they have the potential to make even more money (without doing any extra work).
Which brings us to the next point…
5. Ask Yourself: Can You Set up Recurring Commissions?
One thing affiliates really love is recurring commissions, as it gives them a passive way to make money. All they have to do is sell an offer once (such as a membership), and then make money month after month for as long as their customer remains an active member.
As such, there are two things to note here:
- If you have a recurring payment offer (such as a membership or subscription), then be sure to offer recurring commissions to affiliates.
- If you don’t have a recurring payment offer set up yet, then plan to create one in your near future. It’s a great way for both you and your affiliates to enjoy effortless recurring revenue.
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6. Create Your Affiliate Agreement
If you’re running your own affiliate program, then be sure to create an affiliate agreement. This isn’t necessary if you’re running your program through a service like ClickBank, as reputable third-party services have their own affiliate terms that participants must agree to. It’s only necessary if there are other terms you want to include that aren’t listed in the third-party agreement.
An agreement should outline how and when affiliates will get paid, as well as what types of activities are prohibited (such as spamming). If you’re running your own affiliate program, then be sure to run your agreement by an attorney to be sure it’s fair, binding and that it protects you.
7. The 5 Factors Top Partners Look for in an Affiliate Program
If you want to attract the top affiliates in your niche, then you need to create a program that has all the characteristics these partners look for in an affiliate program.
- High-converting sales letter. Be sure to test and track your sales letter so that you can showcase a high conversion rate when you approach partners.
- Generous commissions. Your top affiliates will appreciate commission rates higher than 50%. Aim for 60%, or even 75% to attract the best partners.
- Commissions on upsells. If you’ve got upsells, then be sure partners get a slice of these profits too.
- High-quality product. When you approach partners, give them unlimited access to the product.
- Marketing materials. While your top affiliates will generally create their own materials, most of them appreciate having access to your materials that they can rewrite or use as the foundation for their own materials. High-quality graphics are a must too.
Use the above list as a mini-checklist for creating an attractive affiliate program. You’ll learn more about each of these characteristics throughout this guide.
8. 10 Items That Should Be in Every Affiliate Center
As you learned in the last section, affiliates love having copy-and-paste marketing materials available to them. With that in mind, here are the materials you’ll want to include in your affiliate center:
- A rebrandable report.
- An autoresponder series (three to five emails).
- Solo emails that affiliates can send individually at any time.
- A blog series (three to five articles).
- Individual blog articles.
- Posts suitable for social media (e.g., shorter for Twitter, longer for other platforms).
- A video or webinar reply.
- High-quality ecover graphics.
- Graphical ads (such as banners)
- Extras such as infographics.
You don’t need to have your affiliate center fully stocked before you accept affiliates. You can start with the basics (such as a rebrandable report and an email series), and then add other items over time as you complete them.
9. How to Promote Your Affiliate Program
Once your program is ready to go, then you need to start promoting it in order to attract affiliates. Here are the best ways to do it:
Get Listed on Your Platform
If you’re using a third-party platform like ClickBank, then be sure your product is listed in the onsite affiliate directory.
Join Affiliate Directories
Run a Google search for “affiliate directories,” and then submit you program to these directories.
Buy Advertising
Still another way to recruit affiliates is through paid advertising. For example, you can buy ads on sites where affiliates congregate, such as affiliate forums. You can also buy targeted ads on platforms such as Google and Facebook.
Tell Your Network
Let your prospects and customers know about your advertising program by emailing them about, blogging about it, and posting on social media.
TIP: You can advertise your affiliate program as part of your new customer onboarding process. The idea is to encourage your satisfied customers to make money by telling others about your product.
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Advertise On Your Site
Still another way to promote your affiliate program is to be sure to include a link to the program on all your major pages (such as on your blog and homepage).
NOTE: Whether to include a link to your affiliate program on your sales page is debatable. Doing so can lower commissions, as any link on a sales page tends to be a commission leak. In addition, you never want to show an “Become an Affiliate” link on any page where current affiliates are sending traffic, as this can result in people joining the program and hijacking the original affiliate’s commission.
Bottom line: you can insert advertising the affiliate program only on a sales page where you send direct traffic, but be sure to test it to see if it’s negatively impacting sales.
One of the best ways to recruit affiliates is to directly approach them and invite them to join your program. Which brings us to the next tip…
10. The #1 Secret to Generating a Lot of Sales
In most cases, your very best affiliates won’t find you. Instead, you need to find them. Here’s an overview of the process:
- Find potential affiliates. Search ClickBank for top vendors in your niche, use Google to locate top marketers, and browse affiliate leaderboards during contests to see who’s selling a lot of products.
- Do your due diligence. Research each potential partner to be sure they’d be a reputable partner.
- Recruit them to your team. It’s best to build relationships first, but you can also use a “cold approach” by sending an email to them with the benefits of your program.
For more details on how to complete the process, check out the Joint Venture Guide.
11. Spurring Sales With Training Materials
Some of your affiliates are going to be new to affiliate marketing. That’s why you’ll want to offer training materials, such as videos or guides that teach people how to build a list and start making their first sales.
12. How to Create a Contest That Gets Affiliates Promoting Like Crazy
One really good way to generate sales and motivate affiliates is by offering an affiliate contest. This is where you offer cash prizes to the top five affiliates who make the most sales during a specified period (such as one week).
The problem with this model is that affiliates who are capable of making a few sales aren’t going to be motivated to compete because they know they won’t win.
The solution? Create a separate “sweepstakes” style contest, where every affiliate who makes at least one sale gets an entry into a random-drawing contest.
13. Distributing Coupons to Boost Sales
Affiliates love distributing coupon codes to their prospects and customers, as coupons tend to generate a lot of sales. To make this tactic even more effective, you might offer coupon codes at the same time you’re running an affiliate contest.
14. A Surprising Way to Get a Lot of Sales
Here’s an idea: offer 100% commissions on one of your products (especially a tripwire offer or other entry-level product). The idea is to let your affiliates keep all the frontend profits, which means they’ll promote often. Meanwhile, you build a big customer and aim to make your profits on the backend.
15. How to Keep Affiliates Motivated Week After Week
You can’t build good relationships with affiliates and keep them motivated unless you stay in touch with them. To that end, email them each week to showcase other top affiliates in your niche, announce contests and new offers, give them new marketing materials, and generally inspire them to keep promoting.
16. Consider Outsourcing Affiliate Management
There is a lot of work involved in running a successful affiliate program, including recruiting affiliates, nurturing relationships with affiliates, creating marketing and training materials, running contests and more.
The good news is that you don’t need to do these tasks yourself, as you can outsource all or part of managing your affiliate program. For example, you can hire someone to run the entire program, or you can hire people to do pieces of it, such as creating the marketing materials and training materials.
TIP: One good way to get super affiliates into your program is by hiring a JV broker. This is someone who already knows and has a relationship with the top marketers and affiliates in your niche. This person can introduce you to these top partners and recruit them into your program in exchange for a cut of any profits these partners make. For example, you might pay the broker 10% to 20% of any sale made by the partners they recruited into your program.
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17. Keep Affiliates Happy With This Strategy
A lot of affiliates like to keep fresh offers in front of their customers. Likewise, you can keep these affiliates happy by creating new offers on a regular basis (such as monthly) and giving affiliates all the tools they need to promote these offers.
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Conclusion
You don’t need to look further than a company like Amazon to know that an affiliate program is a great way to build your business. That’s why you’ll want to use the tips you just learned to start up and run your own successful affiliate program.
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