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                 Overview of Affiliate

Management 

– Part 3

● 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. 

Affiliate Program Management -
Part 23

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. 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. 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. 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, 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. 

Get Them Promoting

Our next most important factor, and that‟s what to

do with your affiliates once you have some in the

system as a result of your product promotion, joint

ventures and a well linked site (which we talked

about above). So we have our affiliates, we've

given the relevant information already, we've got

them to sign up, so what's next? Getting them

promoting, and keeping them promoting is what we

need to get sorted.

Now there's a lot of methods that can be used to

both get affiliate promoting and keep them

promoting. The problem is when deciding what's

going to be appropriate is that you can't only do

one of them. There are generally two types of

affiliates, the ones who know how to sell and are

going to make you money and the ones who don't know

how to sell and aren't going to make you money. It

sounds harsh, but that pretty much sums it up.