If you sell products and services online, chances are you have an affiliate program set up so others can help you market and promote in exchange for a commission on each sale. If you don't have one set up, your first step should be to get a good affiliate program in place. Most of us have it set up and are making sales here and there through affiliates. But there's always room for improvement. Today we want to share three different ways with you to boost your affiliate program and get people motivated to promote you – and to do so more often.
Read through the list and then commit to trying one of the ideas this month. Come back to this post regularly and rotate through each of the different ways. You can try a different one every couple of months to get your affiliates motivated to market your products. Once they start to see those affiliate payments coming in, they're more likely to continue to mail for you and do more of everything else they do to get your offer in front of their own audience.
Give Them Something Free To Share
One of the best ways to get affiliates to mail for your is to make it easy. This includes things like writing the promo emails for them, giving them graphics to include in their emails, and adding their individual affiliate link in the email copy you send them. Another way to make it super easy is to give them something free they can share with their audience. Here's how that works.
Create a small product that relates to the paid product you want to promote. If your main product is a course about blogging, create a short report about installing WordPress, or a worksheet for creating and promoting blog posts. For us here at Piggy Makes Bank, since we sell PLR packs, we create smaller freebie packs that new customers can download to get a taste for our pre-written content. And of course we let affiliates promote those free packs.
Now, the next step is important. Affiliates won't make anything on that freebie referral. It's your job to turn the leads your affiliates are sending you into paid customers. This will happen in a variety of different ways. You should have an offer for your paid product as soon as they download the freebie. If you'd like, you can even include a promo for the big product within the content of the freebie. You should also plan to follow up with the free download people regularly. Build that relationship and of course remind them of your paid product. In other words, market to those people and make the sale at which point the affiliate will get their commission.
Create A Special Offer For Their Audience
Here's a technique we use frequently with individual affiliates. The idea is to create a special offer for an affiliate to extend to their audience. This could be a bonus you create just for their orders, or it could be a special coupon code. Our favorite is to combine two or more products that we know will be of interest to their readers and subscribers. We create a new combo product at a special price.
Put a time limit on the special offer. This creates urgency. It will make the affiliate mail instead of putting it off, and more importantly it will encourage the readers to go ahead and make the purchase… after all, they don't want to miss out on an amazing deal.
By approaching one or two affiliates a month about a special deal or custom offer, you can add quite a bit to your bottom line. As a bonus the affiliates participating in the special deals will get in the habit of promoting you and will hopefully do so more often going forward. And six months from now you can approach them with another special offer for their list.
Increase Commissions, Offer Bonuses, Or Host A Contest – For A Short Time
There's nothing like creating a little urgency. Making the special offer that we just talked about is one way to do it, but it isn't the only way. You could also encourage your affiliates to promote you right now by setting up a special, time-limited event. You could increase commissions from 50% to 75% on certain products for a few days. You could offer them monetary bonuses based on participation or conversion (i.e. $25 bonus for every affiliate who mails this month, or $100 bonus for anyone making 20 sales or more). Or you could host an affiliate contest with prizes and financial rewards for the top performers. Look at what other marketers in your niche are doing for ideas. Or ask your affiliates what would motivate them to participate in a contest.
Of course you could also go all out and combine several of these ideas. Set up an affiliate contest with prizes and increase the commission on a front-end offer. Set up special bonuses to encourage new affiliates to go after that first sale, or to motivate your super affiliates to push a little harder to hit that next bonus level or move up the ranks in the contest.
Is boosting your affiliate program a topic your own readers are interested in? If so you are welcome to share this post with them. You may also be interested in one of our latest Business PLR Packs – Boost Your Affiliate Program. It includes 30 articles, 30 emails, and 30 social media posts on the topic along with a ready-to-sell (or ready-to-edit if you prefer) eBook and workbook titled “Three Ways To Make Your Affiliates Promote You Over And Over Again”. Click the link below for full details including article titles