An affiliate program is successful when created right and maintained well. To create and maintain the program requires time and good amount of effort without which it turns a failure. A merchant who sells products or services can start an affiliate program to increase sales and get his business recognized. The best example of an affiliate program would be programs offered by Daily Deal/Deal aggregator websites to promote deals in various cities. Deal clone websites like yipit clone and grubwithus clone integrate the concept affiliate marketing in them to improve deals sales. The affiliate program invites parties to join the program and become affiliates of the merchant who earn commissions on sale.
Affiliation doesn’t stop here. Let us see what other things we require to build and maintain all through.
1. Know your target customers
Firstly you’ll need to identify your target customers to whom you are going to sell your products.
2. Who will be my affiliate?
Now that you’ve decided to have an affiliate program, you need good and reliable affiliates. Choose your affiliates based on the nature of your products. Make your affiliate program easy to join for prospective affiliates. You may use a strategy to filter applicants and avoid affiliates who are poor performers and don’t have enough potential. As you use a filter to choose your affiliates, they will also measure you and your program against others.
3. Payment to affiliates
How to pay your affiliates is the next important thing you need to decide. A good payment routine is also a factor in the success of an affiliate program. There are 3 types of payment modes available to choose from. They are pay per lead, pay per click and pay per sale. Depending on what products you are going to sell and the risk factor you may choose the mode of payment to your affiliates.
4. Make your program creative
Affiliates usually will want to display banners in their site so you need to provide banner according to their requirements. Create banners in various shapes and sizes for affiliates.
5. Support for Affiliates
To make your affiliate’s job of marketing your products or services easy, provide support by giving creative and promotional material. Some of them would be the html code, graphics, logos, a “how to” manual and a training program to maximize sales.You may also create an online accounting system which will help them keep a track of their sales commission at any point of time.
6. Relationship with Affiliates
Treat all your affiliates the same. You’ll need to prove that you are honest and financially stable. Hence you need to have a fair payment policy and a good commission reporting system. The affiliate programs in a way creates a partnership between you and your affiliate.
You need take care of your partner, give maximum support, establish a strong communication so that there is no communication gap found, keep them updated about products/services and any sort of changes with newsletters. Conduct suitable training programs in order to educate them on things they need to know, tips and advise on how to enhance or revise the present strategy of your product marketing to increase sales. You may do best things for your affiliates but they may decide to move on once they find somebody else measures more than you and your program. So find new partners whenever you come across someone.
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by seeing this post i also decided to start some easy affiliate programs to earn some bucks. 🙂
That would be nice Joseph.
yup communication must be good between partners because that would lead to victory an if there is lack of communication then ii is very hard to form a good organization
Thanks for your comment. You are right and it is well-said