How To Create A Successful Affiliate Marketing Program

Affiliate marketing is one of the best online marketing programs because it's one of the easiest ways to make money online. It's the best way to promote an online business through advertising with an affiliate who you pay for every sale or visitor it brings to your site.

While you can generate sales without doing too much work on your site, making your affiliate program stand out from the tons of affiliate programs available online is not that easy. The challenge now is how to find affiliates to promote your product.

Here are the things you must work on to have a successful Affiliate Program by Garrett Robins, an affiliate marketer with over ten years of experience in sales and has worked on various projects for DotComSecrets.com.

Research, Recruit & Train

I know sometimes trying to figure out the online world can get confusing and we assume that all the laws change with sales. But I want to tell you that they don’t. For example if I were running a business selling cool new water bottles I would need a sales manager to manage the sales team right? If that sales manager was any good he would always be looking for sales reps to travel and get new clients. You should always want more of that. That doesn’t change for your online products. It’s silly to try to sell them all on your own. You need to leverage your selling power and get affiliates (online salesmen) to help you out.

Pay per Performance. I realize some of you may be thinking to yourselves that you can’t afford to pay out commissions. Well I want to set you straight— you can’t afford not to. Remember that you will only pay out when a sale has been made. So you only give me $100 when I get someone to give you $200. A smart entrepreneur would not spend all their time trying to sell their products alone. Instead, that time is better invested when spent getting others to sell their product for them. (Keep in mind that it’s only after the product has sold that you will have to pay your affiliates).

• Researching your Affiliates

When researching for potential affiliates there are few tools that I strongly recommend to have them installed on your PC. Some are free and the other one is a paid software. The paid software is not essential to your success but they do cut the research time down by about 90 percent.

1. The Alexa Toolbar – this tool lets you see information related to the site yo are looking at including the Name of the Owner, Email Address, Physical Address, Phone Number, Other sites created by the owner and Other site related to that site.

2. The Google Toolbar – this toolbar will show the PR (page Rank) of the site. If you can get higher ranked sites to promote for you that is great.

3. SEO Elite – This tool lets you pull out sites related to the keywords you type in and export the list to an Excel sheet for you. At that point you can sort through the list of what is most relevant to you and get ready to make the phone calls.

• Recruiting your Affiliates

Now that you have all these information, you are now ready to recruit your affiliates. You need to have all the work done for the affiliate BEFORE you contact them so all they have to do is CPP (Cut Past Promote). Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for potential affiliates to say yes. Before you recruit you need to be ready with these things:

1. How to craft you offer?

2. What affiliate tracking software should you use?

3. What percentage of the sale are you going to give out?

4. Should you reach them by phone or email?

5. What are the right and wrong things to say?

6. Should you mail them a package so they can see the product?

7. What tools are you going to provide for them to promote with?

• Training your Affiliates

Now that you have all your affiliates ready and willing to sell your product, you need to take the time to train them to reach their full potential. Look at it this way. You wouldn’t hire a salesman in the offline world and just send him out without training on how to sell better. You also wouldn’t stop encouraging him and let him just lie around the office playing paper football. So why would you leave your online salesman hanging?

Here are a few ways we train our affiliate that have been successful:

1. Tele-Seminars (Get on the Monday morning bust out calls at….)

2. Seminars ( Dotcomsecrets.com)

3. Courses (Affiliate Bootcamp)

4. Newsletters ( get your affiliates to sign up for the Affiliator)

5. Webinars

6. Blogs

The goal is to connect with them and deliver powerful content that, in returns, makes you more money.

And remember to post all this training on an easily accessible site so new affiliates can catch up on the material. I don’t sit and listen to training at my computer and I’m sure you don’t either so make it available in MP3 format so it’s ready to download to their I-Pods or music players. Remember to make it as easy as you can for them to consume and apply.

These are just a sketch of what you need to focus on as you build a successful Affiliate Marketing program. I will be sharing with you in depth and the strategies to use to get a hold of the Super Affiliates in your niche next time.

Get to know more about Garrett Robins and his marketing experiences.