6 Tips to Creating a Successful Affiliate Program

February 16, 2017 Teresa Clark

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Affiliate programs are a great way for small businesses to start selling their products without a lot of capital. The problem is that a lot of people already know this. That means if you’re going to have an affiliate marketing program, you’ve got to do it right. Here are six tips to get you started on your way to a successful program:

Find your niche – Running an affiliate program doesn’t require much capital to start, but it can take up a lot of time finding and maintaining relationships with affiliates. That’s why it’s very useful to have a specific niche for your programs. This reduces the number of affiliates you have to maintain, and these affiliates can resell to their own affiliates and customers. You can make a profit without spreading yourself too thin.

Find the right affiliates – Sure, a popular website is a great way to get started when looking for someone to advertise your products and services. But that website should have the same target demographic as what you’re selling. If you’re selling a product to help someone with a home business, a website for stay-at-home moms is probably better than one targeted toward general small business owners. The more specific to your niche, the better. But try not to be too specific, or the audience of the websites will be too small.

Treat your affiliates well – After you gain some affiliates, be sure to treat them well. There are thousands of affiliate programs out there for your partners to choose. If they don’t work with you, they’re very likely to find someone else to work with. That means you not only need to pay your affiliates well, you also need to treat them well, be prompt, and keep up a great professional relationship.

Find the right incentive – While pay-per-click will make the job easy for your affiliates, pay-per-sale or per-client will inspire them to do a bit more on their page than just click. If you provide a large percentage per sale, affiliates will often write entire sales letters for your product or promote it in other ways. You also can consider special benefits for affiliates, such as free or reduced price products.

Find the right kind of link – You can use all kinds of links to sell products through your affiliate program: embedded text, banners, search boxes, and other less common methods. You also can ask your affiliates to link to specific products, to your main webpage, or to a product landing page. To sell your specific products, research all the choices and make the right decision for your product and your goals.

Be creative – Affiliate marketing is all about getting people’s attention, just like TV commercials. Whichever method you choose, you have to be creative, whether it’s through banners, your website, or your affiliate incentive program. You have to get people’s attention and give them a reason to use you over the other guys.