How To Encourage Your Affiliates To Increase Productivity

Affiliates are arguably the most important thing when you launch a product – even if the product isn’t amazing, as long as you have plenty of affiliates, your project could still be a success. That’s just an example of the power of getting affiliates to promote, and indeed sell, your product.

However, although the power of using affiliates is unrivaled when it comes to sources of sales, if you don’t use the right tactics, you won’t attract affiliates, and in this scenario you won’t make any affiliate sales. This would quite simply be a disaster.

So, how can you encourage affiliates to sign up to your program and, more importantly, make some sales? I’ve listed a few techniques below that will hopefully help you out.

High Commission Rate
The first and most obvious thing you need to do is to set a reasonably high commission rate. If potential affiliates see that they could get amount by selling the product, they’re more likely to sign up. It’s just basic common sense really, but I’ll include it anyway. Commission rates of 30 % upwards is a great motivating factor for any affiliate to promote your products.

Limited Time Offers
If you’ve ever launched a product, one of the methods you may use to increase sales and brand exposure is a limited time offer, whereby people can get the product at a discounted price or with a bonus, but only for a certain time period. This is a really effective way of increasing sales, and it can also be applied to affiliates.

For example, the way to do this is to offer affiliates a larger commission, so long as they do something by a certain date.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this further…
You are planning on launching your product on the 1st February, and want to give affiliates a 30% commission. Here’s what you can say to potential affiliates:
• ‘If you sign up to the affiliate program before 15th February, you will earn 50% commission on all products you sell’
• ‘Any sales you make between the 1st of February and the 1st of March will come with a 50% commission’.

You can develop this point further, just as long as you put some sort of time limit on the offer, you should hopefully see an increase in affiliate sign ups and sales.

Run An Affiliate Contest
This is, in my opinion, one of the best ways. You can run a competition where affiliates can compete to win prizes. I saw a contest like this recently where the first person to make 500 sales won a holiday, and I’ve even seen prizes such as cars being given away! Whilst your contest doesn’t have to be quite as elaborate as this, they’re a great way of increasing affiliates’ productivity.

Create Some Awesome Graphics
No doubt when you visit blogs, you’ll see adverts. There are even some on this blog, and I have them on my site, too. A lot of the ads you will see are affiliate adverts, and you always seem to see the same ones over and over. This is because the company has provided affiliate with adverts that the affiliates will happily display on their website.

You need to design awesome adverts to give to your affiliates if you want a successful program, so if you’re not too hot on designing them yourself, it’s well worth spending the money to get cool graphics. It’s a small price to pay for a successful affiliate program!

This is a guest post by Simon Rogers. Contact us if you want to guest post on this blog.