Affiliate marketing is a way of promoting your products and services via third parties or intermediaries called affiliate marketers. These marketers make use of the online marketing tools like blogs, articles, websites and online mailing lists to promote your products on the internet. Therefore, the success of your affiliate program is largely dependent on the efficiency of marketers you select.
Creating an Affiliate Network
Choosing the right affiliate network and marketers is important if you want to succeed. The ideal affiliates would be those that have, or create, a website or webpage that is relevant to the product or service you offer. Also, to attract the best ones catering to a product like yours, you need to create the best affiliate marketing program.
To create your own affiliate network, you can seek the services of Affiliate Marketing services or merchants that help you get in touch with the right kind of affiliates. After that, you can increase your network by designing a tier-based marketing program, where your affiliates can refer other affiliates and gain from it.
Provide Resources
Choosing affiliates or partners that are familiar with the products and services in your industry makes it easier for you to explain what they have to promote. However, considering that your brand and your products are unique, it is important that you give them the necessary resources for promoting your products. Here is how you should do that.
Allow affiliates to access and use the images of your product or service from your website.
Provide free access to the literature about your products. The information should include details about the features, its unique points, advantages etc. If possible, share a free ebook or PDF that the affiliate can share with a potential customer.
Provide a guide that gives complete details of the service or products you offer. If possible, give them a sample or a free demo version of the product. This makes it easier for affiliates to talk about it in their own words.
Share newsletters and email promos that the affiliates can share with prospects in their mailing lists
Provide information about keywords that the affiliates can use in their articles
Give them coupons/discount vouchers that they can share with the prospects
Provide Competitive Incentives
Understand that affiliate marketing is relatively cheaper when compared to other forms of marketing, which makes it great for small businesses. But to succeed in attracting the best affiliate marketers for your products, be sure to offer competitive commission percentages. Find out what your competitors are paying and offer an equal or higher commission percentage to your affiliates.