How to Get Affiliates to Work

[vintagedancer]

I am having a hard time getting my affiliates to actually DO any affiliating. Before writing my ebook I contact about 50 people in my niche who were all very excited to help promote my book. I gave them all free copies with the book and they made more promises they would blog/facebook/tweet about it. That was several months ago and to this day my only active affiliate are through Clickbank's recruiting process. Part of the problem might be that my niche doesn't know much about the affiliate process even though I gave them step by step directions.

What has worked for you in motivating affiliates to work?

[tracyr]

Motivating affiliates to actually promote is the hardest part of the process and typically only 2-5% of your affiliates will ever promote anyway.

What have you done to help motivate your affiliates? Are you doing any reciprocal promotion of their products?

I might suggest a guest blogging tour to draw some attention to your site and ebook and see how that works out for increasing your sales.

Best,
Tracy

[GoodCooker]

Would it be beneficial for you to check out the Warrior Forum and see what possibilities are there for you? I don't know what your niche is in....

Gretchen

[Susanne Myers]

The thing that's worked best for me is to keep reminding them that you're out there and to keep giving them tools that are easy to use. I'm both an info product marketer who is trying to get affiliates to promote my products, and an affiliate marketer myself. As an affiliate I can tell you that I'm busy and often intend to promote a good product, but juts don't get around to writing that promo email or a little text add that I could use on twitter or facebook.

What I do is try to come up with new stuff for my affiliates regularly including:
- graphics they can use on their websites and blogs
- pre-written emails, articles, ads etc. that they can just plug in
- Short reports that can be branded with affiliate links. My affiliates can give those to their lists and have it spread virally from there.
- writing guest blog posts for affiliates
- having affiliates interview me (usually via email).

By the way, Tracy is AWESOME at creating a lot of those affiliate tools for me.

[tracyr]

By the way, Tracy is AWESOME at creating a lot of those affiliate tools for me.

Thanks, Susanne!

[Kayla Fay]

I've given one of my affiliates an account on a couple of my blogs. She can post at will, use the images that are already there, link to her blog/Squidoo lens, and put her affiliate links in. It's easy content for me, but it's definitely made her feel more of the team.

[busymomma]

Are you in direct contact with your affiliates? Do you send them emails regularly with tools to help them promote? Seeing affiliates sign up is exciting, but remember that they may have signed up for quite a few companies and you need to keep your company in their minds at all times so they promote you.

[Joseph Ratliff]

Do you have specific promotional/presell training for affiliates?

Plus, another thing to consider is where you're drawing affiliates from...and the process you're using to recruit them (setting up "qualifying factors" to participate etc...).

Just a couple of thoughts.

[jgant]

How lucrative are your affiliate commissions? Recurring? Lifetime? No leakage on your sales page (i.e. opt-in form)? What's your conversion rate?

I'll write 1 post on any product I like to test it as an affiliate offer. If it sells and the commission is decent, I then promote it like crazy. I LOVE lifetime and recurring commissions, large $100 plus one-time commissions, or high-converting products (like 1 a day on auto-pilot from fewer than 50 page views of that particular product).

If your commission is $15 to $25 one-time with a cookie that expires, that's not going to motivate too many affiliates unless it's a large market with a high conversion rate.

I appreciate some of the other comments about providing images and copy for affiliate use, but as an affiliate I seldom use these tools. I develop my own. All I care about is that the product is good, I generally have to be a user or purchaser (although not always the case with physical products), and the commission structure must be excellent.

These days there are so many affiliate promotion options, that vendors need to be competitive to attract effective affiliates.

One cool technique a vendor I promote did recently was offer a contest to all affiliates based not on sales volume, but on who wrote the best blog post promoting their product. I spent a day writing a killer post and putting together a video. I didn't win sadly, but it inspired me to get to work. BUT, the prize was worth more than $1,000 and worth the chance at winning.