Egidijus Andreika asked:


The affiliate program is also known as associate program and is increasingly becoming popular form of online marketing, where you pay a small commission to your affiliates for promoting your business. To make this affiliate program successful you have to recruit the right affiliates. If you run your own affiliate program you know that it’s not very easy to find good and performing affiliates. However, there are some tips that will help you recruit much more active affiliates and keep them happy, so they will promote your products even more. Here are the 8 best ways to recruit affiliates:

1) Use Article Marketing to Recruit Affiliates

One of the very cost effective and simple ways to recruit affiliates is article marketing. You can either write the article by yourself or recruit someone to write attractive and promising article focussing on the product or service that you provide and post them on article submission sites like Ezine, Submityourarticle and much more. The main advantage of article marketing is that only those who are interested in your product or service will read those articles and if you have successfully attracted them then you have gained a right affiliate for your business. This method can even attract potential customers.

2) Write Reviews about Products to Attract Potential Affiliates

Writing reviews is another very effective way to attract affiliates. All you have to do is write some reviews about the products you promote. You can generate a large traffic to your site by this way. While writing reviews try to make it unbiased i.e., you shouldn’t advertise yourself too much. The review should be very interesting and it would be even better if you do some comparison between similar products. Finally you can post the link of your affiliate page at the end of the review. So, the interested candidates will follow it and become your affiliate.

3) Post Comments in Related Forums to Signup Affiliates

Another very easy way to attract affiliates is to post comments on public forums where people discuss about your product and/or are interested in your product. The public forums have discussion groups where they post ideas and their opinions on a thread. Usually these forums allow you to add your signature below your comment. You can use this portion for advertising your product or can link it to your website’s affiliate page. If the comment that you post is interesting then you can expect more affiliates for your program. This method is very simple and less time consuming where you can attract the affiliates by just writing some three or four sentences.

4) Empower Social Networking Websites to Grow Your Affiliate Database

Social networking sites have great potential for attracting right affiliates for you. Today more or less who ever have access to internet has membership in any of the social networking site like Orkut, Yahoo groups, Myspace, etc. So, you can have large coverage by promoting your business on social networking sites and you can find the right affiliates for your affiliate program. On such social networking websites you can find friends of the similar interests, etc. This way you can even make business contacts and recruit affiliates for your online business.

5) Social Bookmarking Websites Can Be Used to Your Benefit

Social bookmarking like digg, del.ico.us and others are an excellent way for affiliate marketing. When a visitor visits your site and finds it interesting then he can bookmark it. Then others do the same and it creates an exponential amount of visits. In this large group of visitors there will be some right affiliates for your site. This way you can recruit a lot of affiliates easily.

6) Make Your Affiliate Program Page Attractive and Appealing for Affiliates

Now you might have attracted potential affiliates to your site successfully using any of these methods but making them to sign up as your affiliate depends on the quality of your site. The site should be appealing and shouldn’t make them feel that you may be a spammer. Otherwise you risk losing the potential affiliates hence, make your site more appealing and attractive. Keep the content well organized and make the sign up procedure simple and less time consuming. Try to explain them the benefits of your affiliate program in a polite manner, using bold letters or yellow background for the text nowadays are used mostly by spammers so, your affiliate may move away. If your website is good in all means then all the visits made by potential affiliates will increase your affiliates count. If you don’t know how to properly design a good looking website, just hire a freelancer and he/she will do all the work for you really cheaply.

7) Have You Considered a 2-Tier Affiliate Program?

To make your affiliate program more successful you must at least use 2-tier affiliate program. Where an affiliate will get more benefit for recruiting another affiliate. This type of program will encourage your affiliates to great extent and you can get more affiliates without wasting any resource, it will be done by your affiliates themselves. Empower your affiliates to recruit even more affiliates for you!

Find Out Your Competitors And Attract Their Affiliates

The best affiliates for your affiliate program are the existing affiliates of your competitors or other successful sites. But unfortunately there is no secret technique which can help you to get them. Instead you can try to trace out the methods used by your competitor and there is a large probability that these affiliates may be even visiting those areas like articles or social bookmarking sites and others. Just try to pin point the areas like the thread used by your competitor on a forum and post your comment as a reply to his post, hence you can get the attention of those potential affiliates.

These are some of the very potential and best ways of getting affiliates for your affiliate program. You may do some research based on your own experience on these methods to get even better results. We at Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) always ready to help. Sell your products online, recruit affiliates, accept payments instantly. Recruit affiliates successfully and skyrocket your income!

Egidijus Andreika asked:


Your affiliate marketers can literally make or break your affiliate business online. This is why you need to keep them happy and motivated to work for you and get the sales coming in. Here are 8 things you can do to sustain affiliates’ interest in your program.

Payment frequency and amount:

Many affiliate program owners struggle with the issue of what is the correct commission to reward affiliates with. While paying too little can easily demotivate affiliates, paying too much can quickly rob you of your finances. Ideally, you need to have varying commission rates depending on your affiliates’ performances. If an affiliate is consistently performing well, then you need to offer a higher commission scale as compared to the other affiliates. You could also stress on performance as the main criteria for commissions. Have frequent appraisal mechanisms to gauge the performance of your affiliates.

Approval and banning mechanisms:

One of the features that any successful affiliate program that is run through affiliate marketing system needs to have is the ability to approve or ban affiliates as per the owner’s discretion. For example, if an affiliate has been using unethical means or illegal means to divert traffic to your program it could damage your business and reputation. Such affiliates can initially be let off with a warning but if it persists then you have to ban them. The same way, approval mechanisms can be based on initial tests and screening modes. By banning bad affiliates you will be able to protect your online business and reputation and more importantly - save yourself from their spam or fraudulent activities.

Regular contact is vital:

Staying in touch with affiliates not only makes them feel you are clued in but also helps you understand the issues that are plaguing them. This way, you know what is going on behind the scenes in your affiliate program and you will be better equipped to handle them. Ability to contact affiliates lets you receive a feedback about your affiliate program - what is good, what is bad. Such feedback can easily help you improve your affiliate program, because your affiliates always provide the best tips that help you make your affiliate program even more attractive.

Bonuses are important:

Try developing a bonus or reward program, which remunerates deserving affiliates who work for you. Many companies make the mistake of treating their affiliates poorly, which can backfire badly. If you want top quality sales then you need to treat affiliates well.

Traffic sources:

It is imperative that you know where your affiliates are bringing in traffic from. If a particular affiliate is performing exceedingly well, make sure to assess the traffic source. Your affiliate marketing system should allow you to track all the traffic that comes to your products sales pages and then find out where all the buyers come from.

Tracking mechanisms:

It is also important to have a good quality tracking mechanism for your affiliate program in place to see how many sales your affiliates have made. Then depending on statistics you can pay them accordingly. A good affiliate marketing network should provide you with all the data about your affiliate’s performance: views, visitors brought, product sales and conversion rates. When you have such data, you can easily analyze it and find out which affiliates performs the best/worst. With all this information you can reward your best performing ones with additional affiliate commissions, etc.

Training and support:

Even though your affiliates maybe the best in the industry they still need support and training specific to your products and the whole affiliate system. Therefore, you need to provide them with training materials and literature so they can know more about your products. However, your affiliate program system should handle all the support regarding the program’s functionality - educate your affiliates on how to utilize your affiliate system to make even more sales, how to track everything, etc. So you need not only to provide help for your affiliates, but you also need to be sure that your selected affiliate management system provides all the support for them too. Only then you will succeed.

Variety of promotion:

It is also vital that you offer your affiliates as many methods and tips on how to promote and advertise your product - their affiliate links - as possible. Try using a combination of banner ads, articles, blogs, PPC and others to get maximum traffic. Create a good looking page for affiliates to signup, this way you will recruit a lot of great affiliates that will become your program’s members. This way your affiliates can get you more sales.

If you want to start your own affiliate marketing business online and sell products, then you should definitely check Click2sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu). They have all the tools to sell products online, run your affiliate program and manage all affiliates. The best thing is that they provide support and help all the members. A built in affiliate network will definitely help you increase your sales and make your affiliate program a success.

Egidijus Andreika asked:


There are many different affiliate management systems available. You have to select the best one so that you can get good profit and your affiliates are also happy. This article explains 10 most important things that should be present in a great affiliate management system, so you would be able to run your affiliate marketing business easily:

1) Complete control over recruitment of Affiliates:

This is the basic requirement of any affiliate management system because if you don’t have control over the number of affiliates joining and promoting your affiliate program you might be soon end up in loss or some spammers or your competitor may try to break down your affiliate system and create loss in your business. So, wisely choose the affiliate management system which provides complete control over the affiliates so you would be able to contact them, offer them help, request information and keep in-touch.

2) Offer multiple payment options for your customers and affiliates:

Your affiliates are distributed geographically all over the world. In one region particular payment option will be available and the same will not be available in some other region. PayPal is a good option because they are almost present in all countries but you can’t withdraw the money in some countries like Egypt where you can use MoneyBookers to withdraw the money. So, your affiliate management system should enable your affiliates to receive the payment via lot of payment processors else they will not work for you. Offer as much affiliate payment options as possible and then you will have no problem getting your product promoted!

3) Affiliate visitor and sales tracking is a must - track as much details as possible:

The affiliate management system should be able to provide you the ratio between the number of visitors and the sales made by them. This can help you to find out your best affiliate and reward your best affiliate every month it will create a healthy competition among your affiliates and you will enjoy the benefits of it. You must be able to track all details of your affiliates activities: views and visitors that your affiliates bring, the number of sales, conversion rates of your promotional partners, refund rates. Some systems even allow you to track the websites referring sales to your website and even keywords used on search engines to find and buy your products.

4) Affiliate reward system based on their performance:

The affiliate management system should not give the same amount of commission to all your affiliates i.e., it should provide more commission to those who bring quality traffic and make good sales and should give somewhat less commission to poor performers. So, that your good affiliates will try to work even harder to get more commission per sale. Make sure to select the system that allows you to set custom affiliate commission percentages for each certain affiliate. Then you will be able to reward your best performing ones!

5) Ban the affiliates if they use illegal methods - Affiliate BAN mechanism :

Some of your affiliates may bring traffic to your site by spamming or by redirecting their browser in malicious manner and some may buy your product if they like it but more than 95% visitors will consider your site to be malicious site and trying to spam them. So, it will bring bad reputation to your business hence, your affiliate management system should identify these affiliates and ban them. Your affiliate management system should allow you to identify these scammers - by allowing you to track number of visitors, websites used by affiliate to refer visitors - and then ban if you feel that certain affiliate hurts your reputation.

6) Be in contact with your affiliates - always stay in touch with them:

Money is the main factor for which your affiliates are working for you, but it isn’t the only factor which helps you to retain your affiliates. More or less all the affiliate programs offered by different product sellers are almost the same, so you can have an advantage if you do something different than what others do, you can do this by being in contact with your affiliates try to understand their problem and help them whenever they need your support and get their suggestions to improve your product. Always help your affiliates by contacting them personally, asking if they need some help. This way they will reward you with a lot of sales!

7) Keep track the refund rates of each certain affiliate:

When your customer is not happy with your product they request you to refund the money and you have to do this to maintain good reputation. There are basically two reasons for which your customers will ask you to refund: first is when the product is not really worth the other reason is they might be given some wrong information about the product by your affiliates and when they didn’t find that feature in your product they will request you to refund. So, your system should be able to track down those affiliates and ban them if they bring too many sales that ends up as a refund request - in order to protect your product and online reputation.

Track all websites that bring you visitors and sales via affiliate links:

Tracing down the source from where visitors arrive. Your affiliate management system should be able to trace out from where your customers are coming from i.e., the source which directs them to find the sales page and buy your product. After pinpointing it you have to focus advertising there to boost your sales. Such tracking capabilities allow you to identify the most profitable ‘traffic sources’ and concentrate on them (if it’s an affiliate - offer additional help, etc.). This way you can easily make your profits soar!

9) Flexible affiliate training capabilities:

You should provide training to your affiliates about your product so that they can understand what they are selling, its advantages and disadvantages. This will help them greatly to convince their visitors to make them buy your product. Provide all possible promotional materials - banners, pre-written articles, e-mail letters and other content for your affiliates. Your affiliate management system should allow you to place and manage all promotional tools and thus enable your affiliates to access them easily whenever they need to.

10) Track all keywords that bring you visitors and sales and manage affiliates effectively:

Your affiliate management system should be able to find out the keywords used by the visitors to find your product on search engines like Google, yahoo or other search engines. This report can be used to stress these words more in other search engines by using the Meta tags and using ad services of Google, yahoo or other ad service providers. You should be able to track all keywords that people use to find your product via pay per click campaigns such as Google Adwords or Y! Search marketing or regular search engines. Once you find keywords that bring sales, you can easily concentrate on them, bid higher to get even more traffic and sales!

If your affiliate management system has these 10 things then you can be assured that you will make good profit, but always try to improve your system according to the latest technology so that you are always ahead of your competitors. We would recommend you to join Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) affiliate management system. It allows you to sell your products online, run your affiliate marketing business and manage all your affiliates easily with a help of great statistical and analytics features. Choose a good affiliate manage system that will enable you succeed online!