Affiliate Marketing Tips – Our Top 10

When you’re looking into affiliate marketing as a way of increasing your online sales or enquiries, read our top 10 tips to get the lowdown on what you should and shouldn’t be doing;

• Make sure you’ve got a good website

Fairly obvious, but if your website isn’t up to scratch then people aren’t going to buy from it and affiliates won’t waste their time or money trying to get people to visit it in the first place.

• Keep your affiliates updated

If you’re running promotions which are being actively marketed by affiliates on your behalf then it’s only fair that you update people if you decide to alter or stop your promotion altogether.

• Remember affiliates are not your employees

If you have affiliates working on your behalf to try and drive sales or enquires for you online, it’s important to remember that they are not your employees. If you start to hassle your affiliates over lack of sales or anything else, you’ll probably find they will just look for another merchant instead.

• Publicise your affiliate programme on your website

Don’t keep your affiliate marketing programme a secret. It’s a good idea to put enough details on your website to entice people to find out more or want to sign up straight away.

• Check out your competition

Before you decide on how much commission you want to pay your affiliates you should do a bit of research into what rewards your competitors are offering and whether it’s per sale, per lead or another method.

• Pay affiliates on time

Again, this may sound obvious but so many merchants fail to pay their affiliates on time. If you have people doing a great job at bringing in business for your company, it’s only right that they should be paid promptly.

• Make your offer appealing

If you’re a bit of a scrooge then affiliate marketing probably isn’t right for your business. It can cost a lot of money, time and expertise to bring relevant traffic to your website and affiliates rightly expect to be rewarded accordingly. For example, if you’re offering a £5 commission on orders for a £150 digital camera, don’t expect any affiliates to take you up on your offer.

• Use an affiliate network

Depending on the size of your business and the number of affiliates you want to recruit, it can be beneficial to use one of the large affiliate marketing networks to save yourself a lot of time looking after your programme.

• Get to know your affiliates

Once you have your trusted affiliates in place and they’re working well for you, it’s a good idea to try and build a relationship with them. Remember that affiliates are not employees so if a better offer comes along they may decide to jump ship. By creating a bit of a rapport and making sure you contact them regularly to find out if they’re happy or have any feedback you can try to establish a bit of mutual loyalty.

• Use incentives to further increase sales

From time to time you may want to create a bit of healthy competition amongst your affiliates by offering a bonus for the best performing affiliate in a given week or month.

The affiliates benefit from working harder and earning more commission and your business will benefit from the increase in sales or enquiries.

If you liked this article you may also want to read my small business e-commerce tips

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.