Affiliate programs: What affiliates and Publishers want from your program

Time and time again affiliate programs are dominated by a few so called “Super Affiliates,” those few affiliates make 80% of the income out of your affiliate program.
So what can you do to turn your junior affiliates into Super Affiliates?
Get a great Affiliate Tool page and follow these tips:

• Make sure that your product is reliable and that your website works. By working, I mean your website has the best visitor to sales conversion you can squeeze out of it. Test, tweak, test, tweak don’t stop. Affiliates only want to refer their potentials to sites that generate CASH $$$.
• Really good affiliates check out company they are promoting. They don’t want to waste their time and efforts on fly-by-night organizations. Spend the time to make yourself look good and solid.
• Keep an open line of communication going. Make it easy for them to contact you and if you have trouble with your payment systems, just let them know, most affiliates are quite understanding. And if they make you a lot of money, listen when they offer suggestions for improvement.
• Recurring Commissions, one time payouts are good, but if you can create a program with recurring commissions (like a membership site) affiliates might just beat a path to your door.
• Don’t go all MLM on them. 1st tier and 2nd tier commission are good, start going past that and you begin to look like a scam.
• Make ‘em pretty, make ‘em light. Affiliates love attractive banners and ads, but hate bloated graphics. Make sure you optimize all of your affiliate images.
• Tracking and Sales reporting are a key component. Affiliates often worry about getting burned by a merchant. Give them a place where they can see how they’re doing and feel confident they are getting the commissions they deserve.
• Top affiliates want your tracking to stick. By this I mean, if your sales are tracked via cookies make sure the cookies stay active for months or even a year!
• Pay your affiliates often. $25 – $50 minimums are good. Affiliates that get checks each month think about you more when they are ready to do more promotions.
• Regular payments make affiliates happy. Make sure you hold funds back to cover your money-back-guarantee period, and then pay your affiliates quickly after that.
• Your affiliate program terms should be short, clear and to the point. Address acceptable use, spam, malware and the consequences for violating your terms.

In summary, the merchant affiliate relationship is based on money and trust. Both are hard to replace when lost.

Building Super Affiliates takes a little work but pays off big in the long run.

Give them the tools and the confidence they want/need and they will make you A LOT of money.

Zachary