Amazon.com was one of the first and most successful companies to start build a successful affiliate program. It now already has approximately 150,000 partners working for it, who simply send their visitors and customers to Amazon.com. Amazon Affiliates get paid every time a visitor clicks on or purchases products from Amazon.com.
The opinions of affiliate marketers vary from extremely negative to enthusiastic. There are both disappointed and those who earn 10-20% of the total turnover thanks to the affiliate program. Like any marketing tool, an affiliate program must be properly organized and applied.
Affiliate programs are an opportunity to get hundreds and even thousands of visitors from other web resources to your site and increase sales of your products several times. And the best part is that you don’t pay anything while others drive traffic for you! You pay only for results – percent of product sales. But at the same time, you should realistically evaluate how the affiliate program works.
There are two ways to create your own affiliate program
The first way is through a special web service that will take all the worries instead of you. Such services will provide search and selection of partners and perform administrative functions such as calculating payments to partners, monitoring, reporting, etc. But, as a rule, you will pay a higher percentage than if you did it all yourself.
The second way is to buy or create your own affiliate program management software.
How to build a successful affiliate program from scratch?
A good product is the most important thing, so we will repeat several times that you must have a good product that is of real value to your customers and matches the description and characteristics in the sales text. This is especially true if you want to attract the very best partners.
A website with a high bounce rate is the biggest mistake most people make when trying to create their affiliate program. They open an affiliate program, not yet convinced of the effectiveness of their website sales. Wrong! You need a website that sells! If you do not have your own selling website that provides detailed information about the product and allows the buyer to make a purchase, you will not be able to successfully organize an affiliate program and get the desired effect from it.
The size of commissions for partners is a very important component for any member of your affiliate program, as it determines how much money they can make. To do this, it is important to decide on what scheme you will pay commissions – pay per action, per sales or per click. Top affiliate members have a limited number of places on their websites and emails, so if one affiliate program brings them $ 1.50 per 1000 visitors, and yours only 25 cents – guess which affiliate program they choose?
Tools – Try to provide my partners with all the tools and assistance they need to work successfully. It is very important. Most affiliate programs offer their partners only a few banners, but this is clearly not enough for full-fledged work.
As soon as your site starts making sales, and your affiliate program is set up, it’s time to announce it and put the affiliate program on stream.
You must start with an existing customer base. Just send an email to your customers announcing the launch of your own affiliate program and wanting to see the reader as your partner by providing them with a link where they can register. Very often it happens that they themselves write, saying that if we had an affiliate program, they could join it.
Next, you can report your affiliate program in various affiliate directories on the Internet. In your ad, you should make sure to highlight the benefits of your affiliate program for partners. A good benefit, such as high commissions, is an important component.
What you want to create through your affiliate program is a community of your product loyalists and promoters. You will be surprised at how many partners are talking about their best programs or what they are promoting right now.
The most difficult thing is to attract professional partners to your affiliate program, for whom earnings on affiliate programs are the main income and the best of them earn hundreds or more thousand of dollars a month. There may be only 1% of such first-class partners from the entire list of your partners, but even this 1% can increase the sales of your product several times. Professional partners are the owners of various e-mail newsletters with tens of thousands of subscribers or visited sites, or advertising specialists who own a huge client list.
A good way to attract these people is to enter your product theme or keywords into a search engine, look at a few sites on the first page of the SERP, and contact the owners of those websites. Another great way is networking.
Reasons for failure
Before starting your own affiliate program, it is important to understand and consider the most common mistakes of other affiliate programs so that they don’t cause your affiliate marketing failures and disappointments.
Let’s say you have 55 partners, two of them are the owners of partner online stores. The next three are professional bloggers, the sixth is search partners, the seventh and eighth are niche partners, and the ninth and tenth are coupon sites. The sales of these ten partners can account for 60% of the monthly sales. The other 45 partners are various bloggers, one-stop online stores, and coupon sites. All of them require special attention and personal training if you want to receive active sales from them. Your goal is to expand this list of partners to 110 by next year.
Don’t be lazy to talk to your partners on the phone as often as possible. Try to understand what they need to be successful and provide them with the information they need most based on the way they choose to participate in the affiliate program. Typically, your partners have a pretty good idea of what they are doing; they just need to be told how they can do better.
Owners of partner online stores need constantly updated catalogs and information about the bestselling products. Bloggers need up-to-date sales and specials data. Niche partners should have an idea of which banners give the best conversion, as well as be aware of the features of the product being promoted that are not mentioned on the site. Owners of coupon sites should be kept informed about exclusive merchandise.
A competent manager will definitely spend his time writing a newsletter that includes lists of “hit” products and key queries, as well as information about new products, upcoming agreements, best customers, and unique ideas for business development that are not yet used by affiliates. Don’t limit yourself to mailing. Contact each partner individually via personal mail, phone, Twitter, Facebook, or blog – whichever is more convenient.
Conclusions
It is important to remember that the affiliate is your partner, not a client. Affiliates don’t need beautiful “nothing” newsletters – they don’t want to hear that your product is the best, they want to know how they can increase sales and increase conversion rates. And, of course, all of them must be sure that any issue related to customer service will be resolved immediately, and that their interests will not be infringed on the background interests of the selling company.
