Your own Affiliate Program

.When building your own affiliate network communicating with affiliates is one of the most important things for merchants to consider.

An affiliate's web site targets visitors, who may not necessarily view a merchant's web site, and therefore expands a merchants market very often at a fixed cost per sale.

Affiliate are often proting a number of merchants products or services and often are not able to keep up with every merchants products

Its key to ENGAGE the AFFILIATE

Not all affiliates are going to produce a high volume of sales for you. Lots of occasional sales are worthwhilet. Talk with successful affiliates, find out what they are doing to effectively promote your products and services. Use this information to help those affiliates who are not as successful but show potential.

Help affiliates in understanding your product. For affiliates to sucessfully drive sales to you they must understand the benefits of the product they are marketing. Once an affiliate knows the product, they will be better able to promote your product.

Make Communication Easy

Many 3rd party affiliate-tracking programs notify both the affiliate and merchant of a sale. This can often be automated and will create positive communication between merchants and affiliates. Making an affiliate's role easier will help them increase earnings and further promote a merchants site.

Provide affiliates with great looking graphics and sample text. Graphics that work best are those that highlight your web site, yet fit the look of an affiliate's web site.

Newsletters are another great way to get information to affiliates. Include tips and specific for affiliates, along with general marketing advice that helps with site promotion. But please make them interesting and relevant. We get at least ten a day and probably nine are deleted striaght away

Affiliate Don'ts

If an affiliate starts to generate sales for a product and the you decrease the commission they will feel cheated. They will have spent a lot of time and effort producing their website to generate sales for you. This sends a very negative message to the affiliate. Often an affiliate will remove your products either to promote another product or because they feel slighted. Once you have lost them you will have to work twice as hard to get them back. Remember affiliates are trying to make a living too!

Cheating

An affiliate sale occurs, you go to their website and don't find any links you decide they must be cheating you! This conclusion is simply a based on poor communication and reporting. Many, many affiliates have multiple sites, very few affiliate tracking programs allow affiliates to list multiple sites, and in many cases the number of sites listed do not accurately reflect the number of sites owned and managed by the affiliate. Additionally many affiliates manage opt-in newsletters that may result in sales, but links are not visible on a website.

Destination pages

Keep your links valid - don't keep changing them. If you update a section of the site or remove an offer provide a redirect or retain the link. Most affiliates will get irritated if they have to spend loads of time updating linkst. Generally its not a good idea for SEO either.

Added Incentives

Affiliates love added bonuses for reaching goals or specified levels of sales. Many of the 3rd party affiliate vendors run contests and provide large incentives for their top performing ones. Reward and praise successful affiliates.