How Much Help Do You Need to Give to Affiliates?

When you decide to start offering affiliates the opportunity to earn money with your products, one question that inevitably will arise is "How much help do they need?" Do you need to provide banners? Sales text?

What you need to do depends in large part upon how much control you need over what the affiliates are doing and how easy you want to make sales for them.

It is generally a good idea to have banners ready for affiliates. This ensures that there is a consistent and professional look to your banner ads. These don't work as well as text ads, but many affiliates will try them.

You will want to ensure that affiliates understand what they can and cannot say about your products. You don't want to get into trouble for exaggerated claims made by affiliates. Write this into your Terms of Service for affiliates.

Having at least some basic prewritten text ads for affiliates can be quite useful. It gives them a feel for what you like your advertising to say and may help the brainstorming for those affiliates who prefer to write their own content. Many affiliates will simply place your text ads, so be certain that they do work.

Offer some basic marketing advice to affiliates. Suggest they do product reviews, compare with other products, etc.

Some companies do like to offer full-fledged sales letters for their affiliates to use. Test these thoroughly before offering them to your affiliates. You want your affiliates to be happy with the tools you provide. However, also encourage them to write their own sales letters.

Make sure your affiliates understand that they cannot spam anyone with your products. This must be a cause for removal from your affiliate program without pay so as to strongly discourage such tactics. An affiliate spamming in your name can get your website shut down or do other harm to your business.

If you have an online store, decide whether or not you want to offer a datafeed. This would allow affiliates to create their own stores around your products. This is a more advanced technique, but if you have a lot of products, a datafeed, particularly if it is free, will help to attract serious affiliates.

Is it utterly necessary to provide affiliates with any assistance? No, but it is tremendously helpful in attracting affiliates to your program. You also don't want too many people creating banners for your website, as inevitably some will come across as amateurish and give a negative impression of your company. Give at least enough help that affiliates can market like professionals.

Add to Your Social Bookmarks:

Comments	Date

Name:
Email:
Comments :