Keeping Affiliates Happy

Once you recruit affiliates, it’s also important to keep them happy. Happy affiliates will be more likely to promote your products. They may even tell other people about you too. That’s why developing relationships, communicating, and following up with your affiliates is so important.

Developing Relationships

In business one of the most important things you’re going to do aside from creating amazing products that your audience needs, is building mutually beneficial relationships with other people. In order to build relationships with affiliates, you need to understand them as a separate audience. They have different needs from the people that buy or get your products. To help you build your affiliate relationships, here are a few things you want to do.

• Communicate – Use email, webinars, teleseminars, and other forms of communication with your affiliates. Some of them will prefer email and others will like the one-on-one feel of webinars. When you keep your affiliates abreast of new products to come, changes in old products, sales, and other information they’re going to be that much more likely to stick with you and promote you because of the trust that you develop.

• Listen – Communication is a two-way street. Therefore, it’s imperative that you also open the lines of communication in reverse. Ask them questions, conduct surveys, and connect one on one with your highest sellers. For example, you can have a trigger number of sales that elevates your affiliates to your affiliate inner circle where you can help them with all kinds of things.

• Ask for Feedback – When you send out new products to your affiliates, ask for feedback so you can make the product better before launch. You don’t have to send it to everyone who signs up for your program. Choose a few affiliates for feedback, based on your knowledge of them and their reputation in the business.

• Show Your Personality – People do business with those that they like, know and trust. The more you can connect with your affiliates and find ways to show your character, the more you can enhance this effect. Add a little personal information in your emails, webinars, and live videos, and live events. Seeing and hearing you can make a huge impression.

• Be a Helpful Resource – When you really want to have a real relationship with someone, you seek to be helpful. Even if the assistance has nothing to do with your business, being helpful and pointing people in the right direction will go far in helping you solidify your relationships.

• While you may not be able to pay as close attention as you’d like to each individual affiliate, you can use the information and tools at your disposal to build relationships that will stand the test of time and encourage even more sales if you’re open to it. Use email automation, set up training series, host live webinars to talk about your new products and to get ideas, and otherwise be open to new ways to connect with your affiliates.

• Keeping Track of People you talk To — When you are seeking to impress people, one way to do that is to remember who you’ve talked to and what you talked about. A good way to do this is to use some sort of customer relationship software or help ticket software. This is true even if you aren’t really providing customer service to your affiliates due to a product they bought. The help desk software will keep track of all your conversations so that you can easily stick to your promises.

• Hosting Contests – A good way to kick off some relationship building is to plan and host a contest for your affiliates. Give away some iPads, cash, and depending upon your price range, perhaps a free trip. The more outrageous you can be with your contest the more attention it’ll get.

• Do What Needs to Be Done – Affiliate’s needs depend on their audience too. Suppose an affiliate contacts you and asks you to do a live webinar with them. It is to be played “live” multiple times. This is a good promotional item to offer your top affiliates. It will help you develop relationships as you get to know each other as you work together on the webinar and get other people involved.

Finally, the most important thing of all is to follow up. Even if affiliates contact you infrequently, make sure that you do contact them. Connect, encourage, and connect more. Always deliver top-notch services, products, and tools.

Affiliate Software & Tools

A variety of tools and software can be used to recruit affiliates. Consider all the things you need to do – keep track of people, your products, affiliates’ commissions, and payouts. You also need to be able to give them marketing materials easily. Try these tools and you’ll do great.

• Website Building Software – The best website building software right now, hands down, is self-hosted WordPress. You can learn a lot about WordPress by going to their website at WordPress.org. Look for premium WordPress themes or use a free one if you like.

• Website Hosting – There are many different website hosts but you need a good host that offers security, safety, and great customer service. Some good choices are Bluehost.com, Momwebs.com, and Hostgator.com.

• Landing Pages – While you can use your regular WordPress installation to make a perfectly legitimate landing page if you want the bells and whistles consider getting good software like Leadpages.net, or InstaPage.com or other specific landing page software. It will make it a lot easier for you.

• File Storage & Delivery – The best file storage and delivery software is Amazon S3. It’s very inexpensive and you only pay for what you use. It enables you to deliver your products easily and quickly.

• Email Marketing Software – There are some standard programs, as well as newer options that look great. Try Aweber.com, ConvertKit.com, or GetDrip.com. It depends on what you think you need.

• Affiliate Shopping Cart Software – Different programs have various features but a few have everything you need. Try Amember.com if you want to be in complete charge of your products and affiliates. Try one of the networks like JVZOO.com if you don’t want to host or run the software yourself.

• File Sharing & Storage – Even though you may use Amazon S3 for product delivery, Dropbox will work great as well to deliver information to others on a smaller scale and to keep track of your work.

• Automation – If you want to connect your apps together and create some amazing automation, Zapier.com is great software to try.

• Paying People – Right now PayPal.com is the standard. However, there are other options like Stripe.com. Most shoppers on the net are used to using PayPal now. PayPal lets you set up “mass pay” so that you can pay more than one affiliate at a time by uploading a spreadsheet.

• Communication – There are many ways to communicate information to your affiliates. You can invite them to a private Facebook group, or you can create a sign in using software like Amember.com. This software has an affiliate area, which can house messages, graphics, and other promotional materials. Keep in mind a central place works better than using regular email.

• Help Desk – There is also software that you can set up that both your customers and your affiliates can use to get help. Software like Manage Engine’s Service Desk Plus is one such option.

• Graphics – You’re going to need plenty of graphics to help promote your products and make affiliates happy. Try using Canva.com to help you. What’s great is that if you get Canva for Work you can save your branding and upload new fonts.

• Promotions – You will want to use different types of software to promote your business such as HootSuite.com to help you automate much of the work promoting on social media.

• People – While people aren’t often thought of as tools, they are. They’re part of your resources that you need to consider. Think of hiring an affiliate manager who understands software and how everything works so that you can focus on product creation.

Finding tools that will help you run your affiliate program will give you more time to create products that your affiliates can promote. Much of the work that you put in up front will pay off later when your affiliate program seems to run itself and you’re raking in the money.

What to Do Now

The best things to do are to figure out what affiliate software to use, get it setup, and then build relationships. Build relations with your own audience and with potential super affiliates. Make your affiliate program the best you can. Offer great commissions, excellent marketing resources, and deliver an amazing product to become successful.

You can also start by using one of the affiliate networks instead, such as Clickbank.net and JVZOO.com. But, consider building your own affiliate program using software that helps you build relationships with a self-hosted program or software. The reason is that you own that, someone else owns the networks. But, they are a good place to begin while you build up your affiliate army.