Affiliate marketing is like ‘word of mouth’. If you like a product or service you tell your friends about it. Affiliate programs were invented to give people an incentive to tell other people about their positive experience with a product or services. Affiliates receive a portion or percentage of the sales price of an item as a reward.

It is recommended to only recommend products or services that you either personally use or you know the person well who offers the product and you know they always offer a good service. You need to be familiar with what you promote and happily endorse it. If you promote lower level products, your own reputation will suffer and people won’t easily believe your recommendations anymore.

I consider affiliate programs as essential online, especially when the affiliates are familiar with the product. One excellent example of a well functioning program is that of www.vaclassroom.com. Craig Cannings, the co founder, has created a large following with his quality training programs for virtual assistants and other online professionals. Craig’s customers happily spread the word about the training and earn a reward when someone signs up through their affiliate link. I would go as far as saying that VA Classroom wouldn’t be what it is today if there wasn’t an affiliate program and so many happy customers.

When you have a great program, service or product, why not ask your satisfied clients to spread the word for you? As any promotion always costs an effort, a little (or bigger) reward can work wonders in the willingness of people to refer you. Setting up an affiliate program needs some thought and shouldn’t be taken lightly, otherwise you might as well do nothing.

First of all, you need to be sure that there are happy customers who love your product or service. If you get lots of complaints you better forget it! Finetune your offerings and find happy customers first.

Once you get positive feedback, you can set up an affiliate program in a system such as 1shoppingcart. This process can be a bit difficult, so it might be advised to ask a skilled virtual assistant to help you with the set up as there is also some work on the website required. You need to create ‘thank you’ pages and affiliate centers with information for your new affiliates. Many people sign up for an affiliate program, but don’t know how to promote your services, where to promote them and how to go about it. Then they simply give up and don’t promote you.

A dedicated affiliate center will help them with these initial worries. You can give your affiliates advice on where to promote you, to which target market, which medium to use and even supply them with copy for their Twitter tweets and blog posts.  Additionally, you may wish to create attractive banners that your affiliates can use in their email signature and on their blog.

Often affiliates start strong and promote a service and then forget all about it. They are just as busy just as you are. It helps when you regularly contact your affiliates, encourage them and help them with any queries. Different promotions can also reactivate the interest of your affiliates. Craig Cannings, for example, frequently runs special promotions and offers additional prizes for his best affiliates. It works a charm and people get a renewed motivation to get the word out.

Managing the contact to your affiliates doesn’t need to be hard. You can set up autoresponders in the shoppingcart program so that your affiliates receive regular updates and reminders without you actually doing anything. All you need to do is have it all set up well right from the start.

Affiliates are valuable when you are launching bigger programs. Many entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to fill their training classes without affiliates. When you start planning a bigger launch, make sure you set up the affiliate program early on and recruit a little army of likeminded people who mix and mingle with your target market. Social Media is a great realm to recruit affiliates because people like to sign up for programs from people they know, like and trust. Don’t forget your existing clients: send out a broadcast and ask them to sign up for your affiliate program.

Don’t be shy when it comes to affiliate programs. If you have services or products that are of good quality, ask your happy customers to help you spread the word. Many people love helping out and earn a bit of pocket money while doing it.

If you are interested about affiliate programs, talk to us. We are able to help you setting it up.