How To Motivate Affiliates

How to motivate affiliates? This is one question thats frequently asked around by merchants. A good question! After all, youre building affiliates for your own good they sell for you!

When you create your own product or service, you have to put in a lot of effort, time, and money to promote it. If you spend this time and money on building affiliates, you can expand your business at a faster rate. However, simply building a vast network of affiliates is not enough; you need to motivate affiliates, so that they dont become inactive over a period of time.

Tools

In order to motivate affiliates, the first thing that you need to do is give them lots of tools to work with! You cant just hand over your product to somebody and ask them to promote. You need to give them all the support they need. Its YOUR business, not theirs!

The tools include email copies, text links, PopUp ads, eZine ads, Image ads, banner ads, Top Sponsor ads, Signature ads, and others.

Motivators

Its true that money is the biggest motivator. But, its also true that there are times when people want more than just money. They want your attention; your appreciation. Apart from those crispy dollar notes, there are other things that motivate affiliates to a great extent. Here are some examples:

Provide training to motivate affiliates. There are many people who are skeptical about theirs skills to sell. Hence, they lack confidence and dont work well. When you offer to train them, they get a confidence boost and are ready to do the job for you.
Providing recognition to your affiliates on their sales. Whenever they make sales, appreciate them, or give them some incentives. Recognition is the second biggest motivator after money!
Organize contests.
Carry out an Affiliate Reward Program.

Remember, NEVER COMPETE with your affiliates! There are product owners who take up the task of making sales along with their affiliates. The result is: they cease to motivate affiliates; instead, start competing with them!

When you build an affiliate network, you should make your affiliates know that youre interested in their success too; not solely your own. Only then will you be able to motivate affiliates successfully.

Another thing to remember is affiliates are NOT your employees. They are independent workers and will want to work when they see something beneficial for themselves too. Therefore, you have to be a selfless fish that has no qualms in sharing waters of the pond with other fishes. However, you need to be clever enough to keep your own space!

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