Secrets To Getting Affiliates To Sell Your Niche Products And Services

One of the quickest methods of increasing the sales of your niche product or service is to start an affiliate program. An affiliate program is simply a system you can implement which allows other people to sell your product or service and earn a commission on each sale. The higher the commission you pay, the more affiliates you will attract to sell your product.

Your best affiliates are unlikely to want any help from you when it comes to selling your product or service; they will most likely be experienced marketers themselves and could probably teach you a thing or two about selling online.

You can't rely only on experienced affiliates, there will be a considerable number of people who will join your affiliate program who are inexperienced in some aspects of internet marketing and the onus is on you to help them in any way you can.

First things first however, you need to set up your affiliate program so even the most seasoned internet marketer will feel comfortable joining your affiliate program. Important issues you must address are:

1) Pay a reasonable commission on each sale. Most information product authors pay commissions in the 40% to 60% range. The point is not to be greedy, make it worth the experienced marketer's time to promote your product.

2) Pay the commissions due your affiliates regularly. Once per month is the average for most affiliate programs so you never want to exceed that. When sales are good, you might want to consider twice monthly payments to your affiliates.

3) Don't use an overly high minimum payment threshold. In the old days when check payments were expensive to generate, many affiliate programs introduced a minimum earning threshold. They did this because it was pointless raising a check for a small amount when the bank charges and postage costs were more than the value of the check. Another reason the minimum was introduced was because it was so expensive for foreign affiliates to deposit the checks into their bank accounts.

Now days international banking has become common place and therefore considerably cheaper, and there are also other payment mediums such as PayPal which make it feasible to pay smaller amounts to your affiliates.

4) Always pay your affiliates on time. Never miss a payment date unless you have very good reason to do so - not having any money is NOT a good reason, you must plan for all your payments. Nothing will scare experienced marketers away quicker than somebody who misses payment dates and then has no reasonable excuse. They might forgive you once, but not twice.

5) Use an accurate system for recording sales, commissions due and commissions paid. People need to know how they are doing with your affiliate program. They need to know how much traffic they have sent to their affiliate link. They also want to know how many sales they have made and when they can expect payment. If you have paid them they need to know when you sent the check or made the transfer.

Pay attention to these five issues and your affiliates, particularly the experienced ones will be happy, but you also need to offer a helping hand to your inexperienced affiliates by creating:

1) A number of text advertisements that can be used in the affiliate's email advertising, be it in their own ezine or for solo ads in other people's ezines.

You must test these text advertisements and make sure they are effective at generating sales before placing them in your affiliate resource center.

2) A number of classified ads for affiliates to use either as classified advertisements or as top sponsor ads in those ezines that accept advertising.

As with the text ads, you must test all your classified ads before placing them in your affiliate center.

3) A few different banner ads - there are still a few places where banner ads can attract sales, but for the most part banner advertising is not that effective.

One type of banner advertisement that is worth spending some time getting professionally made because it attracts sales is the 120 x 240 pixel, or the slightly longer 120 x 600 pixel banner which people can place under the Google Adsense code on their web pages.

4) Links to training materials which will help your affiliates become better internet marketers. You have a vested interest in their success because the more successful they become, the more money you both make.