by Garrett Robins

Created on: September 07, 2010

In order to have a successful affiliate marketing program online, you need to have these basic knowledge in researching, recruiting and training your affiliates. These three stages have a big impact on your success, thus, you can never go wrong when working on each of these.

Once again, it's hard to compete online and make your offer stand out among the rest, so here are the things you need to be ready and work on the hardest when you want to make a successful affiliate marketing program online.

Researching your Affiliates

When researching for potential affiliates there are few tools that I strongly recommend to have them installed on your PC. Some are free and the other one is a paid software. The paid software is not essential to your success but they do cut the research time down by about 90 percent.

The Alexa Toolbar – this tool lets you see information related to the site yo are looking at including the Name of the Owner, Email Address, Physical Address, Phone Number, Other sites created by the owner and Other site related to that site.

The Google Toolbar – this toolbar will show the PR (page Rank) of the site. If you can get higher ranked sites to promote for you that is great.

SEO Elite – This tool lets you pull out sites related to the keywords you type in and export the list to an Excel sheet for you. At that point you can sort through the list of what is most relevant to you and get ready to make the phone calls.

Recruiting your Affiliates

Now that you have all these information, you are now ready to recruit your affiliates. You need to have all the work done for the affiliate BEFORE you contact them so all they have to do is CPP (Cut Past Promote). Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for potential affiliates to say yes. Before you recruit you need to be ready with these things:

How to craft you offer?

What affiliate tracking software should you use?

What percentage of the sale are you going to give out?

Should you reach them by phone or email?

What are the right and wrong things to say?

Should you mail them a package so they can see the product?

What tools are you going to provide for them to promote with?

Training your Affiliates

Now that you have all your affiliates ready and willing to sell your product, you need to take the time to train them to reach their full potential. Look at it this way. You wouldn’t hire a salesman in the offline world and just send him out without training on how to sell better. You also wouldn’t stop encouraging him and let him just lie around the office playing paper football. So why would you leave your online salesman hanging?

Here are a few ways we train our affiliate that have been successful:

Tele-Seminars (Get on the Monday morning bust out calls at….)

Seminars ( Dotcomsecrets.com)

Courses (Affiliate Bootcamp)

Newsletter’s ( get your affiliates to sign up for the Affiliator)

Webinars

Blogs

The goal is to connect with them and deliver powerful content that, in returns, makes you more money.

And remember to post all this training on an easily accessible site so new affiliates can catch up on the material. I don’t sit and listen to training at my computer and I’m sure you don’t either so make it available in MP3 format so it’s ready to download to their I-Pods or music players. Remember to make it as easy as you can for them to consume and apply.

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