I think there are no such merchants who do not want to have affiliates and their free sales. I mean – every merchant desires to signup as many active affiliates as possible and make even more money without putting much efforts for product’s promotion.

Simply speaking:
more active affiliates = more sales = higher profits = richer merchant.

Now there is quite common problem: every merchant wants to have as many active affiliates as possible, however not every merchant understands the importance of recruiting affiliates himself/herself.

What does it mean to recruit affiliates yourself?

It’s quite simple – just create a simple page for ‘Affiliates’ and add a small link at the top or bottom of your product’s sales page.

Many merchants still overlook an opportunity to recruit affiliates. They overlook the opportunity to provide affiliates with all the promotional tools about their product to promote. I mean… A merchant simply signs up, add a product to the system, then adds "buy-now" buttons on the product’s sales page. However, he/she doesn’t add ANY page for ‘Affiliates’.

This way all website visitors who visit the sales page and do not buy the product are simply lost.

By analyzing various affiliate marketplaces (not only Click2Sell’s), you can find quite obvious product’s profit dependency on quantity of provided promotional materials for affiliates. There are some top merchants on Click2Sell.EU that have created their own  custom page for ‘Affiliates’ to signup and have really great results with affiliates activities.

What do they do differently?

It’s simple: these top merchants treat affiliates as ‘kings’ or ‘queens’. They provide everything for their affiliates, so they could start promoting their products right away. Such merchants create many materials that might be used to promote an affiliate program: pre-written e-mail letters to friends, banners, articles, all the instructions on how to signup on Click2Sell.EU and start promoting affiliate products.

So the conclusion is clear: the more you help your affiliates, the more work you do for them, the better reward you can expect from your potential affiliates.

The top mistake that most merchants make when creating a good page for ‘Affiliates’ is just a lack of provided promotional tools.

If you are about to create your new page for ‘Affiliates’ to signup, make sure you include all the following tools:

• Banner ads of various sizes: banners should vary in sizes, content, images. Provide as many different banners as possible. This way your affiliates will have a big variety of banners available to place on their websites, blogs, forums and etc. Don’t forget to include html codes of each provided banner, so affiliates would be able to easily select, copy and paste the code into the website. Make sure to remind your affiliates to replace XXXXX with his/her username in your provided affiliate link for your product.
   
• Pre-written e-mails: make sure to write at least one or two versions of ‘Tell a friend’ e-mail. This way your website visitors could recommend your product to their friends, relatives or even e-mail such letter to their mailing list. This could easily result you in a lot of additional sales!
   
• Articles: write promotional articles about your product and add them on your page for ‘Affiliates’. Many affiliates have websites or blogs and search for quality content. This way they could easily copy and paste your articles, modify their affiliate links and post your content. More exposure for your articles – more traffic and sales for you.
   
• Provide keywords to use on Pay-Per-Click campaigns: many active affiliates promote products using pay-per-click campaigns such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, etc. Don’t be lazy. Just search for ‘keyword research tool’ in any search engine and you will find some great tools to research your product’s keywords. Spend at least a few hours researching keywords that suit your product. Make a list of the most targeted keywords, then a list of some less targeted keywords. Provide all these lists for your affiliates on your website, so they could copy & paste them into their pay-per-click campaigns. If you use pay-per-click campaigns youself, so you might already know which keywords convert for your product. Provide the best converting keywords. Your affiliates will thank-you for this!
   
• Create mini landing pages for your product: you can provide your own created mini landing pages for your affiliates. Just insert your product’s affiliate link into that website, so your affiliates could easily get the page’s code, edit the affiliate link and use it for promotion. Click2Sell.EU has a great feature: just attach "?checkout" string at the end of affiliate link and that link will lead affiliates’ referred visitors straight to your product’s checkout page on Click2Sell.EU (read about the future). This way your affiliates can have more flexibility to create, modify and adjust their mini landing page for your product and drive visitors straight to the checkout page.
   
• Ask honest people to write some reviews about your website for free distribution: provide these reviews for affiliates, so they would be able to post these reviews on their blogs, websites or any other source to promote your product. Don’t forget to place affiliate links for your affiliates in such reviews or at least leave some space, so they could put all necessary links on their own.
   
• Provide in-depth instructions on how to signup on your affiliate program: don’t forget to write step-by-step instructions on how to signup on your affiliate program, how to generate an own affiliate link and start promoting your product. This way you could easily help those people who are new to affiliate marketing or don’t know how to properly start promoting your product.
   
• Provide all your contact information: many merchant websites don’t have any contact information at all. You can’t imagine how many people you could turn off if you don’t provide your contact information. You should provide at least a simple e-mail contact form to contact you. Make sure to state that you welcome Joint Ventures and other beneficial partnerships/proposals. This way you could recruit not only JV partnerships, but also your potential affiliates might be able to contact you, ask you questions about your affiliate program and ask for your help.

You might also provide all information and instructions for affiliates on how to cloak and protect affiliate links, how to promote an affiliate link/your product website: where, which certain websites, which promotional methods to use and many other useful tips that could be used. Provide as much information as possible. The more you provide, the easier it will be for your affiliates to start promoting your affiliate program successfully. This will definitely result in an increased number of sales and more profit for you!

Just remember this: the more work you do yourself to help your affiliates promote your product, the higher number of affiliates and their sales you can expect!

Sincerely,
Egidijus

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