It is almost very simple to get affiliates for your program. If you announce that you will provide good commission for their sales and run a good joint venture campaign then you can see that hundreds of people joining your affiliate program to promote as affiliates. But however keeping them working for you is a difficult task. There are many reasons for which they might leave you. This article will provide you 10 ways to make affiliates loyal and active.

• Good Payouts. The main reason why people join as your affiliates is that they want to earn money. So, if your competitor provides higher affiliate commissions for selling a similar product then your affiliates may stop working for you and will promote your competitor’s product. Hence to keep affiliates loyal try to provide best payout on the internet in particular more than that of your competitors.
   
• Training and Support for your affiliates. Your affiliate will work for you only until he gets some good profit for promoting your product. If he doesn’t have the knowledge about your product then how can he promote it, and it would result in poor performance of the affiliate and after sometime he may lose interest in your product. So, to you’re them working for you provide a affiliate good training and support whenever they need it and also provide all the details about your product to your affiliates. If possible give them the trial version of your ebook or software to check it out for themselves.  A simple trial version or sample of your product can provide much more benefits for affiliates. This way they can gain more knowledge about your product and will continue working for you.
   
• Offer Promotional Tools that make the life of affiliates easy. You should always try to help your affiliates to promote your business by providing some tools and tips. For instance you may provide the logo or the picture of your product or the banner explaining the product instead of expecting your affiliate to create them. In this way your affiliate will feel easy to work with you and will be loyal to you. Provide as much promotional tools as possible. You can easily provide the pre-written e-mail letters that could be used by affiliates during the e-mail marketing campaigns. Provide different sized banners, articles, even the best converting keywords lists for affiliates to use on pay per click campaigns. They will definitely thank you for all your efforts to help them by bringing even more sales.
   
• Instant and frequent payments. Some of the affiliate programs say that they will give out the money to their affiliates only when a certain amount of money is earned as affiliate commission. The affiliates feel this system as bad one because they wish to get their money that they have earned whenever they wish. So, you have to pay them instantly whenever you receive payment request from them. This will create a good impression about you, so you can earn more loyal affiliates. You can use a good merchant – affiliate marketing system that would allow you to process all payments to affiliates.
   
• Offer multiple Payment options for Affiliates. This is another way to make your affiliates loyal and active. In different parts of the world different payment options are famous or supported. So, you have to understand that and provide a lot of payment options for your affiliates which is supported by their country else initially they might work for you and in long run they will feel that transferring money from one payment processor to another is very time consuming and they have to pay heavy fees for every transaction. So, you may lose their loyalty. In order to avoid this situation you may provide many payment options for affiliates.
   
• Maintain good relation with affiliates and be in touch with them. In most of the affiliate programs the product owner himself doesn’t know who his affiliates are. This is not good for a long term relationship, you should periodically encourage your affiliates and greet them and congratulate them for their good work. Contact your best performing affiliates personally and thank them. You might even consider a loyalty program – more sales an affiliate makes – a higher affiliate commission you pay to them. You can offer your affiliates incentives, reward best performing affiliates and much more.
   
• Reward and encourage the best performer. The affiliates who bring many quality visitors for buying your product are the most valuable asset for you. You shouldn’t lose their loyalty at any cost. To keep affiliates loyal you should encourage them by providing some extra money for showing best performance. You can post his name on your site and create healthy completion between affiliates. Increase a commission percentage to such affiliates, so they would feel that you really care about them.
   
• Help affiliates protect their commission – make sure your affiliates get rewarded. Usually people don’t wish to be referred by someone or will try to reduce the price they pay for the product by becoming an affiliate and will buy the product as if it is referred by them. This method will adversely affect the profit or commission of your affiliates and they will lose interest in this job. To keep them loyal towards you, provide some help to them by teaching link cloaking and making changes in their site for legal redirection and lots more.
   
• Make them feel as a part of your business as a friend. Always get feedback and suggestion from your affiliates about how to improve the product and the sales page. They are the correct person to answer or give feedback about your product because they learn about your product and refer it to potential customers. Hence they can give better suggestions. If you provide some incentives for this then they will feel happy and work for you with loyalty.
   
• Provide many promotional offers. You have to periodically introduce new promotional offers in holidays or during celebrations or whenever your sales are down. You may say that commissions are doubled for a month. So, the affiliates will work even harder for you to get more commission during that month, which in turn brings you lot of sales and it echoes for many months.

The above mentioned 10 tips are very crucial to keep your affiliates loyal towards your business and succeed.

I won’t tell you anything new by saying that Click2Sell.EU works completely smoothly with PayPal. Basically, it is enough just to enter your PayPal email address and you can start using Click2Sell service for your internet business.

However, there is a thing that many people miss: PayPal API data. PayPal API allows third party services to connect to PayPal accounts and make necessary actions in background. Usually it is used for automation of various aspects of business and It’s safe to give out your PayPal API data to trusted parties.

It is not obligatory to save this data in Click2Sell, however it can make your life a lot more convenient.
By saving PayPal API data in your Click2Sell account you will be able to:

1. Make mass payments to all your affiliates with just one click of a button. You won’t need to take any txt file and upload it to PayPal system like in some other affiliate networks. You won’t need to click “Pay” button for each affiliate, so you will save a lot of time by having PayPal API data available.
    
2. Refund transactions easily from Click2Sell members area. If you would get a refund request from your unsatisfied customer, at least you can arrange a refund without a hassle. All you would need to do is to login to your Click2Sell account, go to “Transactions Report”, find the needed transaction and simply click on “Refund” button. It is much easier, quicker and more straightforward than in PayPal member area.
    
3. Accept credit cards directly to your Paypal account without redirecting your customers to Paypal page. If you are serious about your internet business, you should really consider PayPal Website Payments Pro account, as it costs only $30/month. We wrote some time ago how direct credit card acceptance greatly improves your sales rate. However, please note that this account type is available only to U.S. residents.
    
4. Pay your Click2Sell fees and affiliate commissions automatically. This will save you from necessity to login to your Click2Sell account just for paying fees and commissions. No more forgotten payments, no more suspicious affiliates, wondering why you are late to pay them. Just contact Click2Sell support about this and we will provide you with full information how to setup such automated payments.

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Dear Click2Sell.EU members,

It has been some time since you heard from us here on the blog. However, we do not intend to write many posts as we don’t want to waste our members’ time reading useless content. But when we write – we definitely have some great news to announce for all Click2Sell members.

So this week I would like to introduce a new Click2Sell.EU feature: Duplicate transaction protection filter for credit card payments.

About duplicate transactions problem

There are millions of different visitors and shoppers online. Each of them have different computer understanding skills and abilities. Some of them are very tech savvy while others do not know how to properly type an URL in their browsers’ address line and thus use Google/Yahoo to find and enter a certain website. So the diversity is really huge.

We have different kinds of products on Click2Sell. Some of them are downloadable products that are delivered instantly, while other products need a special merchant’s approval to complete the order, i.e. physical orders, some membership websites and etc.

The thing is that if a product is delivered to the customer instantly, then there are usually no problems with their payments. However, we have experienced one strange issue – duplicate transaction problem with some of our merchants.

Customers try to order one their product twice, three times or even more… This is really weird. It goes like this: a certain customer orders a product for the first time. He/she is delivered to the thank you page where it says something like "thank you for your order! We will contact you and provide more information as soon as possible to complete the order".

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Dear Click2Sell.EU blog readers,

this post will be about a new Click2Sell system feature: Instant order notification by API.

It will be a long post, so let me present an index of the post:

1. Introduction to Click2Sell API;
2. How it works;
3. Notification structure;
4. Script sample;

Introduction to Click2Sell API

Some advanced Click2Sell.EU members asked for a feature that would 'pass' a transaction's information to the specified URL location or the thank-you page. Why would merchants need this feature? It is simply not enough for some services to have their customers "simply" redirected to "thank-you" pages after a successful purchase. Membership websites, licence based softwares or just any product with some verifications usually need some data from payment processor in order to allow their customers to access purchased products/services.

Instant notifications allows merchants to take their business to the next level as they provide extra functionality, security and save merchants' time.

Even ordinary sellers could consider about automation of things happening after a successful purchase. Just let me give you some examples:

• you're selling an ebook. After a successful sale your script could accept instant notification and add your customer's email address to your mailing list.
• you have a forum with some paid content there. After a successful sale your script could automatically make changes in user account to allow your customer to access paid content.
• you sell a service based on subscriptions. By monitoring our instant notifications you can track if any of your subscribers hasn't missed his/her payment (and automatically unsubscribe if there is a failed payment).

As you can see, notifications are used to transmit transaction/order information from the system server to the merchants' own servers/scripts. Because of our members requests, we have developed a fully working API.

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Dear Click2Sell blog readers,

It’s almost a month since we posted our last update in this blog… It’s summer… Well, I must admit that the summer is quite slow month compared to other periods of year. Many people go on vacations or just spend time with their families, staying away from their computers and that’s normal.

However, this summer is not slow for all of us – Click2Sell.EU. Even though most of people have their vacations during the summertime, we worked and work hard… really hard on Click2Sell.EU. So now I have some great news to report.

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(this post is useful not only for affiliates, but also for merchants/vendors)

One of the common concerns of affiliates is how quickly they will get their payments for their referred sales. It is a very natural question as nowadays incredibly a lot of product promotion is done by Pay Per Click campaigns. PPC campaigns require some budget and many affiliates simply reinvest their earned money back to PPC in order to make even more sales.

Now there’s a problem that money for PPC campaigns run out quite quickly while payments are paid out monthly or bi-weekly in many networks. That means that affiliates have to limit themselves in their PPC advertising, because they have to wait for their money which they could reinvest.

Here is a solution for such problem. And it really works as I have already seen great results from such solution which resulted in improved income for both of merchant and affiliate.

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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?

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General Report on Click2Sell.EU members area were tweaked in order to eliminate one problem that all active members had.

The problem

Click2Sell.EU merchants who sell their products on their own usually have affiliates. Some of them have higher number of affiliates, while others – smaller. Once these merchants login to Click2Sell member area, they see general report of their own and their affiliates performance, so they can see at once, for example, how successful day was yesteday. However, the more affiliates a merchant had, the more overcrowded general report (and all other reports) was, because ‘inactive’ or ‘dead’ affiliates were still displayed on his/her reports.

Who are these my mentioned "inactive or dead affiliates"?
Such affiliate signs up to promote a certain product, get his/her affiliate link and after that he/she:

a) simply doesn’t do anything at all;

b) runs promotional campaign for a while, but stops doing this after some time.

However, such "dead" or "inactive" affiliate still leave the product in his "promoted products" list, thus some time ago he/she were displayed on all merchant’s statistics (General report, Daily report and Affiliate reports).

There are quite a lot of people who jump in to try promoting one or another product or just to test Click2Sell system and then leave it. So statistics of active merchants were overcrowded by such "affiliates/testers".

The tweak

Now let me tell you what we did in order to solve this.

Well, the solution was really simple: we removed all inactive affiliates from the reports. So now Click2Sell.EU General, Daily and Referral reports display only those affiliates who bring at least 1 view/visitor on a certain period of time.

This is a small change on the reporting side on Click2Sell.EU, but it decreased the load time of reports and the best thing is that such reports are much more informative, useful and easier to analyze for merchants than they were before.

As I mentioned it’s only a small change. But small changes adds up to the big ones. And these small changes will result in huge gains for all our members.

Egidijus