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Blog Bling
Jan
22
Nurture Affiliate Sales
January 22, 2006 | Anita Campbell
If you sell anything online, and you have not established an affiliate channel, perhaps it is time to consider it.
Selling through affiliates is a way to extend your reach and gain wider exposure on multiple websites across the Internet. You don’t have to carry the entire burden and expense of attracting traffic to your website in order to sell the product or service. You let your affiliates worry about attracting the traffic and getting visitors to convert to sales.
Another benefit: affiliate marketing is true “pay for performance.” Unlike advertising, you do not have to pay anything unless and until your affiliate sells something.
Dave Taylor writes recently at the Intuitive Life Blog about his visit to the affiliate sales trade show, Affiliate Summit, which this year had 1,200 attendees. He notes that affiliate sales totaled $6.5 Billion in sales in 2005, and that some affiliates rake in as much as $10,000 per month by helping sell other people’s products. Not bad.
The thing to remember is that many affiliates are small businesses, including solo Internet entrepreneurs and family businesses.
Anne Holland, Publisher of Marketing Sherpa notes:
But my rough estimate is that perhaps at most 8% of the 1,250 attendees were from the traditional mom’n'pop “get rich in your PJs” segment of affiliates.
Although the mainstream marketing press rarely cover it, these days affiliate marketing is a massive multi-billion dollar industry. Most of the people involved have made the leap from PJs to khakis and from home offices to small offices with five or more employees.
Even though your affiliates will be making sales for you, you must have good affiliate sales support materials for them. An assortment of ad banners and suggested text link ads is important. Pre-written newsletter copy, website articles and free downloadable reports are also useful. Marketing tips for your affiliates are also helpful. Self-serve dashboards where the affiliate can track sales progress are good motivators, in addition to keeping your email communications burden with your affiliates to a minimum.
Oh, and never underestimate the power of the personal touch. Barrages of automatic emails do not replace taking a few moments to actually pick up the phone and talk with your affiliates. I know. It happened to me today, and I truly appreciated the Affiliate Manager calling me to discuss the needs for my site.
For an excellent site with resources for affiliate marketing, check out ReveNews. In a recent post by Beth Kirsch you can find a thorough list of blog posts and articles about the recent Affiliate Summit conference.
