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Affiliate Success
By Jerry West
Updated: April 16, 2005

The Internet is a BIG place. While there are hundreds of billions of dollars changing hands, it is hard to cut through the crowd to get your share of the Internet gold rush.

No question, the fastest way to profits is to start your own affiliate program. You get other people to promote your business in exchange for a commission on sales.

Sounds great in theory, but your affiliate program will fall flat if you don't have a simple training program for affiliates. Follow these five steps to make your affiliate team a streamlined money-making machine.

1. Work hard to get all your affiliates to put your link on their site and/or in their email. This sounds rudimentary, but it is by far the most difficult part of getting your affiliate program off the ground. Despite good intentions, 80 percent of those who sign up for your affiliate program won't get around to putting your link on their site. They are busy people and you will need to politely remind them three, five, even seven times. Send your reminders in the form of a free report showing them how to promote the opportunity, a monthly newsletter, or occasional email updates on how well the affiliate program is progressing.

2. Show your affiliates the magic of good ezine advertising. Pick out a handful of good email newsletters that let your affiliates place an ad for $15 to $40. Busy affiliates will find this more attractive than spending hours placing free ads and getting discouraged. Send them to E- zineZ.com, and BestEzines.com, for info on ezines.

3. Write, or have someone write for you, several ads and sales letters your affiliates can use. Put them on your website and have them available via autoresponder. Be sure to remind affiliates that spamming is forbidden. You may need to clarify what spamming is to new affiliates. Most affiliate spammers do so unintentionally because they are new and simply don't know any better.

4. Design some banners your affiliates can place on their sites along with simple instructions for linking them. You can get excellent free banners from Zy.com and NetStudio.com.

5. Develop a web page with your sales letter on it. Offer individualized pages to your affiliates. Many people find this the best and easiest way to promote an affiliate program. If you have a few dozen affiliates, you can make your pages manually. For larger affiliate operations, check out one of the many replicated page systems available. By creating your own affiliate training program centered on these five steps, you can avoid common pitfalls and put your affiliate program in high-earnings mode.