5 Things You Must Consider for Your Affiliate Program

5 Things You Must Consider for Your Affiliate Program

1. Your Offer Should Be Converting Even Without Affiliates 

An offer that isn’t converting without affiliates will be useless even with affiliates. Conversion is a crucial element in your affiliate program. After all, if you’re not actually turning lookers into buyers at a high rate, what are you advertising for? 

Your offer should convert by finding the sweet spot that convinces the maximum percentage of your prospects to take action and affiliates want to know your conversion rate before they can consider promoting you. 

The best way to achieve a high conversion rate is to send a high amount of traffic to any available offer before you can collaborate with affiliates to promote. You can start converting by sending emails to your in-house list. 

If you are not able to do this, get friends with lists and ask them to help you test the offer for you. If this fails, you can opt to buy traffic to send potential buyers to your site.  

2. Do You Have Terms of Service for Affiliates?  

This is also known as an Affiliate Agreement, and it’s recommended to have one before you start having affiliates promote for you. The terms of service clearly define the rules that will govern the contract between you and affiliates. 

This agreement is important because affiliates need to know what can be done and what cannot. Don’t have complicated terms of service because these can limit your affiliates or even scare them away.  However, you should not be too lenient on your rules either.

Ensure the rules don’t allow anything that can jeopardize your business. A good way to ensure that things are done the right way is to consult a professional or learn from other affiliate programs and their TOS. 

3. Do You Plan to Restrict or Limit Affiliate SEO? 

Did you know Affiliates can rank better than merchants in search engines? When they do so, some merchants will try to limit or restrict them. Although this keeps happening, it is really not the best way to do business. 

One way merchants can restrict Affiliates is by placing language in their terms of use. What should you do if an affiliate ranks better than your website as a merchant? If an affiliate is ranking better than you in terms of SEO, you should improve your own SEO strategies. 

Don’t tie an affiliate down by restricting them because you will scare them away. Let them get the sales because they have earned it. It wouldn’t be prudent to restrict them after they have made it to page one in the search results because they can easily substitute your competitor’s link for your own.

Rather than restricting them, allow them to rank naturally for any term other than your exact brand name. If your brand has a trademark, enforce it. You can also enforce this against any affiliate or competing brands that try to rank using your trademarked brand name.

4. How Do You Grade Your Site?  

Is your website bad, good or excellent? Do you have missing images, broken links, poor design? Or is your website decent, straight to the point and professional? You should always ensure your site pages are complete, straightforward and accurate. 

Your branding should also be consistent right from the beginning to the end of the sales process. The site should be user-friendly and mobile responsive. A stranger should not have any doubt about paying for goods or services offered on your site. Affiliates want websites where customers are able to buy products or use the services offered with ease.  

5. What Are You Going To Pay?  

Payment will always differ depending on the service or product being sold. If your products are digital downloads such as songs, movies, educational materials, pay at least 50% because there really is not much customer service involved. 

For those who require customer care services such as recurring billing (hosting, software, etc.) it is recommended to pay less. If you are in business to generate a list of buyers, you can pay as much as you can - preferably 75-100%. 

Apart from the previous payment options, there are some things that you should not do. 

Never lower commissions on existing sales. 

For instance, if you are paying 50% on a recurring commission and realize you are losing money; do not reduce the commission on pre-existing sales to 30%. You will lose affiliates and your reputation within a very short time and it will be a real nightmare. However, you can lower the commission on FUTURE sales but not on Existing sales.  

Think about this. What happens if a contractor is not paid? Well, chances are the contractor will tell a fellow contractor or blog to contractors. The same thing happens if you don’t pay affiliates. Affiliates can build or break your business. 

Never look for reasons not to pay, instead, look for ways to let them understand the business and what you need. Do not reverse commissions, look for technicalities or create loopholes. Affiliates are human beings too, and they can blog and ruin your reputation and business. 

It’s simply not worth scaring away present and future affiliates just because you want to save a commission. Remember! That little commission you are struggling to save can cost you thousands of sales in the future.