Running an affiliate marketing program can be relatively simple and low-maintenance, but it isn’t quite as easy as sitting back and letting your affiliates do all the work. Part of your responsibility is to help your affiliates succeed, and the most important way to do that is giving them all the right tools they need in order to deliver the right message and successfully sell your product. Consider the following.
Sample Social Media Messages
Your affiliates’ social media accounts will be significant sources of potential revenue, so it’s a good idea to help your affiliates leverage the power of their social media. Provide sample tweets that your affiliates can send out on their Twitter accounts. Also provide sample posts/status updates that would be appropriate for their Facebook accounts. Be careful, however: You don’t necessarily want all your affiliates tweeting and posting the exact same social media messages all the time.
In order to combat the potential problem of repeated/duplicate social media messages, give several different options, and include ways for your affiliates to easily personalize the messages. For example, a sample post might read, “Exciting news! (Affiliate’s business name) has a new affiliate partner! If you love (affiliate’s blog’s name), we encourage you to check out this site: (affiliate link).” Also, change or add new suggested social media messages on a semi-regular basis, and give your affiliates tips on posting effectively (for example: “We recommend you tweet this message no more than twice per week.”).
Sample Email Messages
Your most successful affiliates will likely have large networks of email contacts and/or long lists of subscribers to their newsletters or email notifications. Email marketing still holds its position as the most successful form of online marketing, so you’ll want to help your affiliates capitalize on it. Provide at least one sample email message that they could copy and send to all of their contacts. Adjust your promotional material so that the email message sounds genuine and as though it’s coming from the voice of the affiliate themselves, not you or your business.
Consider providing multiple sample email messages that are appropriate for different occasions, functions, or audiences. For example, provide a different sample message for each product you sell, or a sample message targeted at an affiliate’s personal (not business or newsletter) contacts. Sample emails make it easy for your affiliates to deliver the exact message you want to send to potential customers, but encourage your affiliates to tweak the messages however they see fit.
Suggested Keywords
The final “cherry on top” for helping your affiliates succeed will be providing a list of suggested keywords and key-phrases. While your affiliates should already have their own plan for search engine optimization, and should already be doing thorough and regular keyword research for their niche, it can never hurt share with your affiliates the keyword research you’ve already done for your product.
While many of your affiliates will choose to create their own messages, it can only help your business to make these sample messages and suggestions available just in case. You can’t control what your affiliates ultimately say in order to sell your product, but you can make an attempt at influence.