10 Ways to Get Your Affiliates to Sell the Crap Out of Your Product

By Barrie Davenport

Your new product has just rolled off the presses, and you’re about to wet your pants to get out there and start selling it.

With a few thousand subscribers under your belt, you have visions of each reader eagerly waiting at home for you to push the launch button and release your work of art into the blogosphere.

The orders will come flooding in, and in just a few days, you could be raking in thousands of dollars. If you tweet about it and share it on Facebook, all of those non-subscribers will run right over to your blog too, because they can’t wait to get their hands on the latest copy of what you are selling.

That’s the plan, right? Hmm. I hate to burst the bubble, but let’s manage expectations a bit. The vast majority of your readers and subscribers will not buy your product. I know, boo hoo. But that’s the truth of it.

If you get a 1-2% conversion, that’s about average. So if you have 1000 readers, you’ll make 10-20 sales depending on a variety of factors (the price point, the topic of the product, the landing page, etc.).

Turn Affiliate Strangers Into Friends

So what is a hardworking, eager blogger to do? After putting so much time, energy, and sweat equity into your amazing product, is it really worth it for only a couple dozen sales? How can you get a better return on your time and energy investment?

Just as Blanche Dubois said in A Streetcar Named Desire, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” you are going to have to depend on the kindness of affiliates!

Affiliate partnerships can make or break the success of a product launch. But it’s up to you to turn these strangers into friends and treat them with kindness before you can depend on them.

Here’s what affiliate partnerships can do for you:

• Extend the reach of your product promotion by many thousands. If you have some big bloggers as affiliates, you will reach many more people than you would just going it alone.

• Substantially increase your sales. Even though you are giving a commission to your affiliate partners, you are making sales that you probably wouldn’t have made otherwise. So isn’t 50% , or even 30 or 40%, of the price of your product better than nothing at all?

• Drive more traffic and potential subscribers to your blog. Even if readers from other blogs don’t purchase your product now, they might become your subscribers and purchase from you down the road.

• Helps you build relationships with other bloggers who might invite you to be affiliates for their products, tweet about your product or posts, invite you to guest post, or potentially become a joint venture partner with you down the road.

• Helps you build your name recognition and overall credibility in the blogosphere. You will attract more affiliate partners as you become more well-known.

Clearly, the more affiliates you bring on board, the more traffic and sales you will create for your product launch. But you can’t expect affiliates to come swarming to you. You have to woo them. And once you have them, you need to take care of them to ensure they will be motivated to sell your product.

Here are 10 ways to build your affiliate stable and to make sure they sell the crap out of your product:

1. Do your research. Find blogs whose demographic is similar to yours, whose readers would be interested in your product. You can find the demographics by researching on Alexa.com. Pick some blogs that are bigger than yours and some that are about the same.

2. Write a personal invitation. Send a personalized email to each blogger, mentioning what you like about their blog, and briefly outlining your product, launch plan, and affiliate details. Offer them a free copy of the product to review. This email should be sent out a month or two before your launch.

3. Plan your commission structure. The industry standard for affiliate commissions is around 50%. However, if you want to entice a really big blogger, you need to give them an incentive to promote your product. They have plenty of affiliate opportunities. You might need to offer a high commission or some other kind of bonus to make it worth their time.

4. Use an easy-to-use shopping cart. We use eJunkie because there are some great features both for the affiliate and seller, allowing a variety of options for commissions, special sales, and pay-outs. The price is quite reasonable as well. There are other good programs you can research like 1ShoppingCart. Just be sure the software you choose is compatible with PayPal.

5. Provide your affiliates resources, including banner ads in a variety of sizes, text links, and detailed instructions on how to place them on their blogs or in emails. In fact, you should create a special page on your blog for affiliates with this information. Take a look at my affiliate page on Live Bold and Bloom.

6. Give them great verbiage to use for marketing emails and blog posts. I write a series of emails for my affiliates to use — one as a teaser to promote the launch before it happens; one to announce the launch and offer the product, and one as a reminder 24 hours before the launch closes. You can also offer topic ideas for posts in which they can insert mention of your product as a natural part of the information offered in the post.

7. Offer up interviews. Make it easy for your affiliates by suggesting that they interview you for a launch post. All they have to do is provide the questions. You write the answers or create a video with answers that they can turn into a post.

8. Send them reminders. One of the best times to promote your product is during the last day and hours of your launch. A sense of urgency encourages people to buy. So be sure to remind your affiliates of this by emailing them with ideas for last minute tweets, Facebook announcements they can cut and paste, and email copy.

9. Handle problems quickly. If there is a snag of any kind with your product, shopping cart, or affiliate set-up, handle it quickly and thoroughly. Your affiliates don’t want to look bad in front of their readers.

10. Pay on time. Don’t forget to pay your affiliates at the end of the month — or whenever your shopping cart allows. No one likes to chase their money or have to remind you they haven’t been paid. Be sure to include a note with the payment (you can do in this eJunkie) to thank your affiliates.

Affiliate partners are busy bloggers, just like you. If you can make it easy and simple for them to participate in your affiliate program and offer up a product that is well-priced, useful and attractive, you will win the loyalty and support of your affiliates. They will be happy to sell your product because you’ve made it a no-brainer.

Do you have any other tips for creating symbiotic affiliate relationships? Pleas share them with us in the comments.