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When creating an affiliate program, you want to aim for success, but also know when you've achieved it. However, it can be difficult to identify what the benchmarks are for reaching your goal. To avoid setting yourself up for failure, it is crucial that you understand the markers of a successful program.
Fortunately, there are a few elements and characteristics that every successful affiliate program has. Once you know what they are, you can then set your standards for success and take action to achieve them.
In this post, we’ll introduce you to four elements of a successful affiliate program. We’ll then show you how to ensure that each one is present in your program (with the help of Easy Affiliate). Let’s get started!
1. You Must Have a Good Product as the Basis for Your Program
The product you offer (whether it is digital or physical) is the foundation of your program. As such, it needs to be high quality and beneficial to your target audience. To ensure you have a good offering, there are a few things to consider before selecting what you’ll sell. These include:
- Your audience. This means understanding their needs and wants. To achieve this task, you can perform an audience analysis. This will help you determine your target audience and offer products that provide value to them.
- Your niche. You need to know how you can uniquely meet your audience's needs. For example, what product or service can you offer your prospects that others in your niche aren’t, or is there a spin you can put on the product or service that stands out?
Of course, you need a solid product to make your program successful. However, the way you market it to your leads is just as important.
2. Create An Optimized Product Landing Page to Drive Conversions
A landing page is solely dedicated to one product or service, like iMPACT's landing page (shown above). An optimized page is important because it acts as your main promotional content (which is beneficial to leads and affiliates) and can drive conversions. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure you have an optimized product landing page:
- Highlight your product’s benefits. How will your offering benefit your customers? This is the question you should always answer for each product you promote.
- Avoid distractions. Keep the focus on your product and its features and benefits, and stay away from clutter and unnecessary information.
- Include a strong, highly-visible call to action (CTA). This will help to create urgency in your audience, which in the long run, promotes sales.
Overall, using your landing page as a promotional tool should be foremost in your thoughts. This will ensure that your product is being properly marketed, and your leads have a place to learn more.
3. Get Active, Engaged Affiliates to Promote Your Product
The best affiliates participate fully in your program and actively engage with their leads. For maximum returns, it’s essential that those kinds of affiliates are in your service. After all, affiliates are the main source of your income. Unfortunately, not all affiliates will fully engage in the beginning. However, there are steps you can take to improve this, such as:
- Use an affiliate dashboard. A dashboard enables you to provide your affiliates with helpful tools, and it gives them a place within your program to check their stats and earnings.
- Communicate with your affiliates regularly. Consistent and effective communication will ensure that your affiliates stay engaged and aim to do their best. It also provides you with necessary insight for improving your program.
Of course, if you want to ensure your affiliates are fully engaged, you’ll need to provide the proper resources and product training. This can be done through a resource hub, or a program newsletter.
4. Use An Effective Program Management Tool to Keep Things Running Smoothly
Once your program is off the ground, you’ll need to keep it well managed to ensure it runs smoothly. This can be achieved with the help of an effective management tool, such as Easy Affiliate.
This plugin offers a variety of features (including affiliate management and merchant management tools) to track both your marketers and your success. With this in place, you can ensure your program is running as it should, so you can focus on other crucial areas of your business.
To get started with Easy Affiliate, you can purchase a plan and install it on your WordPress website. If you already have affiliates, you can add them in manually. If not, you can create a signup page for your new recruits to join:
Once the initial setup is taken care of, you’re then ready to set your affiliate program on auto pilot! This means you’ll only need to spend a few hours each month on usual maintenance tasks, such as overseeing performance and monitoring program compliance.
Conclusion
While all program managers aim for success, only a few can attain it. However, this has nothing to do with luck. Instead, success requires the knowledge (and proper implementation) of a few essential program elements.
In this post, we’ve outlined four elements that every successful affiliate marketing program should include. To quickly recap, you’ll need:
- A good product as the basis for your program.
- An optimized product landing page to drive conversions.
- Active, engaged affiliates to promote your product effectively.
- An effective program management tool to keep things running smoothly.
Do you have any questions about how to get started with creating a successful affiliate program, or how Easy Affiliate can help? Let us know in the comments section below!
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