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Does your affiliate programme have enough working affiliates? We can all do with more affiliates, right? Are you advertising for these affiliates? Are you buying advertising to attract these affiliates? If you are then I think you may want to read this article to help get your more affiliates and stop you throwing money down the drain.

Put yourself in the shoes of an affiliate for a minute. You see a new programme that fits your website or niche, the payouts look good and the creative / brand looks good too. A Perfect Match. But before you get too excited by things you decide to visit the site.

All looks good here too. You are taken to the programme homepage.

Then you sign up.

You get your nice little affiliate signup with your trackable links.

You test the link and visit the page. Then you look at the site landing page.

Something is different but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Then suddenly several things leap out all at once.

Is that an Adsense block? Why is there huge Call Free number plastered on the top of the page? Why are there banners advertising other products?

As an affiliate you would leave and never ever come back! As the merchant your ears would be burning as the affiliate calls you all the names under the sun.

The affiliate will not be back….

If you had just had that affiliate sign up via an advertisement or Pay-Per-Click listing – you have just wasted an awful lot of money!

You could have also just lost a huge potential income earner for your business! You really need to look at your affiliates landing pages to make sure you are maximising trust and motivating affiliates to use you.

Why would I give you traffic for free that you can turn into Adsense or contextual ad revenue? You think it is a shrewd move to do this to offset your costs but trust me this will bite you in the butt!

Here are our Top Three Affiliate Landing Page Sins, avoid these three sins and you will be well on the way to more affiliates, more sales and therefore, more income.

Adsense / Contextual PPC AdBlocks

Adsense / Contextual ads such as Google Adsense, Kontera, Blog Ads, and the others out there are a great tool for generating revenue. However, they should not be used on affiliate landing pages.

Affiliates will spend time, effort and money driving traffic to their affiliate links so they can earn income. Why would you steal from them? Get caught doing this and not only could you lose the affiliate you could damage your affiliate programme irreparably. Is it really worth that for a few clicks?

Phone Numbers

Now this one I can understand, you copy your site template onto a new page so you can design a landing page, the header has always had the phone number on it so you just leave it there. Well, time to design a new header. Unless you have way of tracking telephone calls to the affiliate then lose the phone number.

An affiliate will not like you getting FREE business of the back of his efforts. Don’t give the site visitors using affiliate links ANY method of purchasing your product without affiliate tracking.

If you can’t track that phone number and accredit the sale to the affiliate, then pull the number!

Affiliate Ads

This is one I have seen quite recently and makes the mind boggle. Sites that have landing pages with product links using affiliate networks promoting OTHER companies’ products.

So you have a mobile phone site and you give affiliates an affiliate landing page that has advertising banners for car hire, or loans….

What on earth are you thinking about?

Think about the affiliate landing page in the same way you would (hopefully) a Pay-Per-Click landing page, i.e. there is ONE call to action and that is to buy the product.

Make these changes to your affiliates landing pages and your programme will gain some much needed credibility.

Did you know that there are over 10,000 affiliate Programmes on the web and in the finance and insurance arena there are hundreds of them with multiple affiliate networks?

How are you going to get affiliates that already promote your competitors products, to promote yours as well?

Well, let me share with you some ideas that will guarantee to get your signups to your Programme.

1. Signing Bonus on First Sale

The first idea to share is the sign up bonus. This comes in many shapes and sizes but for now I will talk about a signing bonus paid on first sale.

Incentivising someone to join your programme and put your links live is easier if you can give them a single bonus for doing it at the same time.

Remember joining your affiliate programme is less than half the battle, getting your ads and links live is a lot more important. Think about it, would you rather have:

Door Number 1: 100 affiliates in your Programme or
Door Number 2: 10 affiliates in your Programme AND have your links live?

Hopefully you took door number 2.

So we want to incentivise affiliates to join AND get your links live. If you just offered a signing bonus for joining then you could end up with affiliates just joining your Programme for the sign up fee. After all, you would, wouldn’t you!

You could be seriously out of pocket and if you don’t pay up, you will do yourself more harm and good.

Don’t do it! Make it clear that in order to qualify for a signing bonus they have to sell product.

How do they sell product? They put your links live! When they generate their first sale then you can go ahead and send them their signing bonus.

See how easy that was!

2. Freebie or Gift

A favourite of mine is the freebie or gift bribe (I mean incentive). Do you have a product or marketing material that could be a freebie? Do you get Product samples from your suppliers? What about buying in something that you can brand with your logo and URL that you can send out as a incentive to join your programme?

One way I used this (it is mentioned in the calendar bonus), was the Chocolate Easter egg. It was fantastically quirky, the affiliate network I ran it through thought it was fantastic. I was egg-static with the result. A £15,000 increase in new business from £125 worth of spend.

Why not try something just as quirky.

Every year one affiliate network sends me a Lottery ticket with my Christmas card. With the advent of scratch cards, you could give away one or a lottery ticket. I’ve never won yet by the way but it is a nice though and I always remember them!

3. Free Product or Service

If you can why not give your affiliates a free copy or experience of your product or service?

The best affiliates are those that will have used the product or own it as they can see first hand how good it is. It also then gives them the opportunity to give you a testimonial or allow them to write there own review of your product.

If you have an electronic product, then really there is no cost to you to send out a few free copies. If you send it to a select few people, they can generate an infinite amount of profit.

Research the potential affiliates that you want to offer this to. Do not make it a generic offering! This is a great way to attract Super Affiliates, the kinds of affiliates that can sell lots of your product really quickly. The web versions of Wall Mart!

Remember: Do not show this incentive on your website! After all everyone would just sign up as an affiliate to get your product for FREE!

4. Cross Promotion Opportunities

Sometimes the best affiliate could be someone with their own product or affiliate programme. This could be in a similar or supporting product.

Think laterally. There could be links with other industries that you have never thought about before.

You could provide this in one of two ways. A one-off cross promotion or an ongoing relationship where you would expose your customers to each other products.

You could find 20 – 30 a week to contact. Look at websites, newspapers, magazines, there is a huge market out there that could be interested in your product. If they see the synergy with your product then getting them onboard should be easy.

5. Affiliate Marketing Centre

If you give your affiliates training, and materials then they will love you for it. Help them to make money. After all it will make you money too!

Provide training courses, forums, FAQs , links to articles or products and tools that have helped you in your efforts.

If you can show affiliates that you are there to support them and offer a wide range of tools to help them earn, they will join your programme.

Imagine, just having an affiliate programme that has a signup page and gives you a trackable link. No creative, no copy, no help.

Would you join and actively promote this programme?

Didn’t think so. Now and again, step into the shoes of your affiliates and walk a mile. Comfortable?

Remember that not all affiliates are at the same place. Some may not know HTML, or how to add a link to a page. Give them the tools or help them to do this.

See who has joined your programme and then after a week or two week, see who has added your links and who hasn’t. Follow up with those that haven’t to see if they need help. You will be amazed at the kind of questions you will get.

The more helpful you are the more likely people will want to help you by generating sales.

Press releases are a great way to attract attention to your business and can be a great booster, if you get picked up in the local or even national press.  For most traditional PR people, this means Job Done!  Press exposure is a key performance indicator – and righty so.

But for those of us that do our own press releases, there is a wider benefit we need to think about and that is the online benefits of press releases.

There are several places online where you can and should submit press releases. The first one is Press Box. (http://www.pressbox.co.uk).

Pressbox is a free submission service and is very good at getting your press releases into Google News very quickly.  This, in turn, means your release can be picked up by hundreds of other sites that use the PressBox RSS feeds.   It also gives you a good quality back link to your website if you build those in. TIP : You should be looking at ways to add keyword relvant links into your Press Release.

The second place you should investigate in PRWEB (http://www.prweb.com) – a huge site with a powerful reach but it is a pay to play site and should be looked into. One release on here is a great way to launch a new business or website.

Thirdly, I would also suggest looking at Online PR News (http://www.onlineprnews.com) a relative newcomer but a very good low cost option during these economic times.

There is a great resource here for a list of Free Press Release sites:

http://www.nikkipilkington.com/internet-marketing-articles/

I would also suggest adding your Press releases to any or all forums or social media places that you can.

You should also build a Press centre, or Media centre on your site and make sure you add all the releases you write.

Depending on how you set up your onsite press room, you can have these releases auto submitted to Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, to name a few.

Press releases are not just for traditional print media, they can be used online to great added benefits for your search ranking and traffic generation.

Finally, I would say, if you are emailing out press releases make sure of the following:

• Have the press release in the body of the email – Do not add it as an attachment

• If you have images that need to go with the press release do not add them the email. – Set up a page on your site and only give links to download them if I need them.  I get around 10 press releases a day and some people still like to send me 6mb attachments. This just annoys me and I tend not to use these releases.

• Have full contact details on the bottom of your release – I might want to ask you something about the product or release. So let me have your contact details.  If you don’t give them, I worry about the validity of your business and will think again before using your release.

Having said that don’t let it put you off.  Having an online Press campaign is a great way to boost your traffic, web rankings and exposure for your business.