In this article on Affiliate Marketing Tips, we will share some ideas & tips on recognizing & rewarding your Affiliate Marketers & Business partners. We have implemented a lot of these over time with our Creative Themes Affiliate Marketing Program with high degree of success.

Rewarding & Motivating your Affiliates & business partners could be a key to your success as an online business owner. They are the sales force, they are the ones who know their readers, they are the ones who can influence readers to make a purchase!

10 Tips to Reward & Motivate your Affiliates

Affiliate Marketing Tip 1: Be in constant touch with your business partners

Don’t lose touch with your sales partners. Emails, direct mails or even telephonic conversations help to build rapport & a good business relationship with your global sales teams.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 2: Educate them on your products

Your business partners are knowledgeable of the market & their readers. You have to provide them with sufficient information on your products. We regularly update our Product FAQs with new information & whenever new features are added

Affiliate Marketing Tip 3: Share customer feedback to motivate affiliates

Customer feedback & testimonials are one of the best ways to convince prospective buyers. Reach out to your affiliates & sales partners whenever you have a great customer testimonial & share it with them.

We also ask our clients to permit us to use their feedback & testimonials on our affiliate’s websites. Most of them do & our affiliates get to showcase them on their websites as product reviews to their readers.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 4: Clearly state any Performance Reward Criteria

Let your affiliate teams know what your performance evaluation criteria is. It could be higher sales (in absolute numbers), conversion rates or simply the one who sells the most! Whatever your criteria, make sure that your affiliate business partners know them well.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 5: Reward Top Performers Immediately

Affiliate marketing is “instantaneous” – the affiliates sell & expect to be paid immediately (in lines with your payment terms). If you have a bonus or cash reward, award them immediately.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 6: Test out what awards best motivate your affiliate partners

When we began our affiliate marketing program, we spent a lot of time corresponding with our partners. It was a slow process, but slowly we found that various partners have different tastes in motivation.

While most affiliate partners ask for higher commissions, a few wanted a cash reward for their performance, while a few wanted to be showcased as a “Top Affiliate” with a couple of links back to their sales pages!

Affiliate Marketing Tip 7: Share Top Affiliates’ success stories with other partners

Sharing success stories is a great way to motivate people. Encourage your affiliate partners to share their success stories & tips that you could share with the rest of the team. However, do so with permission from the affiliate, since not all of them will want to give away their marketing tactics.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 8: Invest in promising affiliates

You may want to invest in your affiliate’s business as well for mutual benefits. This calls for a lot of experience with affiliate marketing to spot the right partners & opportunities to invest. However, under certain situations we have invested in search marketing of certain high performing affiliates driving traffic to their sales pages.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 9: Run seasonal & event based sales campaigns

This is one of our most favored ways to reward our affiliates. On certain seasons & calendar dates, we run sales drives during which we announce a lot of performance awards to our affiliates.

As an example, if you are selling custom T-shirts, summer could be the right time to run campaigns where, in general, T-Shirt sales are usually high.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 10: The 80-20 rule in affiliate marketing

Usually 10% – 20% of all the affiliates help you achieve 60% – 80% of your sales. Sorting out these top 10% – 20% performers could help you focus more on a small number of business partners. Encourage the others to move into that top slot by letting them know the additional benefits & over time many will be motivated to try harder & succeed up the ladder.

These have been our learning from our own affiliate marketing business, selling Premium WordPress Themes for Pro Bloggers & Small Business owners & Selling a service package for complete online business systems set ups. We were open to exploring new possibilities, new techniques & have succeeded in setting up an effective global team partnering with us now.

If you wish to join our team Click here & join the Creative Themes Affiliate Team