Advanced.
Simple enough, right? Basic training would include teaching the steps necessary to accomplish the tasks outlined in your “affiliate attack plan”.
One idea you could implement for your affiliate program is put together text and video tutorials explaining how to do several of the basic tasks you refer to in your checklist.
For example, you may find that quite a few of your affiliates are completely new and don’t understand how to create a redirect page to hide their affiliate link.
So, you put together a short video walking viewers through the process and then load it to your affiliate center blog.
Here’s a quick screenshot...
Your basic training needs to provide the affiliate with instructions on how to accomplish the steps necessary to distribute your content and publicize your ads.
Taking It To The Next Level
There is an incredibly lucrative step that you can take in your “basic training” for your affiliate center that will send your sales over the edge.
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And that step is to provide multiple recommendations and resources. Don’t just say “use this solo mailing”, but rather say, “here is a list of 25
places to buy solo mailings”. Don’t just say “here are some keywords”, but rather say, “here are the top 5 PPC search engines to advertise in.” Don’t just say,
“distribute this ezine article”, but rather say, “here are 12 ways to distribute this ezine article”.
Give the affiliate as many recommendations and resources as possible and you’ll find that many won’t just do ONE thing, they’ll do NUMEROUS things!
Now, the other side of your training is “advanced training”. That is, teach your affiliates how to become SUPER affiliates.
You know, we all talk about finding “super” affiliates to promote our products and services – wouldn’t it be nice if we invested in those who aren’t quite ready to leap tall buildings in a single bound and help them become the caped crusaders of tomorrow?
Okay, I’ll step back down off my soapbox. ;-) But seriously, if you will train your affiliates to become better affiliates, you’ll get the benefit of it as it translates into more referred sales.
Teach them how to write their own ezine articles to promote you.
Teach them how to buy PLR content and convert it into original materials to promote you.
Teach them how to create their own products that “backend” your product.
Teach them how to become experts at using PPC advertising.
Teach them how to develop viral marketing tools that lead back to your site.
I’m not going to give you a long list of marketing activities to stress the point. If you give your affiliates advanced training, you stand to gain from additional referred sales.
And, again, these are training materials you put together one time. Or, you can purchase reprint rights to other people’s products and give them to your affiliates.
Or, as we’ll talk about later, you can get an affiliate manager to create them for
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you.
The point is: you need to train your affiliates, and train them well. So, we have
“creatives”, “checklists”, “coaching” and the fourth and final part of Affiliate
C4TM is...
Affiliate C4TM #1: Communication.
When you communicate in this final step of “communication”, you’ll build upon everything we’ve talked about so far and reach the biggest explosion of sales through your “sales army” – your “affiliate team”.
It’s important that you regularly communicate with your affiliate team.
Now, we’ll talk about this more in a later section, but I do want to introduce the concept here and explain the two important aspects of communication.