Starting an affiliate program is one of the most effective ways to generate traction and grow your business.
You authorize others to promote your solutions on your behalf and compensate for their efforts in the form of commissions.
However, offering an affiliate program isn’t a one-time thing. There are certain ongoing tasks you need to perform for your affiliate program to get you the desired results.
The goal here is to maintain healthy partnerships with your affiliates and ensure regulatory compliance.
Knowing which tasks to perform to enhance the credibility and performance of your affiliate program can be challenging.
Hence, we have come up with a list of maintenance tasks that you should consider to make things easy for you.
Outreach
A common mistake is thinking that once you have initiated an affiliate program, you should wait for others to join. A smart move is to actively reach out to promising candidates and ask them to consider what you bring to the table.
Influencer recommendations convince around 88% of people to purchase certain products or services. It makes influencers worthy candidates for affiliate programs. All you need to do is find the right ones that believe in your vision.
Also, consider contacting content creators with a decent number of followers on social media who are comfortable publishing sponsored posts.
It’s a maintenance task for your affiliate program that enables you to grow fruitful partnerships and increase your chances of generating more revenue.
Search Engine Optimization
Another maintenance task you should consider is optimizing your landing page for better reach.
Entrepreneurs, influencers, and content creators often use search engines to look for fitting affiliate programs that they can join. Hence, optimizing your affiliate landing page helps you generate traction organically and attract promising prospects.
Search engine optimization also complements your authority. When your affiliate page ranks among the top search engine recommendations, your prospects feel more motivated to join your program.
As more candidates show a willingness to join your affiliate program, your chances of shortlisting and partnering with suitable affiliates increase significantly.
Active Onboarding
It’s a huge mistake to put affiliate induction on hold. As your affiliate program becomes more popular, you may see a lot of people joining it.
The time may come when you feel like you reached the limit, and you should stop onboarding more affiliates. It’s when many businesses stop entertaining applications they receive from potential affiliates.
The problem is that all affiliates in your program aren’t active. Some may be dormant, whereas others may leave the program somewhere down the road.
Hence, you should actively onboard affiliates to keep your affiliate program up and running. If you feel like you have an overwhelming number of active affiliates, you should reach out to applicants and thank them for wanting to join your program.
Communicate that you have stopped inducting affiliates for the time being and will cater to their request as soon as you resume onboarding.
It helps you build healthy relationships with the candidates and maintain a good reputation in your respective industry.
Affiliate Performance Review
Affiliates are representatives of your brand. How your affiliates promote your offerings and engage the intended audience has a profound impact on your reputation in the industry.
Moreover, your affiliates’ efforts contribute to your revenue-generating capability. Hence, you should consider tracking their performance.
Affiliate performance review serves two purposes. First, it helps you to identify high-performing partners in your affiliate program. You can help them access useful resources and tools, which boosts their performance even further and enables them to drive more traffic for you.
You can strategize with your high-performing affiliates, enabling them to overcome the challenges they encounter and operate at their maximum efficiency.
Second, you can detect affiliates who are not performing up to your expectations and help them do better.
Affiliate programs perform well when the concerned stakeholders work in close coordination. Your role as an onboarding brand is to be a guide to the affiliates joining your program.
They are your ambassadors. Ideally, you should help them promote your solutions to the right audience. After all, it helps you fuel your sales funnel with more quality leads.
Affiliate Training
One of the reasons affiliates underperform is the lack of training. It happens when aspiring entrepreneurs start their journey and pick affiliate marketing as a business model.
They often struggle to drive traffic due to their lack of experience and the inability to promote the products or services to the right audience.
They have just started their entrepreneurial journey and don’t know how affiliate marketing works. In this case, it is the responsibility of onboarding brands to train their affiliates and show them how to promote their solutions to the right people.
Not everyone joining an affiliate program is a veteran marketer. So, you can’t have the same expectations from them all.
You should pay close attention to prospects who are new to the world of affiliate marketing. As a matter of fact, even seasoned marketers require training to promote your products or services the right way.
Therefore, conducting affiliate training should be one of the most important tasks on your to-do list. With well-designed training, you can help your affiliates identify relevant sources to drive traction and deploy useful tactics to perform as per your expectations.
Conflict Resolution
You may encounter multiple issues when running an affiliate program. Disagreements between brands and their respective affiliates are common occurrences, especially when it comes to payouts.
It makes conflict resolution one of the most important ongoing tasks when managing an affiliate program.
Your affiliates often reach out to you when they face any issues as part of your affiliate program. However, you shouldn’t solely rely on them to do so. Instead, actively reach out to your affiliates from time to time and inquire about their concerns.
Even if they don’t report any problems, you can ask them for their suggestions to help you make your program better.
It makes your affiliate program stand out among other alternatives and enables you to maintain lasting relationships with people onboard.
Final Words
Running a successful affiliate program requires effective maintenance. You need to perform a series of tasks to ensure that you maintain healthy relationships with your affiliates and drive the desired results from your initiative.
We have discussed the most important tasks that you must consider. However, efficient affiliate program maintenance isn’t limited to the action items we talked about.
The tasks we mentioned will help you get started. You can explore other important ones to consider as you go.
Featured image by 1981 Digital on Unsplash
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