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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

The post 6 Maintenance Tasks to Conduct for Your Affiliate Program appeared first on noupe.

To convince people to try your solutions, you can’t simply pitch them your product and expect it to work. 

Customers don’t make buying decisions on a whim anymore. So, despite the brilliance of your marketing campaigns, it’d be difficult for you to dictate the buying decisions of your target audience by defining what’s best for them.

Around 50% of customers prefer brands that offer inclusive experiences. And that’s why businesses today strive to engage their respective audiences via two-way communication rather than sending bland marketing messages.

This is where the concept of a community comes into play. Building a community enables you to engage your respective audience by helping them find answers to their questions or the information that they seek.

With a community built around your product, you’re not pitching your product directly to your customers but rather catering to the concerns of the intended audience and helping them find a solution fitting their needs.

This helps you gain the trust of your target audience and build authority in your respective niche.

Here’s how you set up a community platform for your product.

Set Clear Goals

The first step to creating a community for your product is identifying what you wish to achieve from it and setting clear goals in accordance with that.

There can be multiple goals that you pursue but it’s highly recommended that you keep the list short. This will make it easier for you to translate your efforts into outcomes and gauge the impact of the community in general.

For this, you’d have to design and deploy well-thought-out key performance indicators to assess the value generated by your community and its contribution to the buyer’s journey.

Since we are setting up a community for a product, the core objectives here would be getting traction from a relevant audience and capturing quality leads to fuel conversions.

Furthermore, you can also minimize churn and maximize retention by addressing the queries and concerns of the existing customers through your community.

Define Community Guidelines

When creating a community for your product, it’s essential to lay out some ground rules to be followed by members or participants.

For this, you’d need a team of trusted and reliable moderators whose responsibility would be to make sure that the rules are justly implemented and followed by community members.

The goal here is to create a platform where your current and potential customers can interact and share their experiences concerning your product. This is user-generated content and it has the power to influence the buying decisions of 90% of customers.

However, for this to work, you have to ensure that your community is an ideal place for healthy interactions and discussions about your product by implementing certain rules.

The rules would apply to members, moderators, and other administrative roles in the community clearly defining the do’s and don’ts of community participation and management.

Select Community Type

Before setting up a community for your product, you should select the type of community best suited to your needs.

There are two types to choose from. The first one is a social community platform. Here, you leverage social media platforms like Facebook or Reddit to create a community around your product.

The second type is becoming a branded community platform. Here, you don’t rely on third-party platforms but rather create an independent community.

There’s no right or wrong here as there are pros and cons associated with each type you choose to go with. So, it all comes down to which method serves you the best.

You’re not charged a single penny for leveraging social media platforms to build your community. So, creating a community can be cost-effective. Plus, Facebook alone has over 2.45 billion active users – making it easier for you to reach out to the masses.

However, there’s a flip side to this. You’d have minimal control or authority over things as you may be the owner of your community but you don’t own the platform it’s hosted on. So, you’d have to play by the rules set by platform owners to keep things going.

The same goes for the second option. Setting up an independent community can be costly and may require a lot of effort to attract new members. However, you’d have complete control and authority over the platform.

You can also choose to go with both options. However, managing an independent and social community at the same time can be overwhelming. So, it all depends on what your requirements and preferences are.

Define the Roles

If you’re a startup or just getting started with your business, you can create a community from the ground up and start managing it yourself. Here, you’d be wearing multiple hats and be the only stakeholder.

However, as your operations grow, you’d have to create different roles for your community to keep the needle moving.

This generally happens when you realize that you’re spending more time managing your community than growing your business. So, it’s best that you start delegating.

You’d need moderators for your community from the get-go. For this, you can turn to your reliable veteran community members and assign the said roles. However, to grow your community and manage its operations, you may need to hire a community manager.

You’d also have to engage personnel representing your marketing, sales, and support teams. The marketing team would be responsible for promotional activities, sales personnel would be striving to generate and convert leads, and the support team would be catering to product queries.

Set Up the Community

With the completion of all aforesaid steps, the setup process for your community officially begins.

As per the set parameters and the options you’ve chosen to go with, you’d start setting up your community as an independent entity or by leveraging a third-party platform. In either scenario, here are a few things to consider when setting up the community:

• Tell people your story
• Showcase the community’s essence by adding a brief description
• Add contact details
• Add a cover image with your message, tagline or visual identity. 
• Add community guidelines
• Add answers to FAQs
• Add an announcement section
• Add tags for relevant topics
• Display association with your business page or site
• Add call to action
• Test the signup process
• Setup onboarding or welcome messages

Activate the Community

When you create a community for your product, you don’t just set it up and leave it there. You have to activate it by engaging a relevant audience. And for that, you’d need a stellar content strategy.

According to 72% of marketers, content creation is the most effective SEO tactic. So, it enables you to get noticed and bring traction to your community organically, especially if it’s an independent platform.

Content not just helps you attract new members but also keeps the community alive by facilitating discussions among the members.

Just ensure that the content you share in the community is relevant and exclusive. This would make people stay active in the community and keep coming back for more.

It’s a Wrap

There you have it. The 6 easy steps for you to set up a community platform for your product. Creating a community around your product enables you to connect with a relevant audience and generate awareness.

So, it’s highly recommended that you have one and with the aforesaid steps, you can easily get started.

Featured Image by Kylie Lugo on Unsplash

The post How to Set Up a Community Platform for your Product appeared first on noupe.