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This is the final lesson of the 6-part series on creating your own affiliate
program. If you missed a previous segment, see the links at the bottom
of today’s lesson.

Today I want to touch on how to motivate your affiliates to promote your products and services.

First, make sure you give them something worth promoting. After all, no affiliate wants to have their readers get angry at them for making a crappy recommendation.

But that’s probably pretty obvious to you.

So is paying good commissions to your affiliates. Let me share why you should be paying GREAT commissions to your affiliates.

When you make a sale, how much of the profit are you willing to give away to an affiliate as a thank you for that profit? If you have only one product then, in general, you are going to want to keep more of the money; however, if you want more affiliates to promote your product you are going to need to raise your commissions on your front end sales.

Now, the general standard these days for a digital product, audio MP3 or an e-book or some kind of report or some kind of a video tutorial set, seems to be between 40 and 50%. A lot of folks go higher than that; they go to 75%. Some people go lower than that to 20 or 33%. But, the people who, in general, are doing pretty well, if they only have one product then they are going to charge about 50% commission. Half of the money goes to you; half of the money goes to the affiliate.

Now, if you have multiple products or if you have some kind of a backend strategy then you should give away more money on the front end. This is where you want to sacrifice the front end profits for long term gain.

If you have multiple products, it’s good for you to raise your commission rate on the front end, so that on the back end you can make more of your income.

Now, that’s not a hard and fast rule but it’s something that you want to consider and is something that has worked well for me in the past.

Because when you log into a members area as a customer and you see that you just paid twenty bucks or $27.00 and immediately you can get almost every penny of that back by just telling one more person. Guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to go out and you’re immediately going to tell folks about it.

That’s why the 75% and the 100% commission idea works very well at making your site go viral.

But you want to make sure that you have a back end strategy to that, otherwise, you’re giving away too much of your revenue.

If your site gets stale after a while, which happens to the best of us, you can do a limited increase in commission. Let’s say, you’re going to do a contest and for the first three days of that contest, you’re actually going to double commissions.

If you normally have 30% commissions for those three days, you’re going to have 60% commissions.

The point is that if you do some form of a limited time increase in commissions, you can give yourself a bit of a spike in activity.

One final point that could really help  you: if you are using a software script like Butterfly Marketing, you can actually give people higher commissions during their first few days as a member. This is a great feature that allows you to reward people for acting right away, and can help your site increase it’s viral growth quite rapidly.

Raising commissions is just one of about 5 different ways I know of to motivate your affiliates. To learn what those other methods are, as well as a more comprehensive examination of each of the lessons you’ve learned in this series, go to Create Your Own Affiliate Program now. This is my newest training course, and I’m giving away the first 3 parts (out of 7) for free.

And feel free to post your comment below with what motivates you to promote someone’s products!

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Paying competitive commissions isn’t the only way to motivate your affiliates. Dive deeper into this topic and discover how to create your own affiliate program the right way.

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