As I mentioned in my last post on how to recruit software affiliates, an important part of the recruiting process is the reason you give them to join your program. It may very well be a successful program with high commission rates, but sometimes this isn’t enough.

When trying to convince an affiliate to join your program (especially if it’s an important affiliate), nothing works better than something to welcome him with.

It’s not mandatory in any way, but like Geno Prussakov noted in his “Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing” and from what I’ve experienced so far, an affiliate is easier to convince in joining a certain affiliate program if you offer her an incentive.

OK, so you have the software products to sell and you want to extend your sales force with minimal costs. Using affiliates is a perfect solution, but where do you find them? This is the first challenge that has to be faced by software vendors who are just discovering the affiliate marketing advantages and by newbie affiliate managers.

As I see it, the recruitment process involves 2 elements – finding / contacting the affiliates and the incentives you give them in order to join your affiliate program. Here are a couple of ideas in order to get you started.

Thoughts about getting your voice heard in the crowd

See how Avangate communicates with its affiliates

Once you have a number of affiliates in your portfolio, keeping in touch with them and helping them make sales become paramount. Some software companies invest in creating a special position for this – the affiliate manager -, some deal with the affiliates through the already existing employees, but let’s say you have an affiliate manager.

Talking about communication with the affiliates, beside the personal contacts the affiliate manager should have with his Super Affiliates, email marketing is the best way to reach your affiliates.

Recently I was doing a market research on eCommerce trends in 2009. One of the things we should expect is that customers are more cost-aware and every minor thing they get for free or with a discount is often worth more than a brand they’ve used for a certain time or even a popular and reliable brand worldwide (we’re talking, of course, about similar features of the products being compared).

Of course, discount coupons are not a new technique for affiliate marketers, but in the near future we could easily foresee an abundance of promotions, discounts – let’s call them “deals”.

I recently did a research on what software vendors are doing in order to sell through affiliates. I looked on over 400 websites that sell software. After putting all the data together, the first thing that stands out is that most of the vendors haven’t implemented the minimum requirements in order to affiliate efficiently.

Most surely they would like to sell more through affiliates, but this isn’t going to “just” happen. Either they don’t have as many affiliates as they would like or they don’t help their current ones sell more.

Here are the key findings of my personal research:

• most of the vendors (55%) have an affiliate sign up page;
• just a couple of them (5%) are using a special email for affiliate matters;
• very few software vendors (5.5%) help their affiliates with marketing materials (e.g. banners, other web graphics);
• more than half of all software vendors don’t have any PAD files or they don’t update them with the affiliate section.

Vendors must understand they have to help their affiliates sell more through simple, yet effective ways. After all, it’s the vendors’ interest to get more revenue from affiliates, isn’t it?

This morning I’ve got an interesting email in my inbox, apparently from someone that has read one of my articles (so after all someone is reading what I write). I think it was one of these: 6 Tips for Affiliate Managers or Affiliate Merchants Mistakes. I’m going to copy paste the email below because it’s actually raising some good questions:

Hello there, I read several of your articles. In one, you mentioned wishing that people would ask for advice on how to become better affiliate marketers, and that there are so few people asking for advice.

Well, I want to put my product on affiliate networks and do it right, in a way that treats my affiliates well, where everyone is happy and makes a profit. While there’s a lot of information of varying quality on the internet about how to be a good affiliate marketer (as in selling other’s stuff through affiliate networks), there is very little information about how to be a good affiliate manager (using affiliates as a way of driving your business).

Do you have any advice on how to set up good affiliate programs that will increase my sales and make my affiliates happy?