As a business owner, you know it’s important to find ways to reach new leads and potential customers, whether you’re selling services or digital products. There’s only so much one can do alone, and having others in your corner to help spread the word is essential. Starting an own affiliate program can help you do this!
If you’re not familiar with what an affiliate program is, it’s a type of performance-based marketing where affiliates earn a commission when someone makes a purchase through their affiliate link shared via social media, on their website, or in an email.
There are numerous benefits to having your own affiliate program. Here are a few of the main benefits:
Reach a Wider Audience
An affiliate program allows you to reach a wider audience than you could on your own. Essentially, affiliates give you ‘access’ to their community – people who might not have otherwise heard of your business.
Increase Sales & Grow Your Business
Growing and increasing sales is definitely a benefit of having an affiliate program. By partnering with others who are already reaching your target audience, you can quickly increase sales and grow your business without having to put in all the legwork yourself.
Revitalize Your Affiliate Program with Competitions
Seeing these benefits in your business can be thrilling, but there might come a time when things slow down, and it feels like affiliates have forgotten about you. It could be time to do something different… like an affiliate competition.
If you have an affiliate program all set up, with email swipes and graphics available, and some affiliates registered but things feel a bit stale, you might be ready to engage your affiliates to boost activity and motivate multiple promotions by running an affiliate competition.
What Is an Affiliate Competition?
Affiliate contests are a great way to motivate your affiliates and encourage them to work even harder for you. Knowing they have a chance at winning some cold hard cash or other items is a definite incentive, too!
This is a win-win situation for both you and the affiliates – they are motivated to action by the prizes up for grabs and you benefit because of the boost in sales, new leads, brand/name awareness, and more!
Don’t let the thought of running an affiliate competition scare you. It doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, keep it simple – make things easy for both you and your affiliates!
Here are some tips to help you run a successful affiliate marketing competition to boost sales:
Develop a Plan
Once you’ve determined your goal for the affiliate competition, it’s time to take it a step further and come up with a plan. In this step, you’ll want to come up with the prize structure and the marketing strategy that you will use to promote the competition. It is important to be as detailed as possible in your plan so that you can ensure the competition runs smoothly.
Determine the Dates
The last thing, when it comes to developing a plan for your competition, is to determine how long you want to run the competition and pick the dates! Be sure to put it on the calendar 😉 and ensure you’re giving yourself enough time to get all the things in place for this to run smoothly.
Graphics & Swipes for Affiliates
Affiliates like it when things are super simple for them, so make it easy for them to be a heck yeah to promoting you! This means providing them with promotional tools so all they have to do is copy and paste. When it comes to promotional tools, a good rule of thumb is to have three emails available as well as a handful of social blurbs and some graphics. You can create these yourself or outsource it! You can even make yourself available, to your affiliates, for podcast interviews, guest posts, and more, if you’d like!
Will You Accept New Affiliates for the Contest?
Another thing to think about, when it comes to running a successful affiliate competition to boost sales, is whether or not you will open it up to new affiliates. If so, you may want to vet them. This can be done quickly and easily by setting up a simple form on your website asking for some basic information: name, email address, website, how they heard about you, how they’ll promote the contest, and anything else you feel is relevant that you’ll need to determine if they’re a good fit for your program or not. The last thing you want is an affiliate who is going to go about things in a shady way because your reputation is at stake!
Promote the Competition
Now it’s time to get the word out about the affiliate competition. How you go about this will depend on whether or not you want to attract new affiliates. If you want to keep the competition on the ‘down-low’ and available only to your current affiliates, you can promote it via an exclusive email to your affiliates. Or maybe you want to send an email to your list and let them know about it. If you don’t mind opening the competition to new affiliates too, you can share it on social media as well – the key is to choose the method of promotion that will reach your target audience.
Communicate with Your Affiliates
The time has come – the competition is ready to rock n’ roll and your affiliates are eager to get the ball rolling.
To keep things fun, exciting, and most of all engaging for your affiliates, be sure to offer regular updates of who’s on the leaderboard. You could do this with daily emails. This may even bring a bit of competitiveness out among your affiliates!
Not only is this a great way to create excitement around you and your business, but it’s also a way to encourage your affiliates to stay active even when you’re not running a competition.
As you can see, there are benefits to running an affiliate competition and it can be pretty easy to run a successful one. All in all, an affiliate competition can be a great solution to not just boost your sales, but a fun way to get your affiliates engaged and working hard on your behalf again, as well as a way to make connections with other marketers that could result in future joint ventures.
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