All companies treat their affiliates differently. In fact, your affiliates are your driving sales force. Unlike in the off-line world, they don't get paid by the hour, they get paid for the sales they make.

This means you, the business owner, only pay for what you sell, but it also means that you need to give your affiliates incentives to motivate themselves to dedicate their time to marketing and selling the products that will bring you and them an above average income.

No matter if you're an affiliate owner or just a participant in some or other affiliate program, you make money when you and your downline make sales. Having 500 affiliates will do you little good and bring in little money, if they won't sell.

What can you successfully give your affiliates to achieve the best sales results? 

Starting an Awards Program

A moderately effective method of improving your affiliate sales is to start an awards program. You can have web sites which are related to yours apply for an award from your site. The sites which win the award get the chance to display the logo for your award. This logo is linked to your site, preferably to a page which contains more information on the award.

If you publish an affiliate newsletter, consider declaring the winners in your newsletter. You can also perform a review of the winners' sites in your newsletter. This adds useful content to your affiliate newsletter and also gives more webmasters the incentive to apply for your award, since you may review their sites in your newsletter. This also gives them the incentive to join your affiliate program and newsletter to see if they win the award.

Make sure that you give awards to only those sites which deserve to win. If you give your award to sites which don't deserve it, your award will have little credibility, which will hurt the credibility of your company. Furthermore, make sure that the logo you design for the award looks professional. If it doesn't, not many webmasters will want to display it in their sites.

Start a Link Contest

A good method of improving your affiliate sales is to give away prizes to your members that are the heavy hitters. The prizes that you give out should ideally be something which other members will find valuable enough to want to sell more. 

For example, if you publish an affiliate newsletter you can give away some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. Use a bonus like software or an ebook or a special gift. 

Link contests work best if you run the contest on a continuous basis and if you declare new winners frequently. If you run the contest for a few months, and then stop it, your affiliates will remove their position from your program. However, if you run it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners every month or so, the members will have the incentive to keep selling for you.

Points System 

Reward your affiliates a point for every one-dollar they sell. Let's say your affiliates can get free advertising in your newsletter for 100 points. That means customers will spend $100 dollars on your products and services to get enough points to get free advertising. To push slower selling products or services just offer more points per dollar spent for those particular items. The kind of rewards you give should depend on what your business can afford. 

While other methods of giving your affiliates incentives work better than some, it greatly depends on the value of your offer whether you'll see any sales increase. Affiliates are your sales team. The better you educate and treat them fairly, the more sales you generate. Taking a little extra time to get creative with your incentive will help you keep those heavy hitters and recruit new ones.

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