Creating an affiliate program for your business may be a great way to not only generate additional sales, but to also increase your brand awareness with your target market. You have a bit of work ahead of to so, but the pros usually outweigh the cons if your business is ready and if done right. We say ready, because launching such program usually works best for businesses that are somewhat established.

Few things are needed;

• You have a product or service that sells and where there’s enough of a profit margin so the % you offer to the marketers is worth their while and yours. This offer has to make sense to you, but be attractive to them. If your product or service have a long shelf-life it’s even better because it means neither you or the affiliates have to re-invent the wheel every week or month.

• You will need a plugin, integration or platform to run your program from;

-the tool will enable the affiliate marketers to register with you, will provide them with a unique link so when a customer found your site from their ad campaign and make a purchase, your site recognises the activity of each affiliate.

-The same tool provides reports and give the ability for the affiliates to login and have access to their sales activities with you and how much they’ll get paid.

-It will be password protected

• You will also need to prepare content for your affiliate marketers, you can usually share those through your platform; It is your brand. It’s important to provide your best graphic ready to use in different sizes, the same goes for each social media platform, and email copy that they might possibly need when advertising your product or service – and it needs to be easily accessible.

Here are some pitfalls to be aware of when considering launching an affiliate program to marketers;

There are different systems and plugin options, choose something that fits your budget, this is suppose to generate revenue every month, but the payoff may not be immediate. Also, some systems will come in detached pieces you‘ll need to put together. If you go that route, ask yourself if you’re tech savvy enough and once you add all the costs of all the pieces (CRM, Ecommerce, Membership capability, etc) is it really cost efficient and do all the pieces fit together seamlessly.

Another factor is your involvement with your affiliates. The more leadership you show, the more they’ll want to be involved and involve others. Successful programs go about showing they care in different ways using contests, periodic online meetings and emails.

One more thing to decide when doing a program, is what type of affiliates do you want for your business. Some will be more serious than other and most are mindful about how they present your product to the world, but not all of them. So you can screen each request from affiliates wanting to join your program and you can also set rules of what they can and can’t do. Another point is how many affiliates do you want to manage. Many platform will automate the whole process, but if you don’t have such platform and manual work is involved on top of showing leadership you may want to think this through.

The set-up and management associated with such program could seem daunting, but could be worthwhile if attended to properly.