Over the past few months, we’ve been offering affiliate management services to a few clients…and for the past 6 years, I have been managing a number of my own programs too. If there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way is power of being consistent with your program in order to achieve a steadily growing number of sales.

I’m talking about consistency in a few ways from offering regular promotional tools, keeping in contact with your affiliates and reaching new affiliates. Here are 3 thoughts on how to make consistency work for your affiliate program:

1. Regular Promotional Tools: If your goal is to have an affiliate program that brings in a regular income, here’s a simple ingredient to add to your consistency plan -> Set a schedule to put together new tools for your affiliates to use on a regular basis. By giving yourself a schedule and planning your tools in advance, you’re more likely to actually deliver on what you hoped.

(By the way, if you’re looking for promo tool ideas, a while back I posted 29 ideas to get you started right here – it’s a PDF document you can download freely)

If you slapped up your affiliate page, put up some banners, ads and called it a day – that’s going to make it tough for your affiliates to promote your product on a consistent basis. Of course, you can encourage them to add promos to their autoresponders and post ads on their relevant high traffic pages so that a regular stream of traffic continues to come. But if you REALLY want your affiliates on board and getting the word out in a variety of ways, you’ve got to give them fresh stuff to work with – so they promote you over and over again.

2. Staying in Touch – In addition to broadcasting updates to your affiliates on a regular basis, make an effort to build an ongoing relationship with specific affiliates. If an affiliate contacts you with questions or requests help, they’ve opened the doors to further communication and you can use that to your advantage. If an affiliate is making sales, email them personally to thank them and offer them a special promotion they can share with their list. If an affiliate is sending traffic, but sales are a bit low, talk to them about the methods they’re using and see if you can help them improve things.

And once you start this dialogue with specific affiliates, keep it going if the affiliate becomes or continues to be an active member of your team. Don’t assume that your broadcasts inspire these affiliates to immediately take action. If you contact an affiliate personally, they are more likely to act (maybe because they like you, they feel obligated or any number of reasons – but it works!).

Let’s face it, ACTIVE affiliates aren’t as common as we might hope…so whatever you can do to encourage this continued action is going to go a long way.

3. Reaching New Affiliates: Although you may get affiliates who stick around and promote you for years, most come and go. They’re busy or they move onto new ventures, so you can need ensure you continue to bring new affiliates into your program.

You can do this by contacting potential affiliate individually, inviting your customers to join your referral program, asking for referrals from your existing affiliates, creating joint promotional tools with other product sellers and a ton of different ways…just make recruiting,  in some form, a regular part of your affiliate program.

But How Do You Get Consistent?

Saying you should be consistent is easier said than done. There are tons of things we want to get done and sometimes things like nurturing and growing our affiliate programs fall by the wayside. One way to stay on top of things is to plan your activities at the beginning of each month:

• Decide what you’d like to offer and set dates to release your promotional tools, special offers, etc.
• Look at your stats and see who you might start a personal dialogue with.
• Find “an excuse” (a mutually beneficial excuse, of course!) to contact affiliates you’ve been in personal touch with before.
• Look for new potential affiliates or figure out a promotional strategy to bring in more affiliates that month.

Just a few ideas to get you started…but as always, when you have a plan, it’s easier to get where you want to go

(And pssst…if you have troubles coming up with the ideas, we’ve got something coming very soon to help you out with that and more. )