Dear Affiliate Manager: Are You Hoarding Your Articles?

Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 7:42 am

Question: My affiliates keep bugging me about my articles. Why do they want my articles and should I let them have them? What do I get out of it?

Dear Affiliate Manager,

You hit on my pet peeve. Stop hoarding your articles already! Do you want your affiliates to promote your program repeatedly to their lists and on their sites or don’t you? Isn’t the goal to get your website exposure all over the internet? The more sales your affiliates make – the more money you’ll BOTH make.

My favorite affiliate programs are the ones which provide me with articles or brandable ebooks. These marketers understand what it’s like to be an affiliate who wants to make money. Make it easy for me to promote your product repeatedly. Give me quality articles I can use on my websites, in my newsletter and in my blog with my affiliate link included. Don’t just shove a link at me and say “good luck”. It’s not exactly motivating me to go sell your product. Hey, if you don’t give me the tools I want, your competition will.

And, let me clarify something. Providing free affiliate articles with links to your other websites in it, bypassing your affiliates – that’s just wrong. Please don’t make the article leaky by adding several self-promoting links in the body of the article. As an affiliate, I don’t want to promote your other programs and send you leads out of sheer generosity. Although I am a nice person and I’m happy to promote good products, I’m not donating my time to promote your products. First, the products have to be good. Secondly, all things equal, I have to be able to feed my family in the process. Stealing commissions from your own affiliates is just wrong on many levels.

So, what can you do to start building a loyal army of affiliates today? Put yourself in their shoes. They’ve signed up for your program because they believe in your products and in your reputation. Show them that you view your affiliates as partners and you’ll have loyalty that you can’t buy at any price.