APPROVING AFFILIATES INTO YOUR PROGRAM:

It is becoming a common practice to approve or deny Affiliate signups rather than simply accept signups. AffTraq affiliate sales tracking solution recommends that instead of adding everyone who fills out your signup form to your program - you screen them to be sure that their Web site, and company matches who you are looking for to become one of your Affiliates and represent your products and services.

When a company initially creates an Affiliate Marketing program their first thought is that is that is a numbers game. Many successful programs boasted a high number of Affiliates and used these numbers as a means to attract and obtain more Affiliates.

We recommend quality in this process and many Affiliate Program Coordinators today have become more cautious and are much more selective in who they will accept into their programs. An impressive base of 15,000 Affiliates with very low sales results each month does not meet the revenue goals and  means more work for the Affiliate Program Coordinator for less return.

The success of an affiliate marketing program doesn't rely on thousands of Affiliates but rather on the top 10, 20 or 50 Affiliates in the program that consistently bring in 100's of sales per month.

If your work closely with your top producers and don't waste your time on Affiliates that will never produce, you will find that your sales goals are far more successfully realized.

You can and should filter out Affiliates, by not accepting them into your program when, in your opinion and experience, believe they will not become effective for you. You can cancel Affiliates if after the first few months they have failed to produce any sales.  Many will sign-up and not provide a single sale for you.

When new Affiliates sign up, the Affiliate Coordinator can take just a few moments to visit their Web site, write to them or even call them. Decide if the Affiliate looks like they will become a sales channel for you. 

Turning down Affiliates may seem like hard thing to do and counter-intuitive. However, this filtering process ensures that you won't be wasting time working with Affiliates that will never be productive. You can start out with a fairly broad acceptance or rejection criteria. For example, you might reject only those prospective Affiliates that don't have a Website.  You can reject potential Affiliates that and don't respond to your email or phone messages. You can cancel Affiliates after they sign-up if after 3 months they have not made one sale for you.

As your program grows and matures, you will get a very sound idea of who your performing Affiliates are and you'll be able to judge new Affiliates against your average affiliate benchmark. A successful program isn't always a large program.  A successful program is one in which Affiliates are active and making sales for you.

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