One of the very best ways to generate traffic, make sales, and grow your list is by having affiliates promote your product for you. Essentially, they send you free traffic and you do your best to convert those visitors into buyers.

But beyond the sales we also have an opportunity to opt those visitors in to our list in the process. You may do that with an opt-in form on your sales page, or–you may use some manner of exit script to capture leads when they try to leave your page (a better option).

There are basically two techniques of getting affiliates to promote for you. You can go out into the marketplace and find product vendors with products in the same niche as yours and contact them about some type of joint venture. Obviously, this can work. If you are in the midst of launching your product, you likely promote your launch at one product launch forum or another.

Another option and one that many top-level marketers rely upon heavily is to recruit subscribers to their in-house list to promote their product. Many of your subscribers likely market products of their own.

This is especially true in the IM niche. If people have purchased one of your products in the past, and if they were delighted with the quality of that product, it is entirely possible they might be interested in promoting that product to their own lists.

In order for this to work you must have several things in place. You must have a sales page that converts visitors into buyers with a bare minimum of a 1% conversion rate. That’s not a great conversion rate, but below that you can’t expect to get good quality affiliates promoting for you. With a rate of 3-4% you’ll have no problem getting affiliates to promote.

There are also special cases, such as if you launch an IM related product on the Warrior Forum where it is entirely possible to get conversion rates of 15%, even more in some cases. Affiliates want to promote products with sales pages strong enough to make them money.

There are cases where an affiliate can pull in enough information about your product from your sales page to generate an effective promotional email for your product. In fact, many affiliates do just that.

But to facilitate the process, it is usually a good idea to have a JV or affiliate page set up to help your affiliates promote effectively for you. How can you do this? What should your affiliate page contain? These are the questions we will address here.

The single most important thing to do is to have a strong sales page set up. If an affiliate reads your sales page you want them to say, “Hey, this offer looks like it would convert my subscribers like crazy.” So begin by making sure you have a powerful, high-converting sales page.

Your goal is to have them promote your product by hitting their list with a promotional email containing an affiliate link to your sales page. So make it clear to people who visit your affiliate page exactly how they can get an affiliate link for your product.

You should also set up a commission rate which entices affiliates to promote. In most cases (there are exceptions) a 50% commission would be the bare minimum. Often product vendors will have a 100% commission rate set up for their product. This means that if an affiliate generates the sale of a $17 product they will get the full $17 for the sale.

The product vendor may be offering the product strictly as a list-building tool. They make no money from the sales of the product, but they build a list of buyers they can market similar products to over and over again over time.

A more likely scenario is that the product vendor will take a hit on the original sale and make their money by incorporating an up-sell or OTO (one-time-offer) into their sales funnel. Don’t overlook the possibility of doing something like this yourself.

Your affiliate page should also include some swipe files affiliates can copy and mail to their subscribers to promote your product. Some affiliates will prefer to create their own promotional emails while others will use the one(s) you provide. Many product vendors will provide 2-3 emails for affiliates to chose from.

You can also consider offering a number of banner ads for your product. You can get these made inexpensively and often times bloggers will use the banner ads to promote product from their blog

Another thing to consider, and something few people do, is to provide a promotional blog post affiliates can use. You could create a blog post of 300-500 words in which you discuss the benefits of your product and allow affiliates to copy and paste it in to their blogs along with an affiliate link.

You can also provide graphic images of your product in different sizes affiliates can swipe and use on their pre-sell or review pages.

Affiliates may be able to either view or infer the refund rate of your product depending on the platform you are selling it through. Affiliates hate refunds. If there is a way to give proof that your product has an exceedingly low refund rate–make sure to provide them with that.

In the IM niche it is not uncommon for product vendors to offer prizes to top-selling affiliates during their product launch. These may range from gag gifts, to $20, all the way up to giving away vacations, cars, and cash. I have seen affiliate contests giving away as much as $20,000!

One other thing I highly recommend is, even if you’re not in the midst of a product launch, if you get an affiliate consider sending them something as a reward for promoting for you. There are all kinds of companies online that sell gives for business employees or clients: things from paperweights, to gold balls, to shirts or caps with your company name on them, to baskets of fruit, etc.

You could even go the route of sending them a ten or twenty dollar gift card to some kind of popular franchise type of restaurant. Most product vends do not do this. If you do, your affiliates will appreciate it and be more likely to promote for you again down the road.

Take care of the people who make you money and they will do it time and time again!