by Paul Greaves

If you are selling your own products or services online, a succesful affiliate marketing programme can send your business profits through the roof. Many online marketers unfortunately do not set their affiliate programmes up correctly and as a result acheive a far lower volume of website traffic and sales than they should.

I want to use this article to show you how anyone with an affiliate programme can use some simple tricks of the trade to move their online business up to a whole new and far higher level.

Motivate Potential Affiliates To Sign Up

This is the thing that many people miss. It's no good setting up an affiliate programme with links that say "click here to sign up" and then leaving it at that. You have to sell your affiliate programme.You should create a mini sales letter that explains the benefits that the potential affiliate will gain by signing up. For instance let them know how much their commission will be and how they can earn a living promoting your products without ever having the headaches and expense of product creation or web site building.

Give Your Affiliates Your Own Marketing Materials To Use

Another common error! Site owners tend to get people signed up for an affiliate programme and then leave them to get on with it. Basically they're saying "thanks very much for signing up, now go and make me rich". It just doesn't work like that. You have to work hard for your affiliates if you want them to start making you lots of cash.

Give your affiliate whatever you can create in the way of email promotions, articles, press releases, pay per click ads,banner adverts and whatever else you can think of that will let people promote your site as widely as possible with no more effort on their part than necessary.That way all their effort can go into actually marketing your products and services.

The thing is you could build a nice business for yourself by writing an article and submitting it to article directories all over the internet but just imagine the leverage you would get if you had one hundred affiliates putting that same article out. Your marketing

power has been multiplied by one hundred and this is the key to making huge amounts of cash online.

You don't have to create all these marketing materials yourself if you don't want to. Simply employ someone to do it for you by going to www.elance.com. The important thing to remember is that your business will only be really succesful if your affiliates have good quality marketing materials at their disposal.

Produce A Regular Newsletter For your Affiliates.

This really gets results. Put your affiliates on to an email list and every week send them an update on the best ways for them to market your products and earn commissions. Let them Know about any new products you've just launched or any new marketing materials you've just added to your affiliates area.

One really clever strategy is to run regular competions. Give a prize of an additional one hundred dollars (or whatever you can afford) to your most succesful affiliate. Include the winner in your newsletter and challenge the other affiliates to beat them next week.

This is really good psychology as you are motivating your affiliates to promote your products like mad so that they will be recognised as being your "number one". Ego can often be as motivating as money.

Motivate Your Affiliates And Explode Your Profits

In this artcle I've been showing you exactly what you need to do with your own affiliate programme in order to earn a serious income online. If you do this properly you will earn more money than you could ever have imagined. To recap, in order to overcome the three barriers of starting an affiliate programme you must..............

Convince people to sign up

Make marketing easy for them.

Motivate them to market as fast and as hard as they can.

This way you'll create a massively successful affiliate programme which will sell tons of your products without any real hard work or any costs.

I guarantee that if you put just one or two of these simple methods to use you will see a huge improvement in the number of affiliate sign ups and how actively they market your business. Have a go and see for yourself!