While affiliate programs are a good way to get your business growing quickly and exponentially, it is also an unfortunate reality that most of your affiliates will never make any sales at all. Only about 5% of your affiliates will be top performers - and have the skills and assets needed to succeed.

However, you can hugely improve these figures by making it easy for even novices to gain experience as affiliates and promote your products effectively. You can do this by motivating and training them in powerful affiliate marketing techniques and offering incentives for success.

Your Affiliate Toolkit

At a bare minimum, your affiliates should have access to ready-to-go promotional material including banners, button graphics, classified ads, ezine ads, solo mailing copy, website advertorials, articles and even space ads for print media.

Most affiliates are too busy or lazy to do it all by themselves. By making it as simple for them as possible to promote your program, you will vastly improve your fraction of active affiliates.

You could go a step further for the best affiliates, doing tele-seminars for them, or creating special reports that are rebrandible with their affiliate links, or setting up unique discounts or bonuses for their referrals.

Affiliate Contests

Many affiliate managers have reported outstanding success in motivating affiliates to sell more products by running contests. These are often limited-time events where the affiliate making the most sales within a certain period will win either cash prizes, gifts, or get temporarily higher affiliate commissions.

With some high priced products, this bonus could work out to be a significant amount of money - making even 'lazy' affiliates wake up and take notice.

Tracking Referrals

While there are many ways to do this manually, all are cumbersome and time-consuming. Unless you absolutely cannot afford a program to manage your affiliate program, or plan on keeping it very small, you would do better to have an automated solution for tracking referrals and calculating commissions.

There are a great number of affiliate program software solutions, ranging widely in price and features. Look for the kind of features you need and read reviews on various solutions before picking the one you want to use. Be sure to make this choice carefully, as it becomes incredibly difficult to change your affiliate program software mid-way through your promotion.

Affiliate Coaching

Some program managers conduct formal training programs for their affiliates that helps them sell more volume. This is very similar to sales-person training programs that many offline businesses use to boost the efficiency of their sales force. Your affiliate army is your personal sales team - take care of them well, and enjoy the benefits of hands-off business growth.