Here’s a question I receive quite often.

Hey Nicole, I’m not getting any affiliate sales. I’m getting discouraged with my affiliate program. Should I raise my affiliate commission?

Well, in this case, the person sells physical products. When you sell physical products, you have to take into account the cost of shipping and production — because that’s cutting into your profits. This person also does speaking engagements, too.
Here’s my reply…

You need to look at how much traffic the affiliates are sending you vs. the number of sales. If they are sending you traffic, then you’d want to test different text on your landing page. If they’re publishing your articles and posting banners and sending you lots of traffic, then they are already motivated. So, you may want to look at the page the leads land on and do some testing and tweaking to make money from the traffic you’re already getting. Convert the visitors into customers.

Remember, there are a LOT of benefits to having affiliates other than the number of sales. They are doing FREE advertising and branding and name recognition for you. For instance, I have your banner on one of my kids’ sites. I get hundreds of teachers and moms there every single day. So, who knows if one of them picks up the phone and schedules an appearance or joins your mailing list and forwards it to friends. If I were to charge you for that advertising… well, you don’t wanna know how much it would be. (Hint: a lot!) So it’s basically free to you. So, please don’t get discouraged. And, don’t just look at your numbers, as you’re benefiting in multiple ways from your affiliate program. A newspaper reporter could see the banner, click through and call you for an interview. There are sooooo many benefits to your affiliate program other than those sales numbers. Keep that in mind.

Keep tweaking your marketing before you raise your affiliate commission. It’s already very generous for a physical product. Now, if you wanted to do a short time increase to motivate your current affiliates, that’s another situation all together. A great trick is to say “for the next X days, the affiliate commission will be doubled…” to get the inactive affiliates active. But, to set it higher long-term… I’d say not to at this point, anyway.

Warmly,
Nicole