If you have your own product or service on the Internet today then you will know that the way to explode your profits is to have your very own, successful affiliate program.  The problem is that most people do not have their program set up in the right way resulting in low traffic counts and therefore poor sales from their affiliates.

In this article I am going to outline some tricks and strategies that anyone with their own affiliate program should use in order to take their online business to the next level.

Encourage People To Sign Up

This is where most people start to go wrong.  They set up an affiliate program, stick up a link that says "click here to sign up" and leave it at that.  You need to sell your affiliate program. After all there is an incredible amount of competition out there.

Have a mini sales letter that explains the benefits to people signing up.  Tell them their commissions and how they can earn an income without having to worry about creating a product or having a website but from promoting your products instead.

Provide Affiliates With Marketing Materials

Here's another big one. Site owners get people to sign up their affiliate program and then just leave them to it. It's like they're saying "thanks for signing up, now go and make me some cash". That's ridiculous.  To start earning the big bucks, you need to do all the hard work for your affiliates.  If you don't, somebody else will.

Provide your affiliate with email promotions, articles, press releases, pay per click ads, banner adverts and whatever else you can create that will enable people to promote your site to the masses with as little work as possible.

Here's the thing. You could write an article and submit it to article directories all over the Internet and do very well for yourself. However if you just had one hundred affiliates blasting that article all over the net you've just multiplied your marketing power by one hundred. This is the key to making massive mounts online.

If you can't write articles etc yourself hire someone to do so from www.elance.com but do provide your affiliates with marketing materials or your just setting yourself up for having a very mediocre Internet business

Have An Affiliate Only Newsletter

Here's a real cracker. Have an email list of only your affiliates. Each week send out a mini blueprint on how they can market your products and earn a commission. Inform them of new products you've just launched or new marketing materials you've just added to your affiliates area.

Another great method you can use with this is to have a weekly completion. Each week your affiliate who earns the most gets an extra one hundred dollars or whatever you can afford. Mention the winner in each week's newsletter and say things like "who thinks they can overtake Joe Bloggs as being my top affiliate? Come on guys I know I've got some great marketers signed up as my affiliates prove it and I'll mention you in next weeks newsletter".

This is great. Psychologically you are motivating your affiliates to promote your products like crazy to get recognition as being your "top gun". Often ego trips are just as motivating as money.

Motivate Your Affiliates And Explode Your Profits

In this article I've been taking about what you need to do in order to earn a serious living online through having your own affiliate program. Done properly this could earn you more money than you could ever have dreamed of. The methods in this article outline what you need to do to in order to overcome the three barriers of starting an affiliate program

You need to:

Persuade people to sign up

Make it easy for them to market

Motivate them to market fast and market hard.

Do these three things and you will be able to create a massively successful affiliate program and you will sell buckets of your products, and build a huge list without any real hard work or costs.

Take my word on this; if you implement these simple strategies today then you will see a marked improvement in both your affiliate sign ups and your affiliates marketing efforts.  Go on. Give it a go!