I’ll look at covering that in a later post.

Something you don’t cover is what it takes to recruit new affiliates if you don’t spend the time and money to sell your own products.

If you spend time and money on recruiting affiliates, then you are more likely to succeed.

Rod

You’d probably define how you’d like affiliates to perform.

Are they primarily to:
1) Drive sales
2) Drive your word of mouth campaign
3) Create product awareness?

Depending on how important a role you’d expect them to play, and your available resources on hand, you’d be able to allocate your resources appropriately.

For some of the products I’m currently marketing, I’ve spoken to the product creators and I understand this site is responsible for 40-50% of product sales.

Here’s the bottomline.
If you have one or two super affiliates or huge list owners in mind, you might like to prioritize them. I’d always prioritize these.

If on the other hand, you have an army of newbie affiliates (and no super affiliates in sight – very rare!), you have no choice, but to bring up their proficiency level. It can be quite tough though.

How does one create effective affiliates? Working from the 20/80 principle, where 20% of the people do 80% of the business and the other 80% does 20% of the business, what is the most efficeint way to improve the marketing skills of the 80%.

What is outlined in the article is good for the individuals that already know how to market a product. How far do you do to improve the skills of those that don’t? Or is it even worth the trouble. Is it better to just focus on those with the can-do abilities?