There are the five keys to running an effective and successful affiliate program. If you can implement these five keys you will do very, very well when it comes to running an affiliate program in conjunction with your membership site.

Let us start off with key number one and that is Communication.

Communication is so important with your affiliates because again, your affiliates are like an extension of you. They are your virtual sales force. You would not expect a brick and mortar business to not communicate with their sales team.

Likewise, it is very important that you communicate with your sales team but this is a big mistake a lot of people make. They do not communicate with their affiliates, they do not keep them informed of what is going on, things that are happening in the business, new promotions that are being developed, new updates to the products, they are not talking about new products that are about to be released, or anything of that nature.

There is very little communication going on and again, these business owners are hoping that their affiliates just somehow know all the ins and outs of what is going on in the business. Folks, nobody cares about your business. You have to give them a reason to care about your business and you got to communicate those reasons and it is important that you do that often.

As far as communication goes, we recommend in the neighborhood of at least two to four times a month. Two to four times a month is a healthy amount of communication to have with your affiliates. It is enough to keep them informed of what is happening without bombarding them with too much.

Now if you are doing a very specific promotion or a specific launch of a product, then you could certainly expect to increase the volume of communication during that period of time.

For example, when we launch a particular product, or we are doing a very specific promotion, we will communicate with our affiliates much more during that period of time generally because there is a lot of moving parts to a promotion, there could be a lot of contests and things of that nature and there could be all kinds of other elements, that your affiliates need to know about at that particular time or during that particular period of time.

So, communication certainly increases during any specific launches, or new product launches or promotion but as a general rule of thumb, two to four times a month is probably the amount of communication you want to have with your affiliates.

The five keys to a successful affiliate program: Number 1) Communication. Number 2) Give your affiliates a reason to promote your product. Number 3) Provide tools and training materials. Number 4) Remember the 80-20 rule. Number 5) Build relationships.