One way to boost your sales is to recruit affiliate marketers. There are a number of factors that will influence an affiliate’s decision to promote a product, including level of commissions, their familiarity with the target audience, and the promotional tools available.

Most affiliates are going to be less likely to promote products that don’t offer them resources like banners, well written content, promotional videos, etc. The more good quality, easy to use tools you offer the more likely you’ll be to recruit affiliates.

If you are unsure which resources you should be offering the following tips will help you decide.

1) Consider Your Audience

Who is the audience that will buy your products and/or service? Who do you want your affiliates to market to? Once you know the answers to these two questions you can think about the best ways to contact your prospects. Knowing this will help you create better, more effective tools for your affiliates. For example, if a sizeable portion of your buying audience use Pinterest you’ll want to produce images that can be posted there. If they are more likely to consume the written word then you need to produce that type of content instead.

2) Ask Your Affiliates

Your affiliates are the people most likely to know what works. If you already have a few potential affiliates in mind ask them to help you come up with a list of the types of tools they would need to promote successfully. Do they need great artwork, brandable content, videos, or other tools to promote what you are selling?

3) Have a Budget

Creating affiliate tools can be expensive. You need to determine if your investment will pay off. You should have an idea of the cost of producing the resources you want to provide and how much your affiliates will have to sell to cover the cost of creating them. If your numbers seem reachable you need to set a budget and keep to it. You could even plan to create and release some resources only after you have reached a certain level of sales.

4) Personalise the Tools

The easier it is for your affiliates to personalise your resources, the more likely they will be to use them. If you offer various versions of resources like review blog posts, ad text, etc. the easier it will be for your affiliates to personalise their promotional content and avoid looking like they are one of many affiliates who have just copied something from a swipe file.

5) Make the Tools Easy to Use

Use any means you can to make using your tools easier. Affiliates are busy people too and if you can shorten or simplify a task the more likely it is to be done. For example WordPress Affiliate Builder enables your affiliates to enter their affiliate code once and have that cascade down through all the resources you offer, saving them time and making the whole process easier.

6) Use Experts

If you want to offer good quality resources you are probably going to have to hire experts. If you don’t have the expertise to create certain affiliate tools it will be better to outsource these tasks to those that do. It is much better to use experts in coding, graphic design, etc. than to try to produce something yourself. It will likely take longer and produce inferior results if you try to go it alone. Hiring these people should be built into your budget.

7) Provide Training

When you create a resource, don’t assume your affiliates will understand the best way to use it, especially if you are recruiting newer affiliates. Create training that shows how to use the various tools that you supply. This could be provided in PDF reports that include screenshots, video walkthroughs of processes, or both.

Recruiting affiliates is a great way to help you contact a larger audience, market your products and services, and increase sales. But you can’t do it effectively without providing great tools for your affiliates and the training to ensure that they understand how to use them.