This is a continuation from the article #2 Key To A Successful Affiliate Program - Part A which detailed other elements of the second key to a successful affiliate program, which is: Give your affiliates a reason to promote your product every single month. This one is enormous and this is the number one opportunity area for anybody who has an existing affiliate program, and wants to improve it dramatically or anyone who is looking to start a new affiliate program.

Create a contest or provide some incentive for your affiliates to promote a product during a certain period of time can be another great way to increase their level of activity with your affiliate program.

Affiliates are motivated not only by the money they are going to make, but if they can also receive some type of cool bonus or there is some type of incentive associated with any sales that are generated during a certain period of time, chances are you are naturally going to increase the level of activity that those affiliates are going to produce during that period of time.

In my own company, WishList Products, we have recently done a variety of different contests. We did a promotion with the Gary Vaynerchuck promo that we did and we tied it to an affiliate contest so affiliates won certain prizes if they generated certain levels of sales.

What was fascinating was the increased activity that we saw from affiliates during that period of time and it was substantial. We had affiliates that never had sales before that were making five to ten sales during that time.

If you multiply that over the thousand of affiliates that we have, you can quickly imagine how much of an impact that that type of promotion has and so the key is with a contest, provide some type of incentive or create some fun reason why they should promote your products or services.

There is a lot of creative ways that you can make it fun to promote your products and services but with a contest or some incentive, you can count on the fact that there will be an increased level of activity from your affiliates.

So get creative there. Create some contests, create some incentives, and give your affiliates a reason to promote your product.

Thirdly, Give your affiliates something to talk about. So many people underestimate the value of just giving your affiliates something to talk about, a conversation starter. Give them a reason to create a new blog post about you or your products, or your service.

It can be as simple like something an update to your product or service or your membership site. Perhaps you added a new featured element to your membership site or perhaps you added a juicy piece of content to your membership site. Re-launching a particular product, including a new bonus, increasing membership price on a certain date are all reasons for your affiliates to promote or talk about.

You can see these are all examples of the types of things that your affiliates can use to start conversations to use by making a blog post or starting conversations on Twitter, Facebook or what have you.

These are all reasons to talk about your product or service and you are the one that is providing those to your affiliates. The key is when you have those types of things you must communicate with your affiliates about them.

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.