Viral Referral Marketing - the Next Generation of Affiliate Marketing

The use of affiliate marketing these days is growing rapidly, and
it's no wonder as to why. Every company with a good product has
referrals naturally from their satisfied customers, but with the
simple implementation of an affiliate program into your business,
those customer referrals increase exponentially based on a
commission rewarded per sale.

What is an affiliate program?

An affiliate program is a viral marketing vehicle that allows
marketers and customers to sign up for your program and earn
commissions on every customer they refer that makes a purchase. The
commissions are usually based on a percentage or fixed price amount
per sale. This makes it a risk free traffic/sale generator because
you only pay your affiliates based on the sales they generate.

This method encourages them to refer your product more often than
they otherwise would, because of the reward you give them for such
referrals. Some affiliates have made a full time business referring
various products and services online via their websites, blogs, and
ezine lists.

There is an easy way that many affiliate program operators don't
know, that can amplify the viral marketing effect even more. It's
simply by creating a 2-tier or multi-tier affiliate commission
system.

A two tier affiliate program has far more viral referral power than
a normal system, because now you add the leverage of rewarding your
affiliates for the sales of other affiliates they refer. For
example: Joe is an affiliate. Joe's friend Ted knows a lot of
people that would be interested in the affiliate program's product.
Joe refers Ted to sign up as an affiliate and refer the people he
knows. Now Ted is in Joe's second tier, and now Joe earns a
commission on every sale that Ted earns from his referrals.

In a two tier affiliate system, some affiliates may sign up just so
that they can promote the affiliate program to people they know
that would have a lot of influence on peoples buying behaviours.
This means a lot more leverage to your sales growth and the number
of affiliates in your program. The viral effect is exponential.

How to Maximize the Leverage of your Multi-tier Affiliate Program?

This is a simple trick that I have rarely seen utilized by any
affiliate program owner, and I'm wondering what it will take for
them to catch on to the power of this technique. Most of the
successful programs will give free training and affiliate tools for
advertising and selling their products. This makes their programs
more appealing and they get far greater results from their
affiliates because they've made it easy for them to promote. Very
few programs use the powerful viral amplifier techniques of
offering free training and tools to their affiliates on how to find
and recruit top grade affiliates into their programs. By top grade
affiliates, I mean ones that have a large targetted audience via
their website, blog, or ezine list that would easily and quickly
generate lots of sales if recuited as an affiliate.

With these kinds of training materials included for their
affiliates, they would rapidly grow the number of high performing
affiliates in their program, through the well trained affiliate
recruiters that would be earning predominantly from the second
tier. This would be much more viral than the affiliate program on
it's own, because it greatly encourages and focuses the affiliates
to refer more and higher performing affiliates into the program.

We're talking about the potential for exponential growth here.
Training affiliates to essentially become affiliate brokers, and
explode your affiliate programs viral growth.

Jambhala Rinpo
ViralMarketingBuzz.com
AffiliateSuperNetwork.com
Best Software to Start Your Own Affiliate Program
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