[Sorry... I know I've been neglecting my blog. My sister got married at the end of June so that was crazy, my flight back left without me so I got home a day later, had to find a holistic vet for my 20-year-old cat, discovered Squidoo and creating lenses and that's been eating up much of my time... but I'm back now and will be publishing helpful posts for you on a daily basis from now on.]
“Why should I collect my affiliates’ email addresses?”
As a seller, there are a number of good reasons why you would want to collect all of your affiliates’ email addresses:
So they don’t forget about you. Affiliates are constantly distracted by new products to work with and they tend to forget about others. By staying in touch with your affiliates, it’ll keep yours in their minds.
Want a boast in sales? Maybe sales are starting to taper off, or maybe you want a sudden flood of sales to buy a new sports car. Being able to send your affiliates an email to light a fire under them would be handy. [How would you light a fire under them? Hold a contest. The affiliate who brings in the most sales in a specific time period (ex. one month) wins a cool prize.]
To build loyalty. The simple truth is: affiliates aren’t exactly loyal; they’re going to go with the easiest sale (a product that sells itself). But by doing things to help your affiliates (send them tips to make them (and you!) more money, offer to create new tools and graphics for them, be available for interviews, etc.), they’ll be more likely to stick with you, and not your competitor.
About to launch a new product? You’ve probably heard that some sellers launch a new product and make $1 million on the first day. [Mike Filsaime comes to mind] They do this by sending their affiliates an email a month in advance to start getting them fired up about the launch. Then another three weeks before launch, and continue sending messages counting down until the launch. Inside the message is a message the affiliates can send to their subscribers to get potential customers so excited about the product, they can’t wait to buy it. When launch day comes, people rush to their computer with their credit card in hand.
How to Get Affiliates to Cough It Up
Does your affiliate network let you contact your affiliates? [I know PayDotCom does] If they let you email your affiliates, and not every affiliate in their network, you’re all set.
If not, you’ll have to collect it yourself…
Don’t do like some sites that use a squeeze page to force affiliates to give up their email address before they’ll let them get to their affiliate page. Since sites, like these, tend to bury affiliates in email trying to get them to buy other people’s products, it’s easier to hit your ‘Back’ button and go find a different seller to work with instead.
A better way is to bribe them with a reward program. Some sites might offer an extra 10% on each sale when an affiliate reaches 50 sales in a month, 15% when they reach 100, etc. Others offer a flat dollar amount on each sale after an affiliate reaches a certain point, so instead of getting a $20 commission on each sale, for example, they get $25 on each sale. But the catch is – an affiliate can’t participate unless you have their email address.
All those extra sales will make it worth your while. 
Once you add the form, then just set it up so that it sends the info to a list you set up on Aweber or whichever email list manager you use, and then you can blast a message to all of your affiliates any time you want.
So, how do you pay them the difference? If you use a network, like Clickbank or ShareASale, that pays them their regular commissions, you just PayPal them the difference. For example, if they earned $575 in commissions and your network paid them $500, you just PayPal them the $75.
See? Collecting your affiliates’ email addresses and staying in touch with them pays off in sales now and for years to come.
