A little friendly competition amongst your affiliates can be a great way to bolster sales, build relationships, and increase knowledge of you, your brand, and your products. Luckily, there are all kinds of ways in which you can encourage this and we will talk about a few of them in this post.
Typically, a JV Contest is based on who can get the most front-end sales. This is pretty easy to understand and seasoned affiliates who have already built a big, responsive list will find it fairly easy to get on the leaderboard and/or win the top prizes. A nice spin-off of this type of contest would be to do the same thing, only with One Time Offer sales.
But, what about the ‘little guy’? You know, the one who is just starting out, or has been around for a bit but still struggles to keep up with the more experienced marketers who have been in the game a while? It would be smart to find ways in which they can get involved, as well.
You could, for example, have daily contests in which you award a prize to the person who makes the most sales during a predetermined 24-hour period. Or, you could do speed competitions, and have prizes for the first person/people to reach 10 sales, 20 sales, $100 in sales, etc. Another way to give less experienced marketers a chance to win and increase participation in your JV Contest would be to hold a raffle of some kind. This could be done by allowing your affiliates to earn entries for making a certain number of sales or reaching a certain dollar amount in sales.
Remember that affiliates are shopping around, looking for those contests that they have a chance of winning and today’s newbie just might be tomorrow’s affiliate rockstar! We’ve all had to start somewhere and winning a prize, even a small one, could be just the encouragement someone needs to keep at it, build their list even bigger, and continue making progress in the affiliate marketing world.
In addition to having various contests and prizes, you should consider other ways to inspire friendly competition through communication with and between your affiliates. Social media is a great way to do that and many vendors utilize Facebook Groups for that exact reason. Some other ideas that would work might be for you to create a group Skype chat for your affiliates, or us an app such as Voxer. Remember to cheer your affiliates on during your contest and think about posting the updated leaderboard standings daily on social media platforms.
JV Contests are not only beneficial to the product creator. Affiliates who perform well and are listed on the leaderboards will also see advantages above and beyond their commissions and prizes won along the way. One such advantage would be the recognition they earn as a top performer in affiliate marketing which makes them more likely to receive requests from other vendors asking them to promote their products.
Most importantly, a JV contest should be rewarding to both the vendor and the competing affiliates. Before your next product launch, be sure to spend some time researching ways in which you can make yours the very best it can be. With careful planning and strategic implementation, all parties involved will come out winners!
