There are several things that you can do to successfully conduct an affiliate marketing endeavor.
Here are some of them.
Get involved with affiliates
Help your affiliates with everything that you can. These include marketing materials, discounts and others. Show them how to best sell your products.
Use affiliate networks for your sales channel
The benefits of such a network are quite obvious: a larger pool, larger exposure and less financial and technical hassles. This is true for affiliates as well as most of them prefer an affiliate network as against independent affiliate programs.
Pay timely commissions
Try to avoid a "fine print" payment policy. The shorter the payment interval, the better. Most affiliates often get stressed and annoyed with a complex payment policy that introduces a host of limitations and probable penalties for them.
Give incentives to your affiliates
Extend incentives to your affiliates. This would encourage them to perform better. This can be done right from the stage of affiliate recruiting. However, it's very important that you give incentives to your current affiliates. Try giving them whatever they want, even if it includes an increase in the commission. Also consider other rewarding options like generating their own discounts or credits for a software renewal.
Communicate with affiliates
Share your latest promotions and developments with your affiliates and give them whatever information they want. Most of them prefer the email as the method of communication with their affiliate managers. In software business, the best method of communication is sending direct messages, newsletters etc. them, at least two times each month.
Monitor your pay-per-click campaigns
Closely monitor all your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. If you're doing that, then your marketer may be doing it better. Establish a policy with regard to PPC advertising as this is an important percentage of an affiliate marketer for promoting your links.
Never expect affiliates to promote only your products
Affiliates mostly work with several affiliate programs and it's highly probable that they also promote the products of your rivals and competitors. Instead of deleting them from your programs, try to give them some reasons for highlighting your products and services. This, however, doesn't means doling out higher commissions. Such type of marketers is more than sensible to realize the purpose of the commissions.
Affiliate marketing is a very common SEO strategy that can work wonders for increasing your search engine rank. Resort to this method and derive the most benefits.
