Affiliates today are sophisticated, driven and ready to sell! They need and want more than banner ads. As a merchant, you have to be ready to give them more! You have to be ready with an arsenal of linking methods like:

• Articles: Writing an insightful article about your industry and tying in your product is a great way to offer readers information they want while showing the benefits of your product. Let your Affiliates use any articles you write on their sites, email messages and newsletters. Your Affiliates can use the Article to add content to their site or newsletter and promote your products and services.
• Signature Files: Though they are quick, little blurbs - signature files can be difficult to write. Trying to fit all of the great features and benefits of your product into a few lines is harder than it looks. So, make it easy on your Affiliates and give them a few signature files to choose from.
• Guestbooks/Signup Forms: Do you have a Free newsletter, Free report or any other "emailable" free item? If not -- get one and start collecting email addresses -- and let your Affiliates collect email address for you as well. You can reward them for each email address, or reward them for each purchase made by the subscribers they send you.
• Email Advertisements: With the ever-growing number of topic-oriented newsletters emerging on the Internet every day, your Affiliates have (or will soon have) the opportunity to reach thousands of readers through email advertisements. Much like Signature Files, Email Advertisements can be difficult to write because of the size constraint. So, once again, try writing a few ads in a variety of sizes that your Affiliates can choose from.
• Product-Specific Images: If your site markets a wide variety of products for a wide variety of interests, you may want to narrow down a few key products for your Affiliates to market instead of your entire store. For example: If you have an online office supply store, you may consider creating an image to market general office supplies, one to promote electronics and another to promote office furniture. Your Affiliates can choose a banner for their site based on the interests of their visitors.

Instead of placing a banner on their site, your Affiliates should be able to choose from several linking methods. Along with giving them more flexibility in linking to your site, additional methods provide incentive to your Affiliates: By giving them an email advertisement you give them the idea to place an ad in their favorite email newsletter -- where they may have never thought to advertise before.

So, how do you manage all of these linking methods? Most Affiliate Program Solutions are set up to give Affiliates banners and simple URL links. Do you have to format each linking method? How do you get new linking methods to your Affiliates? Will you customize the links with their Affiliate ID Numbers, or try to explain to them how to do it? What a headache!

There is one application built to handle all of the linking methods you can dish out -- MY Affiliate Program Software.

The Affiliate Empowerment Pack that is built into the MY Affiliate Program Software allows merchants to easily create and distribute additional linking methods in one swift movement. Simply create your image, text ad or HTML ad and place it in the Empowerment Pack. The software will automatically customize the links for each Affiliate and make the new method available to them at their Administration Page.

Affiliates simply copy and paste the HTML or the text for the articles, signature files, images and guestbooks and place them on their sites or in email messages that they send.

Affiliates get what they need to effectively promote your products and services -- and you're saved from the headache of customizing and distributing new linking methods.

For more information about MY Affiliate Program Software and the Empowerment Pack, visit: http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/u/a/t.asp?id=10726