If so, chances are you’ve started or thought about starting an affiliate program to increase your marketing reach.

An affiliate program is a program that’s set up to allow ‘affiliates’ (salespeople) to market your products through their own websites, blogs, email lists, social media networks and more.

Starting an affiliate program is no small feat. It takes work and effort to put together a program that’s easy for affiliates to use and understand. One of the biggest components of a successful affiliate program is the content that is provided to inform, train, communicate and market.

Here’s What You Need – A Checklist:

1. Sign Up Information: A critical stage of a successful affiliate program is convincing potential affiliates that your program is worth their time, effort and money (yes, some serious affiliates WILL shell out advertising cash to promote your products). Make sure the sign up information is complete and detailed, convincing and clear.

2. Welcome Messages: Now you’ve got an affiliate signed up you’ll want to repeat the relevant information you posted on your sign up page. Tell them how much they will earn, when they an expect to be paid, where to find resources and how to get their affiliate links.

3. Training Manual: It’s a great idea to again put important information into a training manual that affiliates can download, print out and refer back to. You can also include more information  on how to make money as an affiliate and give suggestions on where to promote your products.

4. Promotional Materials: The more you can help your affiliates save time the better your odds of success promotions. Have pre-written ads, emails, blog posts, articles, product reviews and anything else that will help your affiliates sell your products.

5. Communications: While affiliates may be excited to promote your product when they first sign up to your program, that momentum may slow if you don’t keep in contact with them. Keep in contact with your affiliates via email or even by phone. If you use email you can write autoresponders messages that go out at certain intervals to remind them of products to promote, available resources, upcoming launches and more.

As you can tell content is an important part of your affiliate program plan. If you don’t want to create all the content yourself you could hire a writer or find PLR content to customize to your own program.

No matter how you produce it, providing great content to your affiliates will help you build long-term relationships and sales.

Here’s something that might make you feel better about selling your wares. Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com says that, in fact, “People love to buy stuff, but they don’t like to be sold to.”

The answer, then, is not to sell, but to presell.

What Is Preselling?

Preselling means getting your prospects in a buying mood. You’re not actually selling something, like a salesman does. Instead, you’re creating the desire to buy.

You get pre-sold all the time. For example:

• Your girlfriend calls you gushing about the new Italian restaurant that opened in town. You make a mental note to try it after your next movie.

• You’re looking for a breadmaker but don’t know which model to buy, so you read a blog which reviews and compares different models.

• Your brother tells you how he completely cleared his sinus infection by using a neti pot. Since you suffer from allergic rhinitis, too, you decide to go out and try a neti pot yourself.

In each of these examples, the people you interacted with did not try to sell anything to you. They were simply giving you information that you might find helpful. In fact, except for the blogger, none of them had anything to gain  from your purchase of the product or service in question.

This is what preselling is all about.

Preselling Principles

How do you presell effectively through content?

1. Start by providing useful content, which by itself, is valuable, useful and appreciated. At the same time, the content should point to the benefits of your product or service.

For example, if you sell organic yogurt, your content could be about the benefits of yogurt, particularly organic yogurt. If you’re selling an ebook of natural remedies for insomnia, your content could be about the harmful effects of sleeping drugs.

2. Your content should have a subtle “sell.” It should point to your product/service as a solution for your readers.

Relate the product or service to the topic. Say whom the product/service is perfect for. Finally, let your readers know how they can get the product or service.

3. Make sure there’s a product-to-market fit. No matter how skillful you are at preselling, you won’t succeed you’re preselling to the wrong market. So make sure to offer your content to those who will appreciate it.

Preselling is an important skills for affiliates. They can warm up their readers so that, when they reach the sales page, all they’re looking for is the order button.

If you’re the product/service seller yourself, then you need to presell as well. You don’t want all your content to be hard-selling all the time, after all.

Master the art of preselling and you’ll see an increase in your conversions. Your readers will be glad to have found the solution to their problems, and you’ll be happy with your profits.