If you run an affiliate program, but are struggling to get it off the ground, you can change that. You only really need a few dedicated affiliates to start making sales, and after that the affiliate program can actually grow itself automatically.

A little-acknowledged fact is that with many affiliate programs, the top 5% of affiliates make 95% of the affiliate sales. Indeed, with many affiliate programs that I've studied, the top 1% of affiliates make 95% of affiliate sales.

So, it's not really a numbers game. It's a matter of recruiting people who will actually promote the product effectively. The secret there is to make it really, really easy for them to promote your product.

I said earlier that it's easy to have your affiliate program grow itself. The "secret" is to recruit your customers as affiliates. After a customer has used your product, and fell in love with it, they are ideal for telling others about it. So, why not send them a follow-up message (via autoresponder) telling them about your affiliate program.

What could be simpler?

Here's an easy way to recruit those early affiliates. It's actually a stealth affiliate recruiting SYSTEM :-)

1. You create a short ebook related to the problem that your product solves. You can design this ebook to be sold, or given away.

2. In your ebook you recommend your product several times, as the logical solution to the problem that you're writing about.

3. You turn this ebook into a "rebrandable ebook" meaning that you set it up so that those who get the ebook can change the links recommending your product to THEIR affiliate links.

4. You bundle the ebook in a zip file with a text file explaining how to rebrand the ebook AND how to join your affiliate program. In that file, you also generally include a software rebrander tool such as Viral Document Toolkit.

5. You join one of the many free giveaway sites that allow you to not only giveaway your products, but to grow your email list in the process.

With these giveaways, you typically require a visitor to the giveaway site to visit your site, and join your list in order to access your gift. This is how participating in these free giveaways allows you to grow your list.

6. You tell your list members, friends on sites such as Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, etc., about the free giveaway. You do this because the success of these free list-building giveaways depend upon contributors all spreading the word.

Contributors are generally rewarded for helping publicize the event on a point system. You earn points for recruiting new members (who come for the gifts), and for recruiting new contributors.

The more points you have, the higher up in the gift listings your gift appears. This is important because if a site has a LOT of free gifts, it's very likely that many visitors are not going to sift through hundreds of listings. They're going to look at the first few pages, grab the items that interests them, and perhaps never come back to download the gifts listed deeper within the site.

7. Thousands of visitors come to the giveaway site, and if your description is enticing enough, download YOUR rebrandable ebook.

They unzip your package, read the easy to follow instructions, register as your affiliate, rebrand the ebook with their affiliate links, and then begin selling or giving away your ebook.

When they begin distributing that ebook, they have begun actively promoting your product.

Do you see why I called this a "stealth affiliate recruiting system?"

Since they can earn money from the ebook, and since you make promoting your affiliate product as easy as perhaps offering your ebook from their blog or newsletter, you will have lots of new ACTIVE affiliates. They'll be active because you made it almost no work.

Select the right free list-building giveaway, and you could easily recruit 500 new ACTIVE affiliates with very little work.

There you have it, a simple plan for growing your affiliate program faster than most people dare imagine is even possible. Now, if you don't have a rapidly growing affiliate program, it's because you simply won't even do the EASY things to make it happen :-)