Starting an Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs will cost you money. But you won't be spending money on advertising. Instead, you'll be spending money on results only. You can pay people a commission for the sales they help generate.
How does an Affiliate Program Work?
Here is how an affiliate program works:
- People sign up for your affiliate program
- You give them a unique id and url that they can promote
- Your affiliates use their unique urls on their websites and newsletters to promote your website
- When people click on their unique urls, they are forwarded to your website. And a cookie is placed on their computers with the affiliate's unique id in it
- When these people buy something from your website, the cookie registers a sale and the affiliate receives a commission for that sale
All this is done automatically with the help of scripts and tools. Here are a few of the best affiliate tools:
Affiliate Program Tools
Affiliate programs hosted on 3rd party servers
You don't have to install any scripts or programs. This is the easier solution. But usually costs more over a long time too.
- Clickbank - If you are selling digital products, this is a very good solution. It allows you to accept payments through credit cards. And they take care of promoting your affiliate program and paying your affiliates too. But they don't allow selling of non-digital products. And combining of more than one product line seamlessly is hard with them. Another disadvantage is they don't allow recurring billing. Thus not suitable for newsletters and membership sites.
- Paydotcom - If you accept payment through PayPal only, then Paydotcom is a very good solution for an affiliate program for you. You accept payment through PayPal instantly and your affiliates are paid through PayPal too. Very low maintenance. Allows recurring billing too.
- 1shoppingcart - This is a very good solution if you want to combine all 3 - affiliate program, shopping cart with accepting payment, and autoresponse newsletter databases together. Charges a monthly fee which is a bit high. But if your online business grows , the extra price for single central database for everything is worth it. The disadvantage is you'll have to take care of paying your affiliates either through check or through PayPal yourself.
- Interneka - If you don't want to use 1shoppingcart and have all your databases in one location, then Interneka could be the solution for you. The disadvantage with them is their high setup fees. But otherwise they seem pretty good and have quite a few options starting from $25 a month.
Affiliate Programs hosted on your own servers
These are scripts you buy paying a one time fee and then host them on your own servers. You'll need to know how to install scripts or hire someone from Rent a Coder to do the installation for you. This is a cheaper option but requires higher level of maintenance.
- Groundbreak - This is a very good script - easy to install and has some very advanced features like tracking campaigns inbuilt into the program. Works with any payment solutions and allows recurring billing too.
- Qualityunit (formerly webradev) - This is a very good script too and the best part of it is it allows as many as 10 levels of affiliate downlines. That means your affiliates can hire other affiliates and they can hire other affiliates - 10 levels down - to earn commission per sale. They too allow recurring billing.
Promoting Your Affiliate Program
Once you've setup your affiliate program, its time to promote it and recruit affiliates. (Note: clickbank does this for you themselves.) Here are a few ways of promoting your affiliate program:
- Ask every buyer to become your affiliate. Tell them that they can make their purchase free by becoming an affiliate and referring 5 or 10 other people. This is the easiest way to grow your affiliate program and earn more money.
- Search for "affiliate directories" in your favourite search engine and submit your affiliate program in those directories manually. Many website owners go to such directories to find affiliate programs that would be good for them to promote on their websites.
- You could also use Affiliate Announcer software to promote your affiliate program to the best affiliate directories online automatically.
Finding Super Affiliates to Promote your Website
Here is a rule of thumb for most affiliate programs: 5% of your affiliates generate 95% of the sales. So if you learn how to attract these top 5% affiliates, your sales will go through the roof. To attract these affiliates, you'll have to do 2 things well:
- Have a good salesletter and autoresponse newsletter that converts well. Top affiliates won't touch a site with a poor salesletter that doesn't convert well.
- Provide excellent promotional tools to your affiliates. The more promotional tools like banner ads and solo email ads you offer, the more affiliates you'll attract.
Here is the trick to finding top afiliates. Go to your favourite search engine and search for your hot market keyword + newsletter. For example, "diabetes newsletter." Then approach these newsletter publishers and ask them to become your affiliates for you. People will good newsletters that is published regularly make very good affiliates.
Here is a tool you can use to automate the process of finding top affiliates for your websites - Internet Success Spider
Now that you know how to setup affiliate programs, its time to show you one of the most powerful online marketing tactics...
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