Allow other people to promote your products or services. For every sale they make, you pay them a referral fee. You can sign up hundreds, even thousands of affiliates who will promote your product or services to their customers, newsletter subscribers, opt-in email lists and you only ever pay a commission when they make a sale.
Affiliate programs
If you have a product that can be ordered over the Internet, then you should consider setting up an affiliate program, allowing thousands of other websites to sell your product on a commission basis. This method has been most successful with Amazon.com, the world's largest online bookstore.
Developing an affiliate program can be very time-consuming initially, but once set up and running on auto-pilot, you can multiply yourself with an army of affiliates recommending your products and services. Your business grows steadily from the efforts of others. Reward your affiliates well and they reward you with a bigger bank account.
Even without your own product you can develop an affiliate program to market products that you have purchased with reprint rights
Learn more about affiliate programs, resources and services:-
Types of affiliate programs
Do you have strong foundations?
Building the Structure
Affiliate Support Tools
Offer very attractive commission rates
Managing Your Affiliates
Accurately Track Your Affiliates
You can automate the whole process
Advertise your Affiliate Program in Ebooks
Advertise your Affiliate Program in Ezines or Newsletters
Register with Affiliate Program Directories
You can also be an Affiliate
Affiliate Program Development Service
Affiliate Recruitment Campaigns service
Types of affiliate programs
The best type of affiliate program is based on pay per sale commissions, as follows:-
Single Tier - you pay your affiliates a commission for any sales they refer.
Two Tier - you pay your affiliates for each sale they achieve and a small percentage of any sales generated by sub-affiliates they recruit to your program.
More than two tiers are multi-level marketing (MLM), which generally has a bad image on the Internet because it attracts spammers. MLM products also tend to be over-priced to pay for many tiers of commissions, so we would recommend you do not go beyond two-tiers.
Other types of programs are available, but can be vulnerable to rip-off merchants using false email addresses or automatic software that clicks on your link without a real person actually visiting your website. These are:
Pay per Click
You pay affiliates for each click from their website to yours, via a banner, text link or other means.
(Note: Don’t confuse this with Pay per Click Search Engines)
Pay per Lead
You pay for each time someone completes a form (subscribe) on your affiliate’s website.
Pay per Impression
You pay your affiliates each time a link or banner is displayed to someone on their website.
Do you have strong foundations?
To recruit affiliates, you will need a quality product or service, a good profit margin, an ordering system that is easy to use and can handle large volumes of sales, a fulfilment process ready to handle the volume, and have a good visitor to sales conversion ratio.
If you have purchased reprint rights for other people’s products and wish to set up an affiliate program to market them, make sure that the same foundations are in place, that they are quality products to complement your business and provide added value to your customers. Many reprint rights products offer personal branding options, which is even better.
Once these foundations are in place, your have every chance of running a successful affiliate program of your own.
Building the Structure
Your affiliate program needs to be well structured to attract quality affiliates who will increase sales and guarantee the continued success of your program.
Affiliates are your virtual salespersons, so you need to provide a complete package of materials they can choose from, to suit their own website styles and for emailing their subscriber lists.
Affiliates who link to and promote specific products are a lot more successful than those who simply promote your site in general. When building your structure, ensure you have relevant landing pages so that they can link to specific products.
Potential affiliates may have their own ezine or other means of email communication, and each will have their own criteria for joining an affiliate program. Anticipating their requirements will show that you are organised and have considered their needs by giving them a choice.
The shorter and less your links look like referral URLs the better. Some people recognize affiliate URLs, and are suspicious of them. A big advantage of short referral URLs is they are easier to put into newsletters, which are a highly effective way to advertise online.
Establish your own criteria first, then design or collate the best support materials you wish to provide to potential affiliates. If you have already ventured into internet marketing, you will probably already have materials you have tried and tested, so you will know which types are the most successful to achieve your goals. If a technique has worked for you, it will work for your affiliates.
Affiliate Support Tools
Provide the support tools your affiliates will need to make it easy and encourage them to promote your products and services. Have it all ready and tested before you start your recruitment campaign. Depending on your company image and style, you may require:
Banner ads and Graphics links
Banners can be standard, HTML or Rich Media and are one of the dominant forms of advertising online. Learn more about Banner Advertising
Text Links
An attention grabbing Headline with a short paragraph and link to your site may be a preferred option for your affiliates. You see these text links on website home pages and also on ‘Links’ pages.
Ready-made mini website or Landing Page
Mini sites are often provided for single product or service promotion. Affiliates could have a banner or text link which then goes to a sales page (mini site) which you have provided, with the affiliate’s ID embedded in the site.
Landing pages within your website designed to actually sell single products or services are the general approach in providing links for affiliates
Sequential Emails or sales letters they can use
The best affiliates will have a large mailing list, and some form of regular email communication to their subscriber list. You could provide short or longer email material which should be interesting and not blatant sales material, with a link to your website. Learn more about the pros and cons of this type of content here:
Sequential Designer Email for Automatic Responders
Ezine (newsletter) promotion
Email marketing
Email marketing campaigns
Personal Recommendations and Testimonials
Genuine personal recommendations and testimonials can be obtained from customers who have purchased, used and experienced your products or services. This ‘word of mouth’ is free advertising for you and can increase your credibility and trust as a business owner.
Interviews
Many affiliates are now using audio or transcript interviews as a sales technique, including them in articles, newsletters or on their websites. If you have an established business, are prepared to be interviewed and provide this as material for your affiliates, this can work well and provide links to your site.
Advertisements
A wide selection of advertisements (including classified ads, banners, graphics or text) for online and offline advertising should be provided for both global and local promotions. The selection should suit various site designs and available space. Your affiliates need to be comfortable in the way they wish to approach the sales process for promoting your products and services.
Offer very attractive commission rates
You only pay for sales, so reward your affiliates well. You receive profit you would not have earned without the affiliate.
Pay excellent commissions on every purchase a referred customer makes, not just on the first purchase. For instance, you might offer anything from 20% to 50% for a single tier affiliate program and a further 5% to 15% for a two-tier program. Even if you did that, you would still be gaining profit you never had before, multiplied by possibly many hundreds or even thousands of times.
You can offer a buyers network and give your affiliates a set percentage discount for being a member of your network. What they are really doing is becoming an affiliate and making savings on products or services they want for themselves.
Build in bonus payments for top earners, to provide incentives to your affiliates.
Or offer a time-limited email coupon sharing scheme, for your affiliates to pass on to friends and neighbours to take advantage of discounts and savings before they expire.
You will need to work from your own business accounts, profit margins and value per customer, to calculate your best offer, and the overall package to attract affiliates to your program
Managing Your Affiliates
Choose your affiliates according to your criteria, if you want to keep administrative chores to a minimum. This ‘screening’ gives you the power to choose affiliates who have sites that closely relate to your target market, have a lot of traffic or have a lot of experience promoting affiliate products.
You can recruit a small team of powerful affiliates who generate a lot of sales for your website. This is the direct approach we would recommend initially, and our Affiliate Recruitment Campaign aims to recruit 75 affiliate sites and guarantees to get you at least 50.
If you advertise your program, or list it on an Affiliate Program Directory, you are offering your affiliate program to anyone who is interested, and you may have many hundreds or thousands wishing to join the program. Many of these applicants will have little experience of marketing on the internet; some may achieve small sales; some may never sell anything; and a few may generate many sales.
This approach broadens your scope, and whilst having hundreds or thousands of affiliates creates more administration, you can automate most of your program.
Experience shows that 5% of affiliates make the most sales. These are labelled as ‘super affiliates’ who can earn a really good income from their efforts. As you track your affiliates, you can encourage them to become super affiliates by providing them with tips, new approaches, and educational material to motivate and encourage them.
Help your affiliates all the way, and they will help you
You could consider giving performance bonuses to the top earners and praise them in a monthly newsletter. Tell your other affiliates how the top earners did it, and how they too can earn bonuses by giving them ideas on how to promote your products best.
Accurately Track Your Affiliates
You must track your affiliates accurately, to ensure they receive correct payments on time. There are different technical methods to do this, including tracking through HTML or “Mirror” pages, CGI tracking, cookie tracking, and so on.
Provide real-time tracking that shows affiliates the conversion rates for their various links, gives an affiliate program the cutting edge. You can achieve this with an online database made available via a secure server.
Such a facility will enable your affiliates need to track their efforts, to see the number of click-throughs to each of their different links, the number of sales that each link has made, and calculates the conversion rate for each link.
This information will tell them which of their various links are performing, which are not, and get an idea why, to see how they could be improved.
Our Internet Marketing Tools module provides an Affiliate and Advertisement Tracking Program Manager which tracks the number of 'click throughs' and orders received from a particular affiliate or campaign. It generates an affiliate/campaign code to be added to all banner, ezine and text ads, when an affiliate signs up or a new campaign is started. Consequently, when an order is received, an affiliate or a campaign is tracked and commission is released to the affiliate.
If you have purchased our Gold or optional Silver Website Builder packages, the Affiliate/Ad Tracking Program Manager is included with the package. For other clients, we provide services where we do all the work for you, or you can Do It Yourself, by paying for using each tool separately or as a package. Just contact us and tell us what you want and we will be happy to give you the lowest possible price
You can automate the whole process
Using a combination of
database and
automatic responders you can run your affiliate program on automatic pilot. Once you have developed and set up everything you need for your program and recruited your affiliates, you will only need to spend a few hours each month watching your virtual salespersons making sales on your behalf - and you can do this from anywhere in the world. Automating your program means you can:-
Track all affiliate activity
Track all sales
Automatically communicate with your affiliates
Automatically communicate with affiliates prospects
(as your automatic responders do the conversion)
Automatically train your affiliates
Automatically track which promotional tools are working best
Advertise your Affiliate Program in Ebooks
Create a free ebook with the advertisement and link of your affiliate web site. The subject of the free ebook should draw your target audience to download it. Also, submit it to some ebook directories and allow other people to give away the free ebook. The more exposure your free ebook gets, the more your ad will be seen.
Learn about Ebook Publishing
Advertise your Affiliate Program in Ezines or Newsletters
If you have your own ezine or newsletter, you can advertise your affiliate program to your customers especially those who have already purchased and have first hand knowledge or experience of your products or services. You can advertise your program in other people’s ezines or newsletters.
Read more about ezine (newsletters) promotion
Register with Affiliate Program Directories
Affiliate Directories are search engines for Affiliates and used by many people wishing to join affiliate programs. Being listed on these directories maximises your program’s exposure to affiliates looking for good opportunities.
Affiliate Directories have their own preferences and submission policies in the same way as search engines and search engine directories. Many directories offer banner ads, and most will include your program in their newsletters, which have 1000s of subscribers looking for new affiliate opportunities.
You need to gather information about each directory, such as their typical usage and timeline data, and optimise your program description (profile) and keywords to select the best category fit. You should also test your links once submitted, to ensure they are functioning properly.
In addition to offering affiliate program development and recruitment campaigns, we offer a hand submission service to the top affiliate directories. Contact us for more information.
You can also be an Affiliate
You can earn commissions by being an affiliate yourself. A simple way to do this is providing a link from your website to other sites offering an affiliate program, where you are paid commissions on sales generated from your website. Getting this right can provide you with another source of income from your website.
It is crucial to only promote complementary products or services you would not normally supply, which will add value for your existing and potential customers and remain within the specifics and theme of your business.
You should spend some time investigating your potential affiliations, as they are business partners Find out how long the company has been in business, and ask questions about their products and services in forums, industry newsgroups, bulletin boards and any other method at your disposal.
Selecting the wrong affiliations can seriously damage your search engine rankings and do you more harm than good. Only associate with the best in your industry, as it is your reputation on the line, and that is priceless. Your customers will rely on you to make sure that every product and service you recommend will perform as promised.
Personal, honest endorsements are the best if you have actually bought the product or service for the affiliate program you wish to join. Tell people what kind of benefits and results you received using the product, or even write a review to interest your customers.
Be original and write your own affiliate program ads, to give you an edge over your competition, or other affiliates.
Affiliate Program Development Service
Whether you want to recruit affiliate sites, or set up a program from scratch, we can do it all for you.
We can create banners, advertisements, develop the content and design to promote your affiliate opportunity and develop the affiliate management tool for your use. We can also offer real-time tracking for both yourself and your affiliates. Payments to your affiliates would need to be arranged separately, according to your preferred Payment Processing system.
You can choose to contact us, use our Self Service Project Cart, or ask for a free quotation (no obligation) and we’ll advise you on the best solution to meet your business needs. We research your target market and create an affiliate program that fits your company image and will achieve the best results for you.
Affiliate Recruitment Campaigns service
When recruiting affiliates for your program, you need to focus on highly targeted affiliates who have direct access to your target market.
Our Affiliate Recruitment Campaign service aims to recruit 75 affiliate sites and guarantees to get you at least 50. This service is incredible value for money in view of the exhaustive and time consuming work involved. Read more:-
| Affiliate Recruitment Campaign |
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Affiliate Recruitment Campaign: Our affiliate recruitment service aims to recruit 75 affiliate sites and guarantees to get you at least 50. This service is incredible value for money in view of the exhaustive and time consuming work involved. First our experts trawl the Internet for prospective affiliate partners who meet your criteria. Once we have compiled a list of at least 150 prospects we then contact the prospects with a personalised email; informing them of the benefits of becoming an affiliate both for them and their own site visitors. Through a tried and tested process we are able to generate a good volume of affiliates for our clients and usually generate more than the guaranteed minimum. This has a beneficial effect on your search engine rankings due to link popularity as well as a direct effect of generating traffic through the actual link sites. |
£239.99
per campaign
Order now |
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Whatever you want, no matter how complex, our experienced offshore development teams can create a solution to meet your requirements. With prices starting at a few hundred pounds, the return on investment could be recovered within a matter of weeks - or even days.
You can choose to contact us, use our Self Service Project Cart if you already know what you want, or ask for a free quotation (no obligation) and we’ll advise you on the best solution to meet your business needs.
We research your target market and create an affiliate program that fits your company image and will achieve the best results for you
