If you have a website that sells a product online, and you’ve
built in a fair amount of room into your price for it, then you
have an opportunity here to use a GREAT free traffic source.
In fact, running your own Affiliate Program helps you in more ways than one. By
signing up affiliates to go out and sell your product for you, you’ll not only build a
huge salesforce, (assuming you make your offer tempting for them) but you will
also be building hordes of one-way, tar geted links back to your website as they
advertise in the various places.
Drawbacks?
You must be very persuasive to get an interested following to do serious selling
for your product.
To overcome this issue, simply build more room into your price so that the
monetary gain for y our affiliates is too tempting for them to refuse. 50%
commissions are quite standard these days on informational products, with some
products go all the way up to 100% commission structure, so that the seller can
build up a newsletter list.
I would have to say that, especially when dealing with
Clickbank
(the #1
infoproduct marketplace for affiliates) 75% commissions to your affiliates is the
way to go. That’s just because there are so many pr oducts out there competing
for an affiliate’s attention… So since 75% is the maximum that clickbank allows,
you’ll soon learn that affiliates will swarm to these products first and you’ll build
up a sales force (and incoming links) quickly. –And you can always turn down the
commission later.
Naturally, if your product is not available for online delivery (i.e. software only)
then the ability to attract affiliates will be much more difficult for you… Not
impossible though, because some affiliates understand the importance of offering
their readers a full range of products built around a central niche theme.
Having an affiliate program that offers multiple tiers helps as well. There isn’t an
affiliate marketer alive who wouldn’t like to earn residual income from the work of
others.
There are two different ways to get started with your own affiliate program. Both
can be free, and of course you pay your affiliates out of sales afterwards.
The most common form of affiliate program is when a webmaster loads software,
usually some form of PHP or Perl script onto the server, integrating it with the
website. These have been sold for years to webmasters and lately have even
been offered for free.
The second type is a service run off-site, through providers such as
ClickBank.com
,
Commission Junction
, or
PayDotCom
. (There are many
other, non-free ones too.) They do the added work for you of helping your
products get found by more affiliates, and they even feature your product in an
online marketplace of theirs. Naturally, they want their cut of the product’s sale
too, usually in the range of 4% to 8%. (Some let you even split that fee with your
affiliates.)
These services may be more effective in the long run for the average info-
product seller, but quite often they do not offer the flexibility that many
webmasters need to best promote their own product line. In those cases, using
server-side software scripts is the only way to go.
Finding a free copy of your own Affiliate program software to load onto your web
server is quite painless, as there are now several different scripts to choose from.
To find your own script, simply google the phrases “free affiliate program
software” or “free affiliate management software.” They should both return helpful
results for you.
Naturally, you’ll have to investigate each one in depth to see if it runs on your
particular server in your software environment. No matter which way you go,
there will be plenty of research involved; this is not something you can start up in
the next 20 minutes. (More like 2-7 days.) Once it starts though, assuming you
make your offer attractive enough, this could really bring in hordes of traffic
immediately.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment