How To Set Up An Affiliate Program
July 19, 2008
To really put your business into jet propelled marketing, you need to use affiliates. So what do we mean by affiliates? It means that you have a lot of people selling your product for you and you would pay them a commission. One thing that’s really good about this is that any payments made, are made after you have been paid.
It also means that your product now has many people promoting it. This creates a viral effect and helps make your product to be seen as being very popular. So even though you may need to share 50% of the income with your affiliates you still end up making a lot of money.
If you did all the promotion your self, even with a big list of e-mail subscribers. And let’s say your list was 100, 000, and you had a conversion rate of 0.4%. This would mean that you would sell four hundred copies and keep 100% of the income.
Now let’s take this a little bit further. If now you had 100 affiliates promoting your product, and each of them made 10 sales. You will have sold another 1000 of your product. Even though you have to share the profit you have make far more money with less effort with your affiliates.
If you own a product and you want to successfully market that product. You really need to use affiliates. So now the question arises; how do we set up an affiliate program? Well, there are 2 that I have personally used. I use a program called Jam Affiliates from jrox.com. This program is easy to use and is very powerful. Giving you plenty of administration options.
Another way you could go, is to use ClickBank. Many affiliates prefer ClickBank, as they are assured, they will be paid. Another advantage of ClickBank, is that you don’t need to go through the difficulties of installing a script on your server. Affiliates can join ClickBank for free. To be a seller on ClickBank requires a small one time fee.
As I mentioned earlier affiliates love ClickBank, because they are assured of payments. But for you as the seller it also has a great advantage. ClickBank recruits the affiliates. ClickBank pays the affiliates. So the money you get from ClickBank is yours. Your affiliates have already been paid. All the administration headaches are handled by ClickBank, and not you.
It’s obvious that if you want to make a success of your marketing on the Internet that you will need to use affiliates. The two that I’ve mentioned and have experience with are both good. But I must admit that ClickBank is by far the easiest, in that all the administration is handled for you. There is a small cost in their commission, but that is well worth it.
Affiliate Marketing News: Ideas For Finding Hot Products
July 18, 2008
In the coming days and weeks I will publish a sequence of articles trying to cover all steps to a lucrative business of affiliate marketing. This is the first article and it is intended to explain the idea of affiliate marketing to people who are just starting to look for information on the subject. I will also show some ways to find a product to choose to promote.
This first article is not for experienced marketers neither is it for those who know and understand affiliate marketing and know how to find good products, as it covers only the essential basics. My following articles will hopefully discuss more complex steps and thus may be of interest even to experienced marketers.
I will start by explaining what affiliate marketing is. Well, I like to say that Affiliate Marketing is to the 21st century what the Gold Rush was to the 19th century. The gold is there - one only needs to find it. But, on a more practical note: Affiliate Marketing is simply an agreement between you and a merchant or a product publisher, that says that the merchant will pay you a percentage of each and every sale he or she makes to a customer that you have driven to their web site.
The “product” may be physical - from a bar of soap to a private plane; it may be digital - anything one can instantly download from the Internet: ebooks, software, video courses etc.; and it may be a subscription or a registration to a newsletter or a list. Tens of thousands of companies pay their affiliates a commission for a sale, a registration or a lead.
As I said, the treasures are there, all over the world of affiliate marketing. The question is how one discovers it. It is a fact that many newbies in this field find that their first step - choosing the right product - is the hardest step on the road to successful affiliate marketing.
Let me suggest a few ideas for starters:
1. Think of a product that you have purchased online and were very happy with. Try to become an affiliate. Visit the product’s web site or sales page and click on the link to the “affiliate program.” You can read there all the details you would want to know.
2. Think about your hobbies. Subjects you are really interested in, such as sewing, poker playing, gardening, anything. You may know a lot about your hobby and perhaps you are a member of some forums. This will come very handy when you are ready to promote the product you choose.
3. Think of products that are on the hot list in the United States, do a little research and find out if the Europeans heard about them. If not yet, promote these products in Europe only, using the different pay per click programs that let you choose the areas where your ads are shown. The same can be done with a product that you’ve found in any foreign country and is not yet known in the US
4. Talk to your children and/or other teenagers and try to find out what their newest fads are. Teenagers are great customers.
5. Subscribe to or buy regularly some popular publications. Follow the reports on the newest fads and fashions.
6. And, obviously: become an affiliate at Commision Junction, ClickBank and other such services. Their database has thousands of products and they’ll let you know what the best sellers are.
See you in a couple of day with Part 2 of the step-by-step plan to successful affiliate marketing.
What is The Difference Between Hype And A Scam?
July 15, 2008
I want you to imagine for a while that you are looking to buy a business. As you look through the advertisements in the paper. You come across an ad that says, “Profitable Ready Made Business it goes on to explain that it’s an ice cream van in a hot sunny area.
You decide that this is just the business for you. You find out later on, that it is an almost new Ice cream van, it comes very well stocked, and is in a very warm climate. But now you find that the area that you are restricted to is the Sahara Desert. It certainly is a warm climate, but no one lives there. So now you have a very well stocked business, but not customers. So really, you have no business.
Many products on the Internet just the same. You can buy ready-made websites, loaded with products ready to go. You are told, you can start making money within 24 hours. So you buy the product and set up the site on your new web hosting account. You make sure all the payment buttons are working. And then you sit back and wait, and wait, and wait. Nothing happens.
Your new business is just like that ice cream van. It is beautiful and new and very well stocked, but you have no customers.
You were told this product is selling like hotcakes. You will have your money back and more within 24 hours. That was just hype. Hot air.
So is there a difference between hype and being scammed? Well, there really is some difference. Hype is often not total untruth. It often stretches the truth to make something appear better than it really is. The thing that makes hype similar to scamming is the fact that both are after your money. Hype is used to convince you to buy.
The difference is a scammer is much like a con man. The scammer uses totally dishonest means, total untruth to get you to part with your money. They often pose as something they’re not. I’m sure you have received e-mails from people posing as PayPal asking you go to the site and fill in your login details. With this information, they can fraudulently use your account your money.
On the other hand, Hype offers you a legitimate product, but over states the truth. It is good to keep in mind that any product that offers you instant success, over night wealth are using hype to get you to buy. Running any business takes work to succeed.
Whether you run a business online or off-line, it takes time to build it. You need to build a customer base. You need to convince your customers that you are there for the long haul, that you’re not a fly-by-night operator.
Remember our ice cream van? Great new van. Plenty of products. No customers. Your new website is exactly the same. Nobody knows you’re there. You need to draw traffic to your new site. This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that takes a lot of time and hard work.
To get traffic to your site is really another subject. I will explain this in another article.
