Affiliate Program Setup
Once you start creating and selling your own products, a way you can increase sales is to start an affiliate program.
An affiliate program is where you pay other marketers a commission for every package they sell. Thus, you never have to pay any money upfront:
You only pay when someone they refer to your site makes a purchase. You get free traffic and the sale, and they get a commission for sending traffic to your offer.
Here’s the key: Don’t be greedy with your commissions. The only way to attract the BEST affiliates is to offer generous commission rates (somewhere in the neighborhood of 50%).
So how do you set up an affiliate program?
Easy: Just use Clickbank.com or www.JVZoo.com or WarriorPlus.com.
Why? Because affiliate programs are all built into these platform. You don’t have to invest in software and manage affiliate because these sites do it for you.
You do end up paying a fee for this, but it makes it a lot easier to manage your affiliates from sign up to sales to the convenience you get because the site will handle the affiliate payments for you automatically. Since all 3 sites work about the same way, I’m going to use Clickbank for this article.
The Clickbank Affiliate Program
Not only is Clickbank.com a payment processor, but they also have an integrated affiliate program. And while the fees may seem high (especially if you compare them to a credit card processor like Stripe.com – Which you’ll need if you choose to work with JVZoo or WarriorPLus), …
The higher charge at ClickBank comes with good reason. You see, Clickbank handles everything, from tracking affiliate sales to cutting checks for your affiliates.
However, just using Clickbank.com and setting the commission rate to 50% won’t guarantee you’ll get a lot of affiliates making sales for you. What you need to do is advertise your affiliate program. Here’s how:
One of the most effective ways to build your affiliate program is to approach potential affiliates directly. This is where you look for other marketers who sell to similar niches.
You can find these potential affiliates by:
Searching the Clickbank marketplace for products similar to yours – all these sellers are potential affiliates.
Searching Google for these same terms. Be sure to check both the regular search results as well as the sponsored results that run alongside the regular results.
Once you’ve compiled a list of prospective affiliates, your next step is to contact them directly to ask that they promote your product.
Two notes:
Building relationships will get you better results.
People like to work with those they know and trust, which means you’ll get better results if you work on building relationships with prospective affiliates before you attempt to recruit them to your affiliate team. This isn’t a requirement, but it really does make it easier to build your affiliate program.
Offering extra perks will get you more yes responses.
Instead of just offering a straight commission deal, you can offer extra perks such as a co-promotion. For example, you can offer to promote your affiliate’s products to your contacts.
Tip: If you’re just starting out, you probably won’t have these sorts of assets to leverage, like an established blog or mailing list. However, you can see that it’s a good idea to start building these assets as soon as possible! Not only will a mailing list and blog help you promote your products and get more sales, it will also give you some leverage to do joint venture deals.
Here’s a sample email you can tweak and send to prospective affiliates…
Subject: $48.50 commissions for you, great content for your buyers…
Alternate Subject: Are your subscribers looking for this?
Dear [first name],
Hi, my name is [your name], and I’d like to send you a big check. Let me explain…
I’ve noticed that you tend to promote high-quality products to your mailing list. That’s why I think your list would love to get their hands on my new [niche] product. You can download this package here to see for yourself that this is a high-quality package:
[Insert link].
However, your subscribers aren’t the only ones who’ll appreciate this package. You will too, especially once the $48.50 commissions start rolling in.
It’s easy to get started – just insert your Clickbank.com affiliate ID into this link [insert Clickbank hop link].
Then email me at [your email address] if you have any questions or if you need any promotional material.
I look forward to working with you!
[Your name]
P.S. I almost forgot – if you agree to promote this offer before [date], then I’ll be happy to co-promote you on my blog at [link]. I can only do this for a small handful of preferred affiliates, so let me know ASAP if I should reserve this co-promotion for you or release it to someone else. Thanks!
Bottom line: You need to be proactive in order to build a thriving affiliate program. However, once you have a group of affiliates, these same affiliates will be happy to promote any other offers you put out.
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