Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Affiliate Programs. How To Set One Up.

By Lucas Heijn

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.

Because you have a lot of people promoting your product, it will now also be seen as a popular product. This also adds to your sales. It is a sort of viral effect. You may have to share 50% of the sales with your affiliates, but you will still end up making good money.

Let's say you didn't want to share with your affiliates, and you are just going to promote it yourself. Could you do as well by yourself as opposed to using affiliates? Well let's have a look at it. You have a list of 100,000 subscribers. You advertise to your list and get to a 0.04% conversion rate. This means that you would sell 400 copies of your product and get to keep 100% of the income.

Now, of course, you still use your list, but we also have 100 affiliates promoting the product. Now if each affiliate made 10 sales, you have made a further 1000 sales of your product. It's true, you may now have to share 50% of the income with your affiliates, but you have still made a lot more money than if you had gone it alone.

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.

The other that I use is ClickBank. In using ClickBank, you do not have to install a script on your server. And it is preferred by most affiliates. They like it because they are assured of being paid. ClickBank's affiliate program is free to join. To be a seller on ClickBank is very cheap.

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 comission, but that is well worth it.

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