If you’re in a business where your profit margins are high enough to cut a healthy piece off for those who send you business, this could become your main source of traffic.
Let’s go over the basics first.
An affiliate is a person who markets your products in exchange for a portion of your profits. It may sound expensive but in the end, it could actually save you money. Either the cost of getting that new client is about the same as your initial profit, or the lifetime value of the new client is several times greater than the cut you’ll be giving your affiliate.
To use this traffic method, you don’t want to just passively sit by and accumulate a dozen or so affiliates.
If at all possible, you want to sign up hundreds, as only the top 10% of them are really going to produce results. You’ll want to recruit mega-affiliates if you can. Particularly for information sellers, it’s a good idea to find places where the affiliate system is already set up and a marketplace is already tied to it, such as Clickbank or PayDotCom.
If not, there are several places where you can find affiliate software set up to track sales for you, although you’ll have to arrange payment for your affiliates manually.
A lot of people stop here – they figure they’ve got an affiliate program, they put a link on their sales pages or in the product leading people to where they can make purchases. I believe your job is not done. Make it as easy as possible for your affiliates to make sales for you by setting up a page, or better yet a separate site, full of tools to help them sell for you.
Give them a brandable ebook to distribute. Give them reprint rights to your articles and let them change the link in the resource box to their affiliate link. Create videos that explain your product. Tell them you’ll do a free teleseminar for groups over a certain number. Let them know JV opportunities are available.
If you’ve been promoting your product on your own before the sales system came along, tell them what worked and what failed. Let them know where to buy ads. Tell them the sales page conversion rate. Make a follow-up email system, that will let them set up a squeeze page. Give them sample ezine ads and PPC copy that worked.
The easier you make it for them to make sales, the more likely they are to take action.
Eventually, you will start to see affiliates that sell hundreds when others sell dozens. When you get to that point, you may have the potential for a joint venture on your hands. Contrary to popular belief, a joint venture isn’t when you approach a person with a huge list to be your affiliate — in joint ventures everyone gets something out of the deal.
We’ll talk about the difference and how it benefits you next time.
How To Make Money With Your Own Home Based Business Niche
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