PayDotCom or Clickbank
When you set up your own affiliate program for your product or service, your ultimate goal is to secure more sales. You should already have an affiliate sytem in place - otherwise, you can easily set one up either in PayDotCom.com or Clickbank.com.
In this article, you’ll learn a step by step procedure of how to run an affiliate program to make money for you.
Step 1: Provide Resources
The worst way to encourage your affiliate is to simply say “Here’s your affiliate link - (affiliate link). Promote that to people and you will get a percentage of the sale.” If you run an affiliate program and that’s all you have for your affiliate, don’t expect too make a lot of money.
You want to provide resources for them such as:
- Pre-written email letters for them to send out
- Advertisements for them to use
- Articles for them to submit in article directories
- Blog posts for them to use
- Reviews for them to use
- Viral marketing methods
When you provide your affiliates with all these resources, you remove the headache of them having to come up with their own information and they can simply cut-and-paste to start generating sales for you.
Step 2: Run Races, Not Contests
To encourage sales, product owners run promotions by giving prizes to the top few affiliates. This usually gets the affiliates up and running because there’s more prizes to win - either in cash or other products. The promotion is either in form of a race or a contest - now, there is a very subtle difference between the two to make money effectively.
Let’s say hold a contest, you set a deadline and whoever is the top will win a $500 bonus cash prize. However, sometimes, due to whatever unforeseen reasons, the affiliates aren’t promoting as much. It might turn out that the top prize winner may have only promoted 10 affiliate sales but you STILL have to give the $500 to that winner. You may or may not be in profit depending on the price of the product.
Holding a race, however, can work to your advantage. If you state that the top winner will win $500 in 50 affiliate sales, your affiliates will aim for that 50 affiliate sales. What’s more, if you track the affiliates, you can send regular updates by saying something like this:
“Jimmy is now currently in the lead with 35 sales - but wait! Michael’s closing up with 32 sales! Andy’s not far behind with 27 in his record too! The race is anybody’s game right now - and you could be the ‘dark horse’ to win by overtaking any of them. There’s still 7 days to go, keep going!”
Step 3: Create A Community
When you have a product that’s selling well with the efforts of your affiliates, you will have more customers. Those customers can also become affiliates (do remember to use your product to tell them that they can make money from selling it!)
Customers or affiliates - they’re all connected by one thing - your product. So you can create a forum or a blog that’s specially for these people to come together. People love to learn and share their opinions - often, too opinionated! But the point is that you want people to keep talking about your product.
From that community of customers and affiliates, listen to the ideas and the comments generated by the community, you might even be able to create a new product from those comments… And guess what? You can start step 1 and step 2 again! Which means more opportunities to make money when you set up a new affiliate program for that new product.
