Part 1 of my affiliate program write up highlighted the pros and cons of starting your own affiliate program. In my second part I’ll go over the best affiliate program solutions. I’m only going to highlight the programs/software that have been around awhile and have a proven track record.
The first solution is affiliate program software which is any software you download and host on your own server. My favorite one out of the bunch is iDevAffiliate. They’ve been around for almost a decade and many major companies use their software. Another good one is Post Affiliate Pro although they’ve really been pushing their monthly service lately.
The “pros” of going with affiliate program software
The “cons”
The other solution is hosted affiliate programs meaning another company runs the program and you pay them a monthly or annual service fee. This is a little different depending on if you’re selling physical goods (clothing,dvd’s, etc) or electronic goods/services (downloadable audio, memberships, ebooks, downloadable video, etc).
For physical goods recommend Shareasale and Commission Junction
For electronic goods and services, the big dogs are Clickbank, Paydotcom and eJunkie.
The “pros” of hosted solutions
The “cons”
At the end of the day, my vote goes to having a hosted solution. It might be a little more expensive in the long run but the amount of time it frees up by not having to worry about software bugs, upgrades and hunting down good affiliates is easily worth the monthly fee in most cases.
One additional note for affiliate solutions is that there is a newer program out there called Rapid Action Profits. It’s an affiliate software but the catch is there is a large affiliate network available through RAPBank. The format is a little different in that affiliates and yourself are paid instantly via Paypal when sales occur. Many affiliates like the instant payment style so Rapid Action Profits been gaining a lot of popularity this year. Worth looking into! Thanks for reading.
So the other day I had an argument with my friend who wanted to get his business online. He wants to sell his hand made high end bags for men and women to a larger audience.
His question to me was how can he generate the most sales with out having to wait years to build up his name on a national or world level.
I asked what he thought of affiliate marketing where people could sign up for his online affiliate program. Basically how it would work is that each affiliate would receive a special tracking link and every sale they helped generate, they would be paid a commission. Either a flat rate or percentage.
Like many business owners I talk to, he really didn’t like the idea of having to pay commissions. No one wants to share a piece of the pie if they don’t have to I suppose.
As a former full time affiliate marketer, I think a successful affiliate program can be a huge business asset so I will give you these points to consider:
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Cons? I can’t think of many. I will say that depending on what you are selling or what your current reputation is, an affiliate program might not fit into your business model.
Watch for Part 2 next week where I highlight the best affiliate program software. Everything from self hosted solutions to monthly affiliate management services.
I’m sure you’ve seen those ads. You know… the ones that say something like “Make $1,000,000 dollars from blogging tomorrow!”. Ok I’m exaggerating a little but because of ads like those, a lot of people think they can put together a blog and fistfuls of cash are going to come streaming in.
Sorry but it doesn’t work like that.
I’ve managed a number of blogs personally on everything from software to hand bags and this is what I found to make the most money from blogging:
1. AdSense
I have mixed feelings on AdSense. On one hand it’s easy to get accepted into the network. It’s easy to set up and Google does pay. It’s just easy.
The downside is that Google doesn’t pay very well. Even for sites that have 10′s of thousands of visitors, the amount webmasters get paid is usually substantially lower than the other 2 options I’m going to talk about.
2. CPA or Cost Per Acquisition
If you have content that is highly sought after and exclusive to your site. Specialty video and television sites come to mind. CPA offers range range from a few dollars to over $100 per lead/sign up so with the right website, you can make some serious money.
The downside? You need a pretty legit site because CPA networks are much more picky than Adsense about who they let in. Plus depending on the network, they like to ban people and if you’re banned, that means they don’t have to pay you and there’s no way to really debate with them.
3. Affiliate advertising
My favorite choice and a nice step up from Adsense, affiliate advertising allows you to choose exactly what you want to advertise on your site. You get commission from every sale you make and the money comes directly from the company, not a middleman network so you can get some pretty high paying offers.
There is an affiliate program for just about any type of product or service you can imagine. One of the larger ones which a lot of people use is Clickbank.
There’s also a nice little plugin for Clickbank which picks out the best converting promos and adds them to your blog automatically. You can check it out here at WackyGals.
By now it’s almost impossible to not have heard of Facebook. They’ve rolled over the 500 million user mark this year. Aside from that, digital marketing analyst comScore recently reported that Facebook accounts for almost 1/3 of online display advertising in the United States so it’s pretty clear that Facebook is going to be around for awhile. The question real question is, what are you waiting for?
Here is a bare minimum set of things your company should have going on Facebook unless of course, you don’t like money.
Create a professional company page
A company page is different than a personal profile page. Your company’s Facebook page should include a custom welcome page that visitors land on when they first visit rather than the Facebook wall page. The welcome page should have something to pull your fans in. A common approach is have something beneficial for your fans but they have to like your page in order to unlock it. Update your page with articles that you would want to read or sales or whatever else. Treat it very much like you would a retail store. You can also always add photos, testimonals, links to your blog. Again the main thing is publish content that people will like otherwise they will just “un-fan” your page.
Get some fans
Once you have a page for your business, the next step is getting fans. There are many ways to go about this but the best ways are to tell your family, friends and colleagues to join. When people seen them joining your page, they may follow and possibly turn into new customers. If you have a brick and mortor ship, put up signs to your fan page or you can also put it on your business cards. If you have a mailing list, you can include a link to your fan page in your signature. Those are just a few ways to get fans. Get creative.
Get people involved
Be interesting
Be sure to keep your fans engaged with a regular flow of status updates, contests, and fun posts. If you don’t want to run contests or incentives, you can consider sharing exclusive information like coupon codes for “Facebook Fans Only”. Only provide valuable information to your fans or people will think you’re a spammer and delete you very quickly. The #1 reason why people become a fan of a page is because they’re already a customer and want to support your business. Use this already-established good will as a way to reward your loyal customers and let them know how much you appreciate them.
Stay involved
Having a Facebook business page is something you have to remain active with. It’s not something you can set on auto-pilot but at the same time, it’s not hard. I personally only release stuff I find valuable to the fans so I generally publish things on a weekly to bi-weekly basis and make sure it’s high quality stuff. It’s called “Social Marketing” so BE SOCIAL! If you follow these tips, you can help a lot of people and make a lot of money in the process.
Are you ready for the tip??? Here it is… Promote good products. WAIT! Before you call me jerk and close out of this article, check out this screen shot from one of our (many) affiliate accounts.After all this doesn’t cost you anything.
Promote good stuff and your commissions no matter how big or small will pile up. 3 main reasons here:
1. You barely have to sell because the company’s brand name already does the work for you.
2. You end up with a lot more money because of the low refund/return rate.
3. High commission offers often times have a lot of affiliate competition and if the products are junk, it won’t sell anyways.
Pretty simple right?
Have you updated your website or blog recently? Understand that Google and other search engines will not notice your updates until one of their scheduled “bots” comes and indexes/re-indexes your website.
If you have published time sensitive material or you’re just impatient, there’s a way to get your new out there ASAP. It’s called Ping Farm.
Pinging your website is basically like slapping search engines in the face and saying “Hey come check out my site. I put new stuff up.” Originally the process was designed for bloggers but it works on all sites. Ping Farm can also ping huge lists of sites at a time and can greatly speed up the process of your new content being indexed.
One major word of advice:
Don’t just ping your site if you added a new paragraph of news or added a small blurb just so you could ping your site. Save pinging for when you publish good content or make major site changes. “Overpinging” can cause your site to be penalized and even blocked by some of the pinging services.
And I’ll end with saying for those who own a website and aren’t adding new content on at least a semi-regular basis, your site is probably losing ground to your competitors who are publishing updates. Update your site and provide value!
