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How to build an affiliate program that affiliates loveAs a web entrepreneur running your own website, what is it worth to you to have thousands of sales personnel promoting your product. You only pay commissions for the actual sales.
Only pay commissions for sales made? The good affiliates will see to it that your products are found and that people will buy from you. Good affiliates may also watch out for you and give you advice that can help you close even more sales. It is in their interest that your online business can close the sales. The more sales, the merrier. How do you do it? How do you get the affiliates to sell for you? What affiliate programs do these online salespeople, also known as the affiliates, love? Affiliate friendly programsGood affiliates are a choosy lot. They want good commission. Some super affiliates will not even look at your program if you offer a commission less than 10%. If you cannot afford to give a high commission, consider increasing the return days to attract the affiliate. For that, you need at least 45 return days to be effective. Meaning, if the customer buys directly from you, say 45 days after the affiliate sent them to your site, the affiliate still gets the commission. Most importantly, affiliates want an honest merchant. Do NOT in any way try to cheat your online sales force of their commission. If you do, they will find out and word will spread like wild fire. They will then promote your competition instead. On the other hand, honest merchants who are fair to their sales force thrive. Affiliates are willing to work their butt off to sell products from merchants who do not cheat them and who can close the sales. They can give you advice on what you could do to close sales. Affiliates hate 1800 numbers if that means that they would not be paid for phone orders from the customers that they send to you. That can easily be dealt with using the solution provided by share a sale Affiliates also hate parasites. Parasites dupe both merchants and affiliates. Typically, parasites have their software downloaded in the customer's pc. They often come bundled with free downloads for file sharing software or as a rebate tool like ebates. They take credit for the other affiliates sales. When a customer with such a parasite in his PC clicks on a link on your affiliates' web site, the parasite will pop up and redirect the customer to their own link, hence claiming credit for that sale and getting the commission. It doesn't stop there. When your site is well known, or you do well in the search engines. If the customer finds you directly through their own efforts, the parasite will still pop up and claim credit for that sale. You pay the parasite commissions for the sales you generated yourself. Parasites do so by joining as an affiliate. If you want to avoid them, go for a network that has a strong stand against parasites. So far, Share a sale is the only network I know of that really takes action against parasites. Many others tolerate parasites. One network even features a known parasite as their top affiliate and recommends this parasite to unknowing merchants. Possibly because that way, the network gets a cut off the commissions even from non commissionable sales. The only network I know of that has a really strong stand against parasites is share a sale. Sales vs brandingTreat your affiliates like a sales force. You get better returns that way. Give the affiliates product links. Let them direct the customer to individual products on your site. That way, the affiliate can recommend that product and sell it. Affiliates sell better when they can recommend individual products. Most find it much harder to close sales when they can only send the customer to your home page. The customer may not see what they want there and both of you lose the sale. It gets worse when your front page is a animated flash splash page. The impatient customer goes off without even entering your site. Hence, availability of datafeeds or lists of product links the affiliates can use is very attractive for the more experienced affiliates. Share a sale allows you to create product links for the affiliates to use. Better still, the affiliates can save all the product links you put there as a text file and use that as their datafeed. Best of all, it is free for affiliates. No doubt other networks also provide data feeds to affiliates but they charge the affiliates for the feeds. CJ charges $250 to an affiliate for the feed if the affiliate sells less than $10,000 per month Linkshare charges $250 to an affiliate. Performics, I heard tried to charge $1,000 or more for their feed to an affiliate.. and became the butt of the jokes at an affiliate forum.
Setting up your affiliate programYou could build your program inhouse or you could join a network. If you set up your program independantly, the onus is on you to search for affiliate. If you join a network, you'll be able to get affiliates through the network. Rather, the affiliates will find you and join your program if it is relevant to their site, and they like you have to offer. The prices of the networks vary significantly. Share a sale, being a rather young network charges only $150 as a setup fee right now. Their normal set up fee is $350. The minimum deposit amount is $50. The transaction fees is 20% Cj, one of the top networks charges a setup fee of $2250, annual maintenance
fee of $250, Non refundable deposit of $3000, transaction fees of 30% and a
monthly minimum of $500. There are many other networks available. The pricing varies by network. Currently, as an affiliate, I have joined many networks but I use these 2 the most.
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Earning as an Affiliate
New! An affiliate's secret to success How to succeed as an webmaster Why most affiliates do not make much money Sales conversion for affiliates The truth about Affiliate Marketing Building your web site How to build a website to bring in customers Pitfalls to avoid in building your new web site Once you've got the cash, invest in real estate. Buy and rent out property for a lifelong income.
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