Thread: A n00b's question about affiliates.

Affiliates earn a percentage or fixed amount commission per sale...that's it.

If you sell your own product or service you can "host" the shopping cart and payment process with a third party, for which you will pay a small fee per transaction (Clickbank, PDC, 2Checkout, etc.). Their system automatically processes the sale, transaction and commission payouts. In some cases you can even upload your product, so you don't have to do anything really...just check your stats.

If you decide to use your own affiliate program, you'll need affiliate software installed on your hosting server/domain. It takes quite some configuring and perhaps integration coding (for several different payment processors, like PayPal, 2CO or whatever you want to use). You'll have to create your own payment button if you want to use paypal, but in most cases you can use a third party for processing the payments (not the comission payouts...).

I'm using PayDotCom for some products and Post Affiliate Pro (hosted on my own server) for my latest product. Having your own affiliate program has its advantages, but also disadvantages. More and more are starting to hate Clickbak and prefer a self hosted affiliate program. Others are paranoid and want to be sure about their commission payouts, so they'd prefer a third party processing the transactions.

To promote as an affiliate yourself, selling other people's products or services, speaks for itself. You can sign up for any affiliate program you want and start promoting the product for commissions.

I hope that helps...

Andre

You could never sell as much as when you'd have an army of affiliates seling for you, aside from what you sell yourself. To attract affiliates you should pay at least 60% commission...some even pay 100%. Why ? Because you'll get more exposure, a bigger subscribers list and with several products or services your affiliates will promote for you...also when you have a new product coming out.

It's a straight fact that the most sales you make come through affiliates. It's like a pyramid effect. The more affiliates you get, the more you'll sell. In this way you have others do the selling for you and you can focus on urgent and other important tasks. The whole point of this is to get exposure and grow your buyers list, which will bring in even more revenue in the end. It's long term strategies that make your business a success and your affiliate base is a very important part of it.

See it like this:

Example - By yourself you could sell say 50 copies of your product in 1 month. that's 50 times 100% of the revenue. If you'd have say 20 affiliates who could sell 250 all together in one month, you already have more income without actively selling yourself. PLUS...you have 250 new buyers on your list who will most likely buy again from you. In addition to your own 50 sales this adds up to a lot more than what you could do alone.

More exposure = growing revenue alltogether.

Andre

That's what all who start think...why give so much commission.
It's vital to make it attractive for affiliates...otherwise they won't promote and you'll be all alone trying to sell your product. Imagine the wide exposure you get through affiliates. Many who buy will ALSO become affiliate, which means more exposure with every sale. You can create a huge passive income from this.

If you have a few good affiliates with big mailing lists, you can make possibly tens of thousands of dollars in just a week or so. All the affiliates that don't have so much exposure themselves (no mailing list, no partners...) will place links to your product all over internet. Their blogs and websites, article sites, forums, you name it. Yes, they'll be affiliate links, but can you imagine all the backlinks this will cause to be built ? In the end recruiting affiliates will solve the biggest problem for most IM'ers....TRAFFIC !

You might still have the wrong picture in your head about paying out commissions. Most have when starting with their own product or service.

Andre

Yes i think so too, its much better to make sales with affiliates and pay commission. So you can make passiv money and focus on other products and work. You wont get the backlinks, traffic and popularity without affiliates.

Originally Posted by Dreamrage

That I can understand. Some also mention that its better to separate sales pages, in other words, divide your sales funnel into the different forms of traffic you are getting so that if you change something for one, you don't have to change it for all. How would this be good for affiliates? If at all?

The segmentation usually takes place in your mailing list, where you can create segments for buyers of every product you sell for example. No need to create several salespages for one product though. For affiliates it's no issue, because whatever salespage their traffic is sent to, they'll have a general cookie in their browser. There are several ways to confront customers or potential customers with your other products.

Andre