SolveYourProblem
Article Series:
Niche Marketing Opportunities
Recruit Affiliates
to
Sell Your Products For You
by Jeff Cohen
One
of the quickest methods of increasing the sales of your
niche product or service is to start an affiliate
program. An affiliate program is simply a system you can implement
which allows other people to sell your product or service and
earn a commission on each sale. The higher the commission you
pay, the more affiliates you will attract to sell your product.
Your best affiliates are unlikely to want any help from you
when it comes to selling your product or service; they will
most likely be experienced marketers themselves and could probably
teach you a thing or two about selling online.
You
can't rely only on experienced affiliates, there will
be a considerable number of people who will join your affiliate
program who are inexperienced in some aspects of internet marketing
and the onus is on you to help them in any way you can.
First things first however, you need to set up your affiliate
program so even the most seasoned internet marketer will feel
comfortable joining your affiliate program. Important issues
you must address are:
1)
Pay a reasonable commission on each sale. Most information
product authors pay commissions in the 40% to 60% range. The
point is not to be greedy, make it worth the experienced marketer’s
time to promote your product.
2)
Pay the commissions due your affiliates regularly. Once
per month is the average for most affiliate programs so you
never want to exceed that. When sales are good, you might want
to consider twice monthly payments to your affiliates.
3)
Don't use an overly high minimum payment threshold. In
the old days when check payments were expensive to generate,
many affiliate programs introduced a minimum earning threshold.
They did this because it was pointless raising a check for
a small amount when the bank charges and postage costs were
more than the value of the check. Another reason the minimum
was introduced was because it was so expensive for foreign
affiliates to deposit the checks into their bank accounts.
Now days international banking has become common place and
therefore considerably cheaper, and there are also other payment
mediums such as PayPal which make it feasible to pay smaller
amounts to your affiliates.
4)
Always pay your affiliates on time. Never miss a payment
date unless you have very good reason to do so - not having
any money is NOT a good reason, you must plan for all your
payments. Nothing will scare experienced marketers away quicker
than somebody who misses payment dates and then has no reasonable
excuse. They might forgive you once, but not twice.
5)
Use an accurate system for recording sales, commissions
due and commissions paid. People need to know how they are
doing with your affiliate program. They need to know how much
traffic they have sent to their affiliate link. They also want
to know how many sales they have made and when they can expect
payment. If you have paid them they need to know when you sent
the check or made the transfer.
Pay attention to these five issues and your affiliates, particularly
the experienced ones will be happy, but you also need to
offer a helping hand to your inexperienced affiliates by creating:
1)
A number of text advertisements that can be used in the
affiliate's email advertising, be it in their own ezine or
for solo ads in other people's ezines.
You must test these text advertisements and make sure they
are effective at generating sales before placing them in your
affiliate resource center.
2)
A number of classified ads for affiliates to use either
as classified advertisements or as top sponsor ads in those
ezines that accept advertising.
As with the text ads, you must test all your classified ads
before placing them in your affiliate center.
3)
A few different banner ads - there are still a few places
where banner ads can attract sales, but for the most part banner
advertising is not that effective.
One type of banner advertisement that is worth spending some
time getting professionally made because it attracts sales
is the 120 x 240 pixel, or the slightly longer 120 x 600 pixel
banner which people can place under the Google Adsense code
on their web pages.
4)
Links to training materials which will help your affiliates
become better internet marketers. You have a vested interest
in their success because the more successful they become, the
more money you both make. # # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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