If you’ve got a product that your selling online, perhaps have even signed up to Clickbank, and are promoting it with them, one of the things that can take your product sales to the next level are affiliates.
Affiliate marketing, is a great source of income and I personally love promoting other people’s products.
It’s a win/win situation for both parties. I as the affiliate am able to pick and choose the highest quality, and most relevant products to my readers and subscribers, and am able to offer a much wider variety of products and services than if I were to only promote my own work.
The vendor gets the benefit of being able to have multiple affiliates promoting his product, or service to their audience and is able to reach a much greater number of potential customers this way. For example, Mike Smith builds a great piece of software because he’s a programmer. He may not be much of a website designer, so he then has to outsource his website. Then, he also needs to promote it and do the SEO work in order to get visitors so they can then see his amazing product in order for him to make sales.
A great thing for Mike is the fact that there are people out there who already have websites, readers, etc. but who maybe aren’t the programming genius that Mike is. These people lack a product to sell, so they team up with Mike, and promote his piece of software to their audience for a percentage. Due to the nature of many products online, and them being of a digital nature, the cost of reproducing, and sending is next to nothing, typically the cost is only the bandwidth used to email the product and perhaps the support that comes afterward.
Even if Mike manages to build up his website to the point where he’s getting 1000 visitors a day, it still can’t compete with 100 affiliates who maybe only get a couple of hundred a day. Another thing to consider is many full time internet marketers, and affiliate marketers, have spent their time and energy building up an email list of subscribers who they email out to on a regular basis, expanding his reach even further! 100 affiliates with even just three hundred subscribers (and this number would be much higher, I typically get between 10 and 20 subscribers each day, and know many who get ten times that) would be an extra 30,000 potential customers that Mike couldn’t have reached using only his own resources.
Here’s a list of a few things that will make your product or service more attractive to potential affiliates, as well as more profitable for the both of you.
- Have attractive banner’s made up to promote your product, or service and make sure to include several sizes so that you fit into most people’s marketing plans and websites. A few of the most popular sizes that I would include would be 125×125, 120×60, 468×60, 728×90 and 300×250
We personally design 5 set banners for $60.00 (Services Page)
- Provide graphic sets, or eBook covers for the affiliates to use on their sites. I charge $50.00 a month for a 125×125 banner spot, but often include products I’m promoting because I’m making more than that in sales for that particular product. (Could you afford to place 100 banners at $50.00 a pop?) The advertising power alone would make it worth your while.
- Have Pre-written ads made up for PPC campaigns so that the affiliates can just plug them in and go.
- Have your keyword data available so that they can use it to promote their PPC campaigns
- Have three or four copies of email sales copy that the affiliate can send out to his list. This way, you can be sure of getting your message out exactly the way you intended as well as making it easier for your affiliates to promote you. It takes 2 minutes for me to copy/paste your email, and send it out to my list. (Which I may never do on my own, if you didn’t provide it)
- Sales videos are another great tool that you can offer to your affiliates.
- Articles written in the form of a review for your product, or simply stating the benefits to your potential market, that they can post or market for you.
- Affiliate tracking software, you want to make sure your tracking clicks and sales that your affiliates make on your behalf accurately. If I notice that my traffic isn’t converting properly or as expected or clicks that I’m sending to you aren’t showing up in my reports, I’m not going to be promoting for you for very long. It’s also important to pay your affiliates on time and regularly. Offer up several methods if you can. PayPal is my preferred method, but do receive checks from others, and that is just fine too. Just be as flexible as you can, in order to appeal to as many affiliates as possible!
If you’ve been in business for any length of time at all, you realize the power of leverage. There are always only going to be 24 hours in your day! Isn’t it time you started to harness the power of many?
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About Warren
An informative post. You have described all the things which are to be done so as to attract more affiliates promoting our product. But I would like to add one more important promotion method – TWITTER. As we all know big affiliates sell most of their stuff with the help of a single tweet to their followers. So it would be better if you can provide like 5 tweets to the affiliates so that they can use them along with the particular tag provided. This ensures that the tag gets more exposure and people will know that the product is indeed good because of the huge exposure getting in Twitter search trends.