I’ve blogged previously about the benefits of creating information products, whether they’re related to organizing or to one of your other interests, but even if you’ve developed a product, unless you have a very popular website, you may have found that you’re not bringing in nearly as much income as you’d hoped. Why not increase your earning potential by hiring a sales force?
Of course, I don’t mean you should literally go out and hire sales personnel, but you can certainly expand your reach by allowing others to promote your products on their websites in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Don’t be afraid to share! Would you rather have 75% of $1000 in sales, or 100% of $100 in sales?
Practice Pay Solutions and E-Junkie are two of the online services that you can use both for selling products on your own website and for managing an affiliate program. When someone becomes an affiliate, they receive their own linking code which will identify them when a purchase originates from their website. The system will keep track of everything; you just need to pay out the commission each month, or at whatever interval you choose.
Here are three things you can do to make it easier for your affiliates to generate sales on your behalf:
1. Create individual links for each product that you offer.
If you offer a number of different products, and the affiliate can only link to your homepage, it’s going to be much more difficult for them to promote a specific product. If bloggers can’t easily send their readers to the appropriate order page, they might not feel it’s worth it to blog about your product.
2. Offer an attractive commission.
Affiliates are more likely to make an effort to actively promote your product if they feel it’s worth their while. With digital products where you don’t have high overhead costs, it’s not uncommon to offer commissions in the area of 50%. If you’re only offering 10%, there’s a good chance that your affiliates will not be willing to do anything other than just slapping up a link somewhere and hoping it gets noticed. If you don’t feel that you can afford to pay a higher commission rate, consider increasing the price of your product to increase your profit margin – just make sure that you don’t charge more than your product is worth!
3. Offer a number of tools to help your affiliates promote your products.
Different affiliates will want to display your product links in different ways. While some will be happy with a simple text link, many will want a 125×125 pixel graphic which they can place in the sidebar of their blog, and others might prefer a small, medium, or large banner ad. Successful affiliate managers go the extra mile to provide all of these options, as well as pre-written articles, blog posts, email campaigns, and even tweets.
Keep in mind that this is just my perspective, as someone who has been participating in various affiliate programs for a number of years now. I must confess that although I offer a number of my own information products, I haven’t yet taken the step of creating an affiliate program. When I do, I will definitely take my own advice and implement the three steps outlined above.
Fortunately, you don’t have to rely on my experience, because you can receive Free Affiliate Manager Tips from Internet Marketing Sweetie. When you sign up, you’ll learn how to start and manage an effective affiliate program, recruit, train and motivate your affiliates, and provide them with powerful marketing materials.
For a small investment, you can order the Affiliate Management Training Tool Bundle, a comprehensive collection of resources which you can customize with your own logo and information and provide to your affiliates so they’ll be equipped to promote your products through various media. Until February 26th only, you can save 30% off the regular price by entering the coupon code 90928.
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
William James
