Effective Affiliate Program Management Part01
Friend, welcome to our new article series "
Effective Affiliate Program Management " which will help to improve your
business.
Friend, good old affiliate promotion,
the lifeblood of many businesses: underestimated or ignored by many more. In
this manual, I want to take you on a journey through the inner workings of a
well-oiled affiliate program.
We’ll talk about everything from the importance of running
such a system, through to getting affiliates promoting when you want them to,
and some stats for you to have a look at that will squash any doubt that this
is one of the most profitable aspects of online business, and I’ll make sure to
get at least one interactive quiz in there to make things a more interesting
read, and to test your knowledge.
Friend, even if you don’t have an
affiliate program set up for your own business yet, give it a shot. Skim over
it at least. It’s not hard to understand or set up once you have the facts, not
to mention the mighty profit potential it puts at your disposal.
So, grab a cup of your favorite drink, sink into your most
comfortable chair, and let’s get started.
Overview of Affiliate Management
● To give
you up front knowledge about how to effectively and profitably maintain your
business’ affiliate system before the first affiliate even lands on your
doorstep.
● To demonstrate how powerful
affiliate marketing is, and why no marketer should be without it.
● To look at some figures of product
sales and profit both with and without affiliate programs functioning. How
effective is this? You decide.
● To open your mind when it comes to
setting your commissions and understand the concept of reaping resources being
far more powerful than any small percentage you can keep from your affiliates.
● To discuss the inner workings of
affiliate sales through commission level setting for your business, taking into
account the money making power you're going to build for yourself.
● To show you how to overcome the
problem of affiliates not promoting your products for you.
Effective Affiliate Program
Management
Friend, welcome to Effective Affiliate
Program Management. I wrote this for one reason, and one reason only, and
that's to show you how to maintain both your affiliate system, the affiliates
contained within it, the offers you send them, and how to get the most out of
all of the above.
Also, I’ll be talking to you about what not do to with them,
why they're so important and some of the reasons that affiliates and affiliate
systems are often underestimated or seen in a negative light from the
perspective of program owners looking solely at their short to medium term
profit.
One thing I will say is that It’s important to acquire and consume
this knowledge at the earliest stage possible for reasons we’ll discuss
shortly. Even it isn’t your top priority at this particular moment, you’ll be
able to see just how powerful affiliate marketing is and why you should start
planning before even launching your products.
What You Won’t Find Here
Friend, what you won't find here is any
technical talk on how to install scripts, which scripts to use, coding, how to
make them look pretty or anything like that, because if you haven't already
guessed, we're a purely practical marketing theory based guide (proven and
tested theory that is), and not a techy guide, or a dressed up marketing guide
that overlaps into these categories to make the manual look bigger.
Setting the Scene - Displaying the
Power
Lets take it from the top. First up, how do you define an
affiliate program, or affiliate system? Friend, a system
in which an owner or licensee of a product allows people outside of his or her
own company to promote for them for a percentage of the commissions.
Pretty much everyone online uses this resource to their
advantage, because lets face it, it's far easier for 100 people to sell 1000
units of a product than it is to have one person sell a thousand units of a
product. I'm sure it's possible, but we don't have all the time in the world,
so affiliates are generally the answer, and should make up a large amount of
your business' revenue if you're promoting your own products.
Friend, in case you're kind of underestimating
the situation, don't have any affiliate system in place, or haven't decided to
fully utilize this type of system within your business, let me put a scene to
you to make this all crystal clear. Here’s the situation;
You're a business owner, you've just launched your shiny new
site, which just happens to sell the same product as Mr. X here. Both yours and
Mr. X’s product is priced at $500. The difference is you've built yourself up a
relatively modest 150 affiliates, and Mr. X is doing all the promotion alone.
Now imagine you each make ten sales in the first month
through personal promotion. You both make $5000. Great, but when your
affiliates come in, it's easy to see how this figure can double. Now of course
not all of your affiliates are going to be heavy hitters, great promoters or
even make any sales at all, ever.
But lets say just 10% of your affiliates, just 15 of them,
make a measly three sales each in that same month at 60% commissions, which
I'll set higher than average right now for a reason I'll reveal in a moment.
Pulling out my handy calculator, I can tell you that through
those three sales from a small percentage of your affiliates, you've just made
an extra $9000, bringing your total to $14000 for that month.
Friend, you're laughing, and poor Mr.
X. He was one of the many marketers out there that didn't take this type of
affiliate marketing seriously, or didn't see any real profit in it. Meanwhile,
you've just pocketed in a month what it takes most of my friends in regular
jobs to earn in four or five months, often longer. Cool huh?
Why Don’t You Set It Up? - I Asked
Them.
So now you can see how important this is, never ever let
anyone tell you it's not worth spending the extra money on the set up of an
affiliate program, made even easier nowadays by the plethora of software and
solutions available to you as an online business owner.
”So why not set one up? They’re more than doubling my
income”, I used to say to my less experienced contacts in the online business
world. Friend, ask yours the same question if you like and
see what they say.
The reasons they'll give you when you ask why they hold
their negative opinion on this subject, more often than not will be that in
their experience hardly any of their affiliates promote.
Well, they’re not wrong, it varies from business to
business, but many affiliates don't bother to promote, or sign up meaning to
and forget, or just don't have their resources built to a point where they have
the promotion power to make the sales.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't still grab them at
every opportunity, as you can see here from just that small example above, just
10% of affiliates promoting, making a small (very small) amount of sales each
can easily double, triple., quadruple your income and sometimes even more.
Looking at these figures always gets me excited.
Have you ever seen someone making 40-50, 60 or 100 thousand
dollars a month and wondered to yourself how the heck they pull that kind of
cash out of their products when you're struggling to hit five or ten thousand a
month?
Well let me tell you, this is a very big part of it. Don't
miss out, or you might find yourself just getting by instead of extremely
comfortable where income is concerned.
Friend, the second reason you might be
told that having affiliates promote for you is a waste of time and effort on
your part, is that they're hard to find.
It's another one of those little niggly things, like the
list craze going on all around us. In general the more responsive your list,
the more cash you're going to make out of them now and in the future.
This is exactly the same. Don't ever let anyone tell you
that you're making a mistake putting a successful affiliate program high on
your list of priorities, even over making direct sales.
To be continued
Friend, next time we'll start to
build up a picture of the ideal affiliate program. See you there
