White Hat Guys

The first step is to start your own Affiliate program for those products you created and to promote your future products. Now this is a very important step and your product absolutely MUST be unique and of high quality to ever have any success. You can explode your profits with this technique OR you can end your career in marketing if you do it wrong.

Why do I say that? If your product is junk or some regurgitated Private Label Rights eBook you bought for a few bucks that you slapped your name on your affiliates will quickly learn what you have done. They will stop promoting your products and move on to someone else’s product to promote. Why?

They will get tired very quickly of losing their commissions when people ask for refunds – which they will do if you are selling junk! You also will find that you are working for pennies and not dollars after you refund all of those purchases and spend hours wasting your time with customer service complaints. However, the real kicker is that your credit card processor will probably drop you like a hot rock when they see all of those refunds coming through.

However, if you really have produced a good product and priced it a fair price then your affiliates will gladly promote your product. This is simply playing to the greed factor of most affiliates. If it sells well, is a good product with very few charge backs and is desired by the marketplace it makes their job (and yours) much easier. They make money, you make money and the customer is happy and is ready, and willing, to buy more of your products!

You will first need to prepare promotional materials, for your future affiliates to use, that will make their job easier. You will need to pull together materials from your experience of selling your products.If you have had a successful product then you already have a strong sales letter that should be converting well.

Did you do some successful email campaigns to your own list that converted well? If so then you already have some sample emails to offer to your affiliates to use to pre-sell your product to their lists.If not you will have to write, and test, at least two to three versions to get a high converting email for your affiliates to use.

You have to remember that the majority of your affiliates (90%) will just use what you give them. If you are lucky you will find that rare affiliate that is good at what they do and will write their own pre-sales copy to use. These are affiliates who make the big bucks for you and yourself because they know how to promote to their lists.

In addition to the email promos you will need to produce and furnish a variety of banners and text links. If you are not good at doing graphics hire out the production of the banners, a header and a footer for your sales page. Studies have shown that good high quality graphics can increase your sales by over 900%.

Now that you have this promotional material ready it is time to set up your program. So how do you go about setting up an affiliate program that is easy to setup, easy to administer, satisfies your potential affiliates and is not a nightmare to manage? Fortunately, for you, there are several very good choices:

* Clickbank
* Run your own program and use PayPal, 2Checkout or a similar shopping cart/credit card processor program.
* PayDotCom
* Hire an affiliate management company

By far the most popular affiliate management program is ClickBank. You simply pay a small $50.00 fee to set up your product, with ClickBank, and they handle everything else for you. ClickBank’s typical markup on every sale is $1 + 7.5% of the sales price. The actual commissions you pay your affiliates is determined by you and averages 50% of the sales price.

ClickBank affiliates can promote your product by simply adding their “ClickBank nickname” to the link that goes to your sales page. Everyone gets paid every two weeks, they handle all credit card transactions and pay the affiliates. It is truly a win - win for everyone!

Another added advantage, if you are using Clickbank, is that they already have 1,000’s of experienced affiliates ready to promote your product. Nowhere else can you get such a large already trained, and successful, affiliate sales force ready to promote for you so quickly.

Clickbank has many advantages but if you run your own program you have the added advantage of having each affiliates email address. This allows you to send them reminders and tips to help them promote your product.

There are several choices if you decide to go this route – some good and some will take a lot of your time. You can do it all manually or you can automate it with software.

If you are using Third Sphere, as your hosting provider, then they have a built-in affiliate program that will automate everything for you. It is in their Automation Station tools section. This program is quite robust and once you set it up it is virtually a hands free scenario. You simply choose the credit card processor you want to use and then how you are going to pay your affiliates - I.E. by check or through PayPal and then set up your product in the program.

Depending on which processor you use it is a little to no cost way to set up your program. You do still have to process your affiliate payments at the end of each pay period but even that is somewhat automated.

If you do not want to setup your own affiliate program to manage your affiliates then a good alternate choice would be Pay Dot Com. They handle all of the affiliate management for you – much the same way ClickBank does. You do have to have your own credit card processor, to handle the actual sales, but Pay Dot Com handles paying you and your affiliates for a flat amount per transaction. You pay half and the affiliate pays half of these transaction fees – very fair. No Percentage at all only a flat of $1.00 to $3.00 Sales Fee - split by you and the Affiliate - Plus the applicable Merchant credit card processing fees.

The last choice, and the most expensive choice, is to use one of the many “shopping cart or affiliate management companies”. These companies handle everything for you including collecting the money, processing the credit cards from your buyers, paying your affiliates and sending you your earnings.

They charge you a monthly service fee of a few dollars to a hundred or more dollars per month AND they charge a per transaction fee. Unless you are doing tens of thousands of dollars a month in business, we advise you to choose one of the other methods – at least to start with. Affiliate management programs can run as high as $150.00 per month AND up to 7.5% of the total sale.

If you do a keyword search on Affiliate Management programs OR Shopping Cart programs you will find many companies listed. I would not even bother with any that are not on the first 3 pages of your Google search results.

As you read through the varied program offerings keep your budget in mind. These expenses can get out of hand very quickly. We strongly suggest that you look only at programs that work off of a percentage of the actual sale with no monthly minimum fees. This way you only pay when you have results and, of course, the money earned to pay the fees.

Some programs require you to get your own credit card processor/gateway account separately. This is an added expense and it is why PayPal and 2CheckOut are two of the most popular alternatives for the new vendor as they handle it all.

Tags: list building, web site building, internet video, marketing advisers, seo