Run Your Own Affiliate Program

We’ve talked about the possibility of being an affiliate for other websites and earning a percentage of every sale you refer to them. But have you ever considered doing it the other way around?
The truth is that if you can get your own army of affiliates to bring in sales for you, you will cut your advertising costs considerably – and you could well make more money too.
But how do you decide what subject to build your website around? And how do you supply the products so your affiliates have something to sell?
Okay so you want to build a website and essentially get other people to advertise it for you, in exchange for a percentage of the profits from each sale. What do you think would be the easiest thing to sell?
Simple – information.
You can of course sell anything you like but information is the best thing to start with since you can automate everything. When someone buys a copy of your latest e-book (more about that in a moment) they pay you and the product can then be downloaded or sent to them automatically.
Now I can hear you saying you are no good at writing and couldn’t write an e-book if your life depended on it. No problem. All you need is a good idea; you can then find a writer on one of the online freelance bidding sites who will write it for you at an agreed fee.
The next step is to find your affiliates, and the easiest way to do this is to join ClickBank for a one off fee, and your book will be listed on there, provided you comply with all the rules. You decide how much commission you want to reward your affiliates with, and ClickBank takes care of the rest. This means you don’t have to worry about processing all the affiliates’ payments and working out who is owed what. Everything is done for you.
Now if you have physical products that you want to sell (let’s say you have contacts with suppliers to sell a whole range of their products for example) you could instead look at Commission Junction to help you out.
It’s not enough to just put together a website, create an e-book and sit back and wait for people to promote it though. You need to have a tempting proposition for the affiliates who are out there. They need to feel that they stand a good chance of selling a lot of units of your product – whatever it may be – and so you need to be sure you have a product which is going to be popular, and that is priced fairly.
The price is particularly important since a certain percentage of it will be going to the affiliate in return for bringing you each sale. Therefore you need to give a reasonable percentage to them, while still making a decent amount yourself. Take a look at other e-books on ClickBank to give you an idea of how much you should charge for your product, and what rate of commission works best. Quite often the affiliate will get 50% or even more of the sale, so be prepared to share! You will get more sales for no effort on your part however, so it really is a win win situation.
You should still advertise when you are enlisting the help of affiliates – at least to begin with – but after a while you may find yourself in the happy position of not having to. Your affiliates and your ranking in the search engines may be all the advertising you need to rely on.
So why not make a start now and come up with some ideas for that first e-book or product to sell? Don’t forget to leave a comment below first though!