Affiliate Profits Program

Posts Tagged ‘Promote Affiliate Program’

Depending on your service or product, this is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal: get other people to market your product. They promote your product or service in exchange for a commission that you decide upon.

There are many different ways to set up an affiliate program. You can give a fixed commission rate across the board. However, I recommend giving a good commission rate for the new affiliate, and giving a raise to those affiliates who drive a lot of sales. Most affiliate programs offer their affiliates a 2-tier system whereby an affiliate ears extra commissions if they refer other affiliates to your program.

First you have to decide how you are going to host your affiliate program. You can either promote your affiliate program through an affiliate network, or you can host your affiliate program on your website with your own software.

The advantage to using an affiliate network is that your affiliate program will be advertised in their databases. Marketers searching for businesses to associate with will search through these databases and choose products that they want to affiliate with. However, most of these databases are quite large, and the most popular affiliate programs with the highest conversions will be advertised the most.

This means that if you are just starting out, your program will probably only be found by people who are searching for a niche product or service to market. In order to get around this you have to market your affiliate program like you would market your product or service. Here is a list of possible affiliate network that can host your affiliate program:

1. www.clickbank.com (digital products only)
2. www.cj.com
3. www.reporting.net
4. www.linkshare.com
5. www.performics.com
6. www.websponsors.com
7. www.shareasale.com
8. www.clickxchange.com
9. www.clixgalure.com
10. www.fineclicks.com
11. www.fastclick.com
12. www.affiliatefuel.com
13. www.darkblue.com

If you are interested in hosting your own affiliate program, you need to do some research and decide what kind of affiliate manager solution fits your business or shopping cart system. You can do a side-by-side comparison of different programs at http://www.affiliate-software-review.com.

Promoting your Affiliate Program

As previously stated, you have to market your affiliate program just like you would market your product or service. Keep in mind that unless you find the “super affiliates” who are already set up to drive massive sales to your website, the overwhelming majority of the affiliates that sign up will never make any sales. This is normal so don’t be surprised.

Start by finding complimentary websites that sell products or services that are not competitive with what you offer, but are closely related. For example, if you sell plant seeds, you would want to approach a site that sells books on how to grow a garden.

You should approach as many websites as you can, but it’s wise to focus on the websites with the largest amounts of traffic. You can do this research by using Alexa (www.alexa.com).

When you enter a website address, Alexa will tell you their traffic ranking (the lower the better), how their traffic has fluctuated over a period of time, how many websites link to them, and what websites their visitors also go to. It also provides contact information, including an email address.

When it comes to these email addresses, I’ve found that they are not always accurate. Sometimes they are outdated, and sometimes they are email addresses for the website’s hosting company. To be safe, you should send an email to that email address along with any email address you can find on the website.
Another great option is to approach content sites. Websites that mostly post free content usually make their money through affiliate programs and advertising. If you have a good product or service, these could be your best champions.

However, the best affiliates are ezine publishers. If you can find an ezine publisher with a large subscriber base that will promote your product or service, you will find a huge amount of new sales coming in. The reason is that these publishers have an ongoing relationship with their subscribers.

There is usually a stronger loyalty-factor with ezines rather than content sites alone. And often these ezine publishers will also have their own content sites, so they can promote your product or service in both platforms.

It is a good idea to give your affiliates the right marketing tools. Most likely your best affiliates will have their own approaches, however everyone will appreciate getting help from you, especially since you know your product or service better than anyone else.
These marketing tools can include sales letters, articles, ebooks, special reports, solo advertisements for ezines, short advertisements for ezines and search engines, banners and graphics, and any marketing ideas you might think are key to your affiliate’s success.

Party Poker, the online poker site, gives their affiliates a poker dictionary to put on their website. This is a brilliant idea, because they are giving their affiliates quality content for their website, which their visitors will appreciate. And since their name is branded on the dictionary, the visitors will associate the quality content with Party Poker. If you can think of anything like this, you will find that marketers will be more likely to join your affiliate program.

Affiliates work hard to promote a product or service, thinking that they will earn commission for that. But it is a soar fact that part of the money is actually lost by affiliates. One of the easiest way to lose an affiliate commission is to advertise plain affiliate links that have a product’s website embedded: the most simple example is the affiliate program with such link like:
http://www.products-page.com/aff.php?affiliate-name
Let’s say an affiliate promotes his/her affiliate links using an article marketing. Visitors will read the review of the article written by the affiliate and if they like the product they will try to directly buy the product from the product’s site instead of clicking the link provided by the affiliate. So, after all the hard work affiliates get nothing.
Some of the most common problems faced by the affiliates are affiliate link hijacking where another unfair affiliate could easily modify the affiliate code and buy the product via own affiliate link i.e., if a visitor decides to buy the product he will become an affiliate of that product and will purchase the product using his own affiliate link so that he can buy the product and can also get some discount in the form of commission.
Another major problem is affiliate link bypassing where visitor will delete the affiliate’s reference in the link and buy products directly, it is just because some people don’t wish to buy the product by being referred by someone.
This article will explain how you (affiliate) can protect your commission from unfair people and maximize your affiliate profits:
• Link Cloakers can solve some of these problems. It is a special script or software program that directs the user from the entered URL to your desired page.
For instance, if visitor clicks the link:
www.website.com/product
the web browser automatically redirects to:
www.website.com/product?id=affilate_name
So, your visitor will not know whether it is a direct link or affiliate link, hence you will be protected from the unfair affiliates.
• Use Html Unicode format. Instead of providing the affiliate link in the readable format you can encrypt the affiliate URL with Html Unicode like:
www.website.com/product?id=-mt
so your visitor can’t understand what it means, he will think that it is the code of the product. If you wish to make this even more effective you can encrypt the entire affiliate URL and place it in the anchor tag of the link and place some image or meaningfull text as the visible link. You can use the text like ”
Click here to order” or use the Buy Now button but always try to keep your link search engine friendly like:
website.com/product-name-with-keyword
as much as possible because it can help you to easily gain more visitors. This way you are assured that the visitor can’t predict the URL of your original affiliate link and you can reap the full benefits of affiliating the products.
These techniques mentioned so far, can protect the affiliate commissions from the unfair affiliates successfully to great extent. However, that’s not all… To find even better tips on how to protect affiliate commissions, visit Click2Sell.EU affiliate network blog: http://www.click2sell.eu/blog/affiliate/how-to-protect-affiliate-commissions-from-unfair-affiliates-and-customers-who-dont-want-to-buy-via-affiliate-link