Now, you might be wondering how learning how to make money with affiliate marketing will help you create a killer affiliate program.  Well, for one, Susanne knows this stuff inside out…..and as a Super Affiliate she know which tools help her promote products in order to make the most money. One of those very successful tools is the Brandable Report.

If you’re not familiar with using brandable reports, it’s really very simple.  You take your content, turn it into a report and then using a handy-dandy “branding tool” you allow your affiliates to brand, or add their affiliate link to your report.

Now, your affiliate has something of value to share with their readers.  By offering quality content, they become more credible to their readers and hopefully, their readers are more apt to click & buy.

Susanne has written a short report on how to put together a short report using content you already have!

You can download her report below:

How To Turn Your Articles and Blog Posts Into Free Reports

(Right Click & Save to your Computer)

It’s a really quick read and is jam packed with information on how to get your report written.

Once you have your report done, think about getting it branded and added to your affiliate center.  Your affiliates will thank you!

Whoa, Nelly….

That super, wonderful, well-connected affiliate may have agreed to promote your product but now they need to fit your promotion into their very busy schedule….and that’s completely O.K.

People are busy.  Affiliate Marketers, doubly so.  They may forget (it’s nothing personal) or have may just have trouble fitting it into their promotion schedule.

So, it’s up to you to get them to take action.

And since you’re only human, you’d like them to promote you, like, well, yesterday.  Not only that, but you want them to realize sales and be excited about promoting you again.

What can you do to motivate your affiliates to take action?  Here is a quick re-cap.

• Set up their affiliate account and send them their link.
• Write a affiliate promotions specifically for them. Copy/Paste simple. [Consider writing custom promo tools for bigger affiliates]
• Ask what they needs from you.  Interviews, special reports, articles or blog posts can be great tools to use to introduce you to their readers.
• Offer a limited time special discount for their readers only.  Something they can’t get anywhere else.
• Since you intiated contact and want them to promote for you, think about giving them a higher commission, bonuses or increases based on performance.

Having said all that…there is still a chance that even though affiliates have said they’d promote for you, in reality they never will.  Don’t take it personally.  Just continue offering excellent products with valuable [read: filled with quality content the readers can use] promotional tools and follow the rule that says something like–to get a friend you must be a friend.

What are you doing today to motivate your current affiliates?

Her question:

What’s your best tip for getting your affiliates to actively promote you?

She has graciously allowed me to share this report with you!

You can download this 7 page report below

Motivating Affiliates

(right click and Save to your Computer)

What are you doing get your affiliates pumped up to promote your products?

P.S. Nicole has a wonderful program that shows you exactly how  to Make More Money from your information products.  She takes you behind the scenes of her own 6-figure business and shares her secrets.  CLICK HERE for more information!

#1 Tip You Mustn’t Forget: The best way to find affiliates or partners in any type of project, product or anything in business is to ALREADY know the people who reach your target market. This can be website owners, email list owners, message board owners, blog owners or even people you might consider to be your competition. When you already know people reaching your target market and have a personal relationship with them, it’s easier to ask them to help you promote a new product.

Here are some ideas to start developing a relationship:

- Offer to send them your product for free so they can review it – or just mail it to them right away without any expectations. Even if they can’t promote your product now, if you treat them cordially, they might just promote your product down the line.

- Show them that you know something about their business and comment specifically on some of the projects they are working on or some of their products that you have purchased

- Do something for them first. List them as a recommended resource on your website, etc., and tell them about it.

- Pick up the phone and develop a relationship. Perhaps you can offer to promote his or her product first, instead of asking for a favor right away. Don’t be in a rush to get them to promote your product or you may just burn your bridges completely.

- Show them proven results of other affiliates or illustrate how well your website converts visitors to sales.

Taking things slow is best long-term strategy in finding great JV partners, but of course, you can’t be friends with every affiliate and you will want to search and approach some affiliates with the sole purpose of promoting your product.

More tips for finding new affiliates: When looking for new affiliates, ideally you want affiliates who have…

•    Good website traffic
•    Decent-sized lists
•    Targets your buying audience

The first two are nice, but aren’t totally necessary. Don’t ignore a potential affiliates with a highly-targeted audience just because you think they don’t get much traffic or have a lot of subscribers. You want affiliates that can reach your very targeted market of customers.

•    Ask your fellow online business owners if they know anyone who reaches your target market and they could introduce you. These types of “recommendations from a friend” can go a long way.

•    Go to your favorite search engine and see which sites come up near the top for your target keywords. This is a great way to piggy-back on those great rankings without having to pay for them – until the affiliate makes sales for you.

•    Check their ESTIMATED traffic ranking at Alexa.com – This site very roughly estimates how popular a site is based on traffic and page views. The lower the ranking number, the busier the site. This is not a foolproof method, but can be used as a guideline to compare websites in similar markets.

One of the reasons I really like using Alexa.com for finding sites is because they always list “related sites” for each site information you view. This can keep you going for a very long time finding related websites.

•    See which sites link to your competition. Go to Yahoo.com type in the following: link:yourcompetitorsdomain.com. Just substitute “yourcompetitorsdomain.com” with your competitor’s actual domain name. The results that show up will be sites that link to your competitor. You will potentially find some good sites to partner with here. I prefer Yahoo for this check because they will show many more links than Google does.

You can also simply enter the company name or a product name at Google, Yahoo or other search engine in quotation marks to see which websites are writing about your competitor.

Also, check Technorati.com, the blog search engine to see who’s talking about them too. If your competitor has a blog, search for it on Technorati and use the handy “Blogs that Link Here” feature to see whose linking to their blog. You can also search for other on-topic blogs to be your potential affiliates.

•    Check DMOZ.org  and the Yahoo Directory for websites in an appropriate category for your market.

•    Look through Ezine Directories for potential affiliates. Most directories are categorized by subject and some include information about the size of the list. Some Ezine Directories you can look at include: The Ezine Directory, EzineHub.com and EzineLocator.com.  You can also search for your target market keywords plus the words “newsletter”, “ezine” or “mailing list” on a search engine to find even more publications.

•    Find message boards related to your target market by searching on a search engine with your target market keywords plus words like “message board(s)”, “forum(s)” or “board(s)”. You can also search

Past posts have given you the information to start understanding what you might want out of an affiliate system and why.

If this is the first post you’ve read about Creating Your Affiliate Program, I encourage you to go back and read everything up to this point, so you can make the most informed decision possible for your affiliate program.

So, let’s move ahead, shall we?

There are three popular options when it comes to setting up your affiliate program:

Have your programmer install a script on your server

This means you will have complete control over your affiliate program and everything will be hosted on your domain.

Also, experienced programmers may be able to make modifications to existing scripts that will further customize your program to make it do exactly what you want it do. With a script, you basically pay a one-time fee and then you will likely need a program for maintenance and upgrades. You will also be responsible for managing and paying your affiliates.

NOTE: Scripts often require maintenance and may not work well with some hosting accounts and the way they are configured. Be prepared to spend a bit of extra money to have a programmer maintain the script for you, back up your databases, etc…unless you know how to do this yourself.

Some server script options:

IdevAffiliate

It’s not a bad script, but I’ve heard it has had trouble with recurring payments and refunds. Make sure to do your due diligence.

Post Affiliate Free

QualityUnit.com/postaffiliate – Has a  free option with a Pro upgrade.

Amember Pro

Amember.com – This is a script for membership sites, but can be used for one-time sales as well, and is what I use personally use for this site.. It works very well for our purposes, but the reporting (for Admin and affiliate purposes) is lacking.

Get a Script Made

You can hire a programmer at MyElanceOnline.com and have them set something up according to your specifications. (Expensive)

Third-Party Options

This means, instead of worrying about a script running on your site and maintaining it, you have another company take care of it. They make sure all upgrades are done and you simply manage your affiliate program through your own account on their domain.

This is likely a more expensive option than #1 because it carries a monthly fee. However, if you are going to hire a programmer to maintain your script, it may not be as expensive at it first appears. With a 3rd party hosted script you are also responsible for managing and paying out your affiliates. This isn’t such a big deal if you use the PayPal Mass Pay option, where you can pay your affiliates with a few clicks of your mouse.

Some Third-Party Options

QuickSales

YourQuickSales.com – This is a private label version of 1ShoppingCart.  It’s a full ecommerce system that allow you to manage all your products, mailing lists, ad trackers, affiliates and more. It also allows for pay-per-lead and pay-per-click campaigns.

WAHMCart

WAHMCart.com – This is a similar system to Quicksales, but is far cheaper and offers a lot of the same functionality. To it’s credit, it allows for link tracking for affiliates, while Quicksales does not. However, WAHMCart does not have a pay-per-lead or pay-per-click option.

Full Service Affiliate Provider

This is the most hands-off approach, but the most expensive. There is often a start-up fee, plus you’ll pay transaction fees as well. They completely manage your program from hosting it to managing your affiliates to paying them as well. However, realize you’ll still need to do work to recruit and motivate your affiliates.

You could go with the big guys at CJ.com, but expect to shell out thousands of dollars just to get started. If you sell digital products, you could go with a program like ClickBank or PayDotCom and get started with very little start-up cost.

Some Options Include:

Commission Junction

CJ.com- Top-notch program, but it comes with a hefty start-up fee and is often beyond the reach of a budding home-based business.

ClickBank

ClickBank.com – for digital products like software and information products. One big drawback of this system, as is, that you don’t know who your affiliates are to stay in contact with them, however a paid script like Easy Click Mate will offer a partial solution to the problem.

PayLoadz

PayLoadz.com – for digital downloads with PayPal and Google Checkout. There is no built-in system for contacting your affiliates with this system either.

PayDotCom

PayDotCom.com – Products and services sold using PayPal only.

There are plenty more options in each category and you can search around for options. Be sure to ask your friends or colleagues on your favorite message board to see what they recommend. You can often learn a lot more from someone who’s used the system than you can by reading the company’s web page. Still, do take advantage of the system’s customer service to ask questions about specific features. If you get good service before the sale, that’s a good indication of what you can expect after you become a customer.

We’ve talked about:

• The types of affiliate programs you can run
• cookies
• lifetime customer
• and payment options.

Today, we’ll talk about what types of things you need in your affiliate system and what things you should be doing to make sure you’re creating the best affiliate program possible.

Ability to Adjust Commissions

You may want a system that allows you to give certain affiliates a higher commission.  There are a few reasons you’d want to do this.  A couple off the top of my head are -

• good performance – affiliates that go above and beyond.
• extra incentive to get a super affiliate to promote your product.

You will also likely want the ability to adjust commission on a per product basis.

We’ve talked about using an across-the-board commission rate for your affiliate programs, but there may be times you’ll want to make an exception.

For example, if you sell information products and also want to offer a commission to people who refer clients to your consulting program, you will likely have a different commission rate. Your info products will typically have a higher commission (remember 50-75%) than your services products (10-20%) depending upon the profit margin you’ve decided upon.

 

Two Tier Programs

You may or may not to be able to offer two-tier commissions.

“Two-Tier” simply means that the affiliate receives the following:

• The normal commission on their own sales
• A smaller (additional) percentage based on sales made by new people that become affiliates based on their referral.

Here are a few things to think about- a good-performing affiliate might not like this as much as getting a bigger commission upfront.

In most two-tier programs, the first tier commission is reduced in order to make the second tier commission available.

However, having a two-tier option available because that will allow you to select a few people who can potentially bring in new affiliates- think  JV-brokers – people who focus on finding affiliates to promote your product. They take their payment via the  2nd-tier commission.

NOTE: A word of caution about two-tier commissions. If you’re paying by PayPal, this is likely against their terms of service and they don’t allow payment on multi-level programs.

Affiliate Statistics

Your affiliates will expect to be able to log into an account and see their clicks, sales and pending commissions (hopefully, in real time). Most affiliate systems offer this feature.

You may even think about offering tracking links and statistics to your affiliates and this is not as readily found in affiliate systems. Smart affiliates – and those are the type of affiliates you want – generally want a way to track all the traffic they send to you and want to know which links are converting and which are not. For example, they may want to set up a special tracking link for an email campaign, another for an Adwords campaign and yet another for a link they added to the bottom of an article.

The Ability to Link to Any Page

Many affiliate programs are set up to have the affiliate link to the main page of a website . This is the worst possible set up and it’s not good for you or the affiliate. You want affiliates to send you the most targeted traffic possible and have them be able to link to any page or to any product in your store.

For example, if you sell party supplies and your affiliate has an article about throwing a Princess Party, you don’t want them to link to the main page of your party store and make the visitor click around trying to find the items she needs on your website. You want them to be able to link directly to your various princess-themed products.

In addition, this allows affiliates to link to your various resources and get cookied in the process.

For example, if you have a blog, your affiliates can comment on some of your own blog posts AND use their affiliate link. They can link to articles on your site and so forth. It gives them an incentive to link to you more frequently and more links is definitely a good thing!

• 3 Types of Affiliate Programs
• Paying Your Affiliates: How Much?
• Paying Your Affiliates: What Are Other People Paying?
• Paying Your Affiliates:  How Often?

Now let’s talk about handling refunds:

Refunds are a reality of business and sometimes you’ll issue refunds on a sale referred by an affiliate. Make sure you choose an affiliate system that will track refunds and deduct amounts from an affiliate’s account, as necessary.

Occasionally, you may run into an unscrupulous affiliate that will make fraudulent charges through his affiliate link that are later refunded.

Make sure your affiliate contract includes provisions for billing an affiliate if there are negative balances in their affiliate account. In most cases, you won’t likely need to ask for money on a negative balance, especially if the amounts are small or the affiliate is still active and the balance will likely work itself out.

Today we’re going to talk about how often you should pay your affiliates.  Honestly,the fact is that the more often you pay your affiliates, the more likely they are to be motivated to keep sending you customers. If you pay by PayPal, it becomes very easy to pay frequently. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t take too much of your time.

Whether you pay by check and/or PayPal, I’d recommend you pay your affiliates at least once per month- which is the most often time frame used.  By paying once a month, consistently, you’ll stay in front of your affiliates and they won’t have to worry about when and if they will get paid.

If you use a 3rd party service, you won’t likely have any control over the payment frequency. The schedule will be set out by the service you are using.  But once again, you don’t have to worry about any of the accounting or payment portions – they will take care of it for you – but you will pay a “convenience fee” for this service.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how to handle affiliate payments when refunds are made.

So let’s take a look at some of the ways you can get those commissions paid out to your affiliates.

Which Payment Method?

There are a variety of ways to pay your affiliates but a few of the most common ones are:

• Payment via physical check
• Payment via PayPal (or another payment processing system)
• Having a third-party service take care of the payments (think ClickBank)

Payment via Physical Check

Many affiliate systems include check-printing integration, so you can print your checks with a few clicks of a mouse. You’ll still have to sign the checks and get them into addressed envelopes.

Payment via PayPal.com

This online processing payment service that is used by more than 100 million people worldwide and is easily the most popular method. It is an easy and inexpensive way to instantly send payments from your PayPal account to all your affiliates.

Many affiliate systems will generate what is called “PayPal Mass Payment” files, so you can pay all your affiliates in one transaction. You are charged only a small processing fee for each mass payment you do and your affiliate incurs no charges for receiving the money- a nice perk for your affiliates.

Note: To do a Mass Payment to your affiliates, you will need to have a sufficient balance in your PayPal account. This can be from sales you generate for your products or you can transfer money from your bank account. Just allow enough time for the transfer from your bank to complete.

Give Them A Choice

You can give your affiliates a choice as to which payment method they can choose or you can decide to offer one option only. It’s completely up to you, but you might want to consider the following:

• Mailing checks is more time-consuming and more expensive.
• However, mailing your affiliates gives you a good opportunity to send further promotions and incentives in the mail each time you pay. People often take offers more seriously when they’re in hand than via email that isn’t always read.
• Even if you pay via PayPal, you can still send mail out to your affiliates and require their postal address when they sign up for your affiliate program

Some affiliate managers insist that there’s nothing more motivational than receiving a check in the mail.  I’m not so sure that’s absolutely true, however, take everything into consideration and do what is best for YOUR business and affiliates.  Here are some more things to think about before deciding:

==>    There is no waiting for checks to clear. This is particularly an issue if you have international affiliates. They will often have to wait up to 20 business days (sometimes longer) for an out-of-country check to clear.
==>    Payments are more reliable. The mail is not always reliable, but affiliates can count on their regular payments that come instantly through PayPal.

==>     A business owner often lives by their PayPal account and having money coming into their account, means they have money to spend on their business and that can be very motivational.
==>    It’s cost-effective to pay affiliates more frequently and that can be very motivational. You can pay your affiliates every week or whatever frequency you’d like.

Some PayPal drawbacks consider:

• Not all countries have PayPal available. Check the current list at: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-approved-signup-countries-outside
• Some affiliates may choose not to use PayPal.

Third-Party Systems

If you don’t want the hassle of handling affiliate payments, you can have a third-party affiliate program service take care of this for you and they will determine the method of payment.

There are affiliate networks lik:

• ClickBank
• Commission Junction
• Link Share

These services typically charge a hefty transaction fees but will free you up from the responsibility of accounting & actual payment.

We’ll discuss the more in later posts but in the mean time please any questions you might have in comments.

Have You Seen?

• 3 Types of Affiliate Programs
• Paying Your Affiliates: How Much?
• Paying Your Affiliates: What Are Other People Paying?

Before making a final decision on how much to pay, take a look at your competition. Along with having a great product to promote, having a more attractive affiliate program than your competitors might help give you an edge.

Here are some things to take into consideration:

• How much commission is your competitor offering?
• How much are they charging for their products?

If you have a product that sells for $20 and your competitor sells a similar product for $12 and offers 50% commission, you don’t have to follow their lead with 50% commission.

If you sell a higher-priced product that converts to sales well, you can speak to your potential affiliates in dollar amounts. Whereas your competitor gives $6 per sale, you can offer an $8 commission and keep more of the money for yourself.

Even if you choose not to, or are unable to, compete based on percentages or dollar amounts, there are plenty of things that make your affiliate program attractive including:

• Good conversion rates
• Frequent and convenient payments
• Plentiful and useful promo tools and support
• Performance incentives

We’ll be talking more about these things in future posts.

Some earlier posts you may have missed:

3 Types Of Affiliate Programs

Paying Affiliates: How Much?