One of the biggest reservations and fears about marketing is that it won’t work – that they’ll invest all this money in trying to promote their business but they won’t get any results back. What if there was a way that you could have thousands of people promoting your business (blogging about you, running banner ads, sending out e-mails and creating video reviews about your business) to drive more sales to you for free?
Now what I’m talking about is affiliate marketing. You can setup special codes on your website and have people come and sign up to your affiliate program and promote your business for free. So what’s the catch? Well it’s if and only if you make a sale that you then pay that person that sent that buyer to you.
You can also refer to it as “no lose marketing” as it revolves around having commission only sales people in the market working and bringing sales to your business and putting money on your bank account and its only then that you pay out commissions to successful affiliates.
Support your affiliates
In order to have people promote your business consistently, you need to provide them with enough materials and actually make it easy for them to promote you. This means ready to use banner ads, e-mail templates, video promotional material and anything that would make it easier for your affiliates to promote your business.
Don’t be a scrooge with what you are prepared to pay your affiliates. Prior to starting Think Big Online, I used to be a fairly successful affiliate for a number of other businesses and making a very good income just from promoting other people’s businesses. From my experience I can tell you that when comparing different affiliate programs people will consider:
- Who is going to pay the most?
- Who has got the highest conversion rate?
- Who is going to look after me the most as an affiliate?
Now typically, if anyone was offering less than 10 percent, I wouldn’t even consider promoting them. It’s not because I am greedy but rather its because I have affiliate expenses as well – running websites, creating content and putting time in building my business in order to be able to send buyers to their respective merchants.
Depending on what product you are selling, 10 percent may be too much but the main point is that you want to offer a percentage as high as possible. The higher the percentage, the more affiliates you are going to attract. More importantly the high end affiliates – the ones that are going to probably make 90 percent of your sales, they are not even going to bother with your business if your affiliate program is too small with insufficient incentives and if you’re making it hard for them to promote your business.
One other thing that you can do to encourage or support your affiliate is to pay them regularly and if you can provide pay outs once a week that would be fantastic! A lot of affiliate managers and merchants only pay out once a month but if an affiliate is seeing money getting dropped into their bank account every week, that is a really big incentive and it’s a good reminder that they are making money from you and that they should go and actively promote your business even more and drive more sales.
It’s really a win-win situation and you can’t possibly lose by having an affiliate program setup and managed properly.
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