Affiliates

If you have a quality product to sell, and you don't want to wait the several months it can sometimes take to get good search engine rankings, and you don't have a lot of money to spend on advertising, then using affiliates is a great way to go. By creating an affiliate program you can leave your affiliates to pay for any advertising, and let them use their own websites to promote your products, some of which will already be established with high search engine rankings and high visitor numbers.

To entice your affiliates to promote your product you need to offer a good commission for each sale they make. It depends on your costs, and the price of your product, but I recommend offering at least 40%, although I think a 50% rate and an equal share of any sales revenue is best. Some affiliate programs on Clickbank offer as high as 75%. Incidentally I can thoroughly recommend using Clickbank for your affiliate program if your product is an information product. They will list your product for you, making it easy for affiliates to find your product, and they will handle all your transactions, track sales, and handle any affiliate payments themselves.

To be successful, however, you need to do more than just start an affiliate program and let them get on with it. You need to educate them on what the best methods of selling your product are. Give them various marketing tools such as text links, different sized banner ads, a long list of relevant search terms/keywords they could use in PPC campaigns, and sample emails. Remember they're effectively working for you, so treat them well, and give them as much information and helpful advice as you can. The more successful they are, the more money you will make.

There are so many affiliate programs out there, so you need to make yours stand out by offering these effective marketing tools, and a high enough commission to make it worth their while. To go one step further and attract even more affiliates you could adopt a two-tier affiliate program. This is where your affiliate earns a commission for any sales they make, plus if they themselves recruit any affiliates underneath them then they can earn a small commission on any sales they make as well. 

For example, say you had a two-tier affiliate program that offered 50% to 1st level affiliates and 10% to 2nd level affiliates, and your product was $100. Affiliate X makes a sale to Customer X, and is credited 50% and therefore $50. If Customer X went on and made a sale he would get $50, and Affiliate X would also get 10% or $10.

As you can see this can be very powerful, and very attractive to potential affiliates. Although you may lose a small percentage of your sales price for every sub-affiliate sale, you will still earn far more in the long term with this two-tier affiliate program. It can be trickier to set up than a single level affiliate program, but the rewards are definitely worth it.