Using Affiliate Marketing to get thousands of people promoting your products

In the offline world, you may open many branches in different locations to sell your products. But when you are online, your website can be the only store.

So, how do you reach to more customers? Register a new domain name? If you register a new domain name, the 2^nd website will only display the same thing over again. This is not very useful.

In fact, there’s a much better way which we call affiliate marketing. Sometimes we call it referral, partner, reseller program etc.

By recruiting affiliates to promote your products, you are allowing the affiliates to display your products on their website, through their newsletters or existing customers in their database. When a sale is made at your affiliate’s side, you will then rebate a certain amount of commission to them. In this way, you are guaranteed to make money.

One of the main reasons Amazon.com becomes so successful today is because it has thousands of affiliates actively selling their products online. Some other examples include templatemonster.com, whereby individual companies may sell website templates and earn some commission. A common example will be Google’s pay per click Adsense program, whereby individual webmasters can earn commission by displaying Google Ads on their own websites.

The power behind affiliate program is that this is a win-win situation. There is nothing to lose for both parties.

There are basically 3 types of affiliate program:

1)  Pay per click – If someone clicks through a link on your affiliate’s site, you pay your affiliate a small fee, usually from $0.10 to $1.

2)  Pay per action – If someone clicks through a link on your affiliate’s site, come to your website and perform some action like signing up for newsletter, registration etc. You pay your affiliate for each lead that you receive.

3)  Pay per sale – When someone clicks through a link on your affiliate’s site, come to your website and purchase something, you rebate a portion of the profit from the sale that is generated.

Normally, Pay per click and pay per sale programs are more commonly used.

Becoming an affiliate is easy so we will not elaborate here. There are 3 ways you can set up an affiliate program :

A)  Use 3^rd party Service

Tapping on 3rd party solution is the fastest way to set up your affiliate program. Normally, there is no sign up fee to use these services. A big advantage of using 3rd party affiliate program is that they normally offer strong support and promote your products to help you recruit affiliates. Also, reports and statistics can be easily generated and commissions are automatically worked out. Below are 2 popular solution providers:

Commission Junction: Launched in November, 1998. CJ is the largest affiliate management service provider. Depending on volume, transaction fees range from 15-25% of whatever commission you pay.

LinkShare: Another large network but the setup cost is high. LinkShare has attracted some big names. You benefit from the publicity it generates.

B)  Purchase an affiliate program:

A big advantage of setting up your own affiliate program is to improve link popularity, which may also help you in search engine ranking. Compared to using 3^rd party solution, the affiliate link normally points to the solution provider’s site and redirected to your site.

Below is some affiliate program software that you may consider:

Ultimate Affiliate: Industry favorite, one of the most fully featured affiliate program scripts on the Internet. Possibly the only affiliate program software which reports affiliate statistics graphically.

iDevAffiliate: Feature packed affiliate program software. And the company is well known for its superb support.


C)  Custom build an affiliate software

If you have plenty of budget, you may engage a professional web design/development company to tailor make affiliate program software for you. But of course, the cost is much higher compared to the previous 2.