Taken from MarketingTops.com
1) You must have a quality product and fantastic customer service.
I'm not going to pull the wool over your eyes...to start off with, you must have a great product, and fantastic customer service. You MUST have these before you can develop an Affiliate Program that will build loyalty with your Affiliates.
This is critically important! To build a successful Affiliate Program your Affiliates must know that you have a great product, that you offer great value, and that you give fantastic customer service (so that when they recommend you or send people your way they KNOW you have a quality company). If you provide all of this, they are going to feel proud of the program. They have to be able to trust you with their customers. They have to be able to trust that you know what you are doing and that you will treat them fairly and honestly. Your Affiliate Program won't last very long if you get a bad reputation.
Given that you DO have a great product or service and fantastic customer service...there are dozens and dozens of things you can do to make your Affiliate Program a successful one! I'll discuss some of them here.
2) Choose your Affiliate program software wisely!
The first, of course, is your choice of Affiliate Program software. The software you use is going to determine how you set up your program. It's going to determine where you spend your time (on marketing or on administrative trivia)... and it will be a factor which some of your potential Affiliates will use to determine whether or not they will sign up with you! I am not going to spend a huge amount of time discussing software in this article... because I am going to discuss it in DETAIL in the articles that follow.
3) Your Affiliates can also be your customers.
They join your affiliate program to earn some money, but you can actually sell your products TO them also. They get a discount through the kickback they receive from their own sale. It's a great way to actually generate some new customers AND once your Affiliates use your products or service they can use their own testimonials, increasing the effectiveness of their marketing efforts!
If you have a situation in which you sell a lot of products, you can actually get Affiliates to sign up with you solely for the purpose of buying your products at a discount. They buy at regular price but at the end of the month they get a referral fee on their own purchases, so basically they are getting a discount. This might work for example if you are selling something like vitamins. MLM companies have been using this sales technique since the beginning of time! It works!
So it's a natural thing to actually sell products to your Affiliates because if they buy from you they are getting a kickback (i.e. they are buying at a discount) and you are supporting your Affiliates. It is a natural thing to do, don't fight it!
Some Affiliate Program owners say, "NO, you can't buy through your own Affiliate Program" and they fight it. They're losing out! Don't fight it! This is a great way to get new customers, new business. Let it happen. Encourage your Affiliates not only to sell your product but to buy from you.
There's another benefit...it generates a lot of customer loyalty. You allow them to save money by buying from you through their Affiliate membership. And you make them money when they sell for you. This is a fantastic way to build customer and Affiliate loyalty.
4) Pay out excellent commissions and realize the backend sale.
You have to pay out good Affiliate commissions as referral fees. The more room you have or the more profit you have, the more you should be giving to your Affiliate. There's one reason most of your Affiliates have joined your program... to make money! The more money they make, the more motivated they will be to market your product or service in a variety of ways. The more money they make, the more work they will put in on your behalf.
What it comes down to, and what most Affiliate program owners do not understand… is that most of your real profit is on the "backend". Don't be afraid to give away a lot of your profit on the "front-end"… it is the customer who is worth the money. Once you have the customer, if you have quality products and services that are great value, you will generate a lifetime customer from whom you can profit for years. This is why you, as an Affiliate Program owner, can afford to give an Affiliate a lot of money. You're not looking at immediate profits... but at the potential of repeat sales or potential back-end sales. If you give your customers good value, a lot of them are going to come back and buy and buy again. Over 50% of my net income is made through back-end products. So - realize it is very important!
So don't look just for the money made today, look for the money you can make over the next 6 months... or the next year, or even 5 years! You may only be mailing your customer something which is worth $50 or $100 today, but they may buy $2000 worth of merchandise over the next two years! Understand and realize that the purpose of building your Affiliate Program is not only just to make money today, it is about getting that customer, holding on to them and making a sale 6 months from now or a year or 2 years from now!
5) Do business with your competitors.
You will be surprised to know that you may end up doing business with some of your competitors! And that people you originally thought were competitors really aren't... in fact they can be someone you actually do joint ventures with (especially if your product/service is similar but still different)!
This may sound corny, but you will not believe how many times we do business with our competitors. When it comes down to it, many of the people who purchase our information or software will also purchase our competitors'. So why not work together and both profit from that?
For example, I do business with companies people consider to be my competitors. But we actually have established good working relationships. We sell each other's products! If I believe someone has a good service selling great copywriting skills... and they have a manual on copywriting, I will recommend them and I am sure that in return, referrals and recommendations come back in my direction.
Be prepared to look at your "perceived competitors" products... and if they would be of value to your customers... negotiate a deal, become part of their Affiliate Program. Look at what you can offer your competitors' customer based on what they would want and on what you both could profit from. Yes, you may find that you actually can be partners with some of your competitors and it can be very interesting. So, be prepared for this to happen.
6) You must have a great visitor to sale conversion ratio.
To have a good Affiliate Program you must have a good visitor to sales conversion ratio.... This is one of the things you should look for before you really ramp up your Affiliate program. You need to be able to convert visitors into sales in order to keep your sales Affiliates happy. If they send thousands of visitors your way and after a month or so realize you are not converting the visitors into sales, they will not be very pleased with the results.
Test, test, TEST, TEST, TEST, test!
Test everything! Don't be afraid to test!
If you don't have a site which converts enough customers into sales… or maybe you have a site which doesn't even generate enough visitors to check this… or maybe you want to do this Affiliate program, but don't have a product or service to sell… and in this ebook you will find the answer.
A great thing about the Internet is that you can test very quickly. So if you have ad copy which isn't doing very well, or a banner which isn't selling well, you can put a new one up and get the results in minutes or hours, depending on how much traffic you have.
With traditional forms of advertising you had to wait weeks or even months to get the ad in, wait for it to come out and then get the results in, in order to tabulate it. It would take months and months to test for one thing.
On the Internet you can put up a banner and test it. Then only a few days put up another one to see the differences in results and find out which banners pull really well for you. You can also do different sales letters and different site designs to find out what is producing the best conversion ratio for you… all in a matter of days, not months as in traditional advertising.
For example if your banner says, "FREE gardening newsletter".... and what you want to do is sell them a gardening product... your visitors may not be very qualified because they may not be willing or interested in buying anything... they are looking for something free.
You may have a very low sales conversion ratio (1 out of every 400 to 600 visitors buys, which is not good)
If you have quality visitors coming in, people who want to buy what you are selling, then your conversion ratio should be better. Your banner might read, "INCREASE THE GROWTH OF YOUR PLANTS BY 30% ALMOST OVERNIGHT FOR ONLY $25.00". You'll bring in less visitors, but very qualified visitors. You will probably get a conversion ratio of one out of every 50 visitors… a lot better than having lots of unqualified visitors.
But you may have had to test 20 different banners to find the one that really pulls! A key to marketing success is to test everything! And then tell your Affiliates the results of your tests. Tell them what works. Get them to use what works!
Your Affiliates are actually working for you for nothing until they make a sale... you can not lose money!
The plain fact is that this is the most advantageous way of marketing there is right now online, because you are not paying them per hour or per ad... only for sales made!
7) The 12 Secrets and Tools to an Outrageously Successful Affiliate Program.
Ok, to be very straightforward, there are real "killer" ideas on how to instantaneously guarantee your Affiliate program makes you money, but I have saved these for a special course which only comes with my AssocTRAC software.
Why?
Because there are two people online right now who are selling the same kind of information that I have been giving you here in the last two issues of this newsletter for almost $100 (I just gave you over 100 pages of information in less than 2 months… all for free). I have to hold something back… hold back my real "gems" of information that will give my clients an unfair advantage over the other Affiliate programs out there.
It is a "no-brainer".
You will learn how to easily get thousands of people to join your Affiliates program and sell incredible amounts of your product or service. You simply have to read the manual and follow my steps, and you are on your way to adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to your bottom line. I just can't give that away… . I want to give them an edge that they can't get anywhere else - I am sure you would do the same for your clients.
The beauty of Affiliate Programs is that you have hundreds or even thousands of people out there promoting your product for you.
This manual will give you my few guarded secrets that will explode your sales and show you EXACTLY how to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in business in as short as 30 days from when you start. I have done it, and I will show you how you can easily follow in my footsteps to do the same.
Find the "right" Affiliates that can sell thousands of dollars of your product or service easily.
To be very blunt, this is what really MAKES OR BREAKS AND Affiliate PROGRAM. And as I was just telling you in the last point, I am going to save this really killer stuff for my special clients that use my AssocTRAC software. These "gems" of information will give my special clients an unfair advantage over other Affiliate programs out there (including their competitors!). I am sure you would do the same for your clients. If you are interested in what I think is one of the best Affiliate program software packages out there on the market.
Affiliate Programs are "hands down" the hottest and fastest way to sell your product and make a fortune online right now! Don't take that lightly, we have been doing this for over 4 years and it has just EXPLODED in the last 8 months. Ride the wave before it is over (or before your competitors beat you to it).
Technology has really progressed rapidly when it comes to Affiliate Program software! Let's take a look at what it does... how it works and why it is so important.
There are many packages of software out there… and you literally have to be a programming expert to figure out the differences, specifically the advantages and disadvantages of each.
What is even more confusing… the prices for this type of software range from...
$300 to over $12,000!
Yes, I am not kidding… there is that much of a fluctuation. Over the next two articles, we will go over the pros and cons of each and show you the most economical solution.
The main purpose of Affiliate Program software is... tracking! Visitor tracking, Affiliate tracking, sales tracking. In other words, you need to be able to track your Affiliates, and the visitors they send to your site - and the visitors who buy.
There are a number of ways this can be done.
There are many, many ways, but the most common are:
CGI tracking
Cookie tracking
Hard-coded HTML tracking (this is a very old fashioned way of doing things at this point because technology has really progressed)
Please note that these systems have one of the following:
An "offline" database where all of the information is stored offline, which means the Affiliate cannot view their statistics but it is easy to manage for the company.
An online database, where all statistics and Affiliate information can be viewed by Affiliates, in real-time.
Neither database, if they are really "Mickey Mouse" and manually calculate what they owe their Affiliates by hand (this is the way we used to do it back in 1995 as the software and technology didn't exist for doing this without a major investment).
Just to refresh, in case you have forgotten, all Affiliate programs assign an Affiliate a special URL, which is specific to them so when someone links to their site, they know who sent them the visitors and if that visitor buys. For example, with our Internet Marketing Course, the URL may look like www.marketingtops.com/aff/1234/. If someone posts this URL at their page, with a text link or banner, anytime someone clicks through that link to our site, we know Affiliate #1234 sent us that visitor. If that visitor buys, we will give that Affiliate a referral fee as a "thank you" for sending us the customer.
It sounds very simple, but the software is very complicated, as it has to account for many different types of situations, which we will go over in this article.
Tracking through HTML pages
This basically means you are setting up mirror pages or mirror sites. I've already described how this works in one of my previous articles, but in case you didn't read it... here it is again.
Basically you set up a separate page... or a separate site, for each Affiliate. This is a VERY time consuming way of doing things, but there is almost no cost involved other than your time. Here's how it works...
Using marketingtips.com as an example. You'd set up a page for your 1st Affiliate called www.marketingtops.com/info1.html. Then, as you got more Affiliates you'd add pages... i.e. www.marketingtops.com/info2.html and .../info3.html .../info4.html and so on.
These would all be identical pages. The only difference between.../info1.html .../info2.html .../info3.html etc. is that it has a different tracking number. You actually hard code in the Affiliates tracking number (i.e. info5.html would have the tracking number or Affiliate number of "5") so that when you get an order, a hidden code in the order form prints the code. This allows you to manually track and give your Affiliate credit for the sale.
Now this does work and is great for doing a joint venture or two with a few people… however it has MANY drawbacks.
First of all you can only sell one product. So if you have one sales letter which sells one product, doing it this way can work initially… but having multiple products at your website or having multiple pages will cause you nothing but havoc.
But say I get 100 Affiliates (and it's pretty easy to get 100 Affiliates… in fact it's very easy to get 100+ Affiliates in a matter of 30 days)... now if I want to change something like the price, or I have found a better way to sell my product so I want to change the sales copy, or I want to add in a graphic, or whatever; I have to go to every single webpage and change them all manually, all 100+ of them. It's a HUGE job!
Trust me, I used to do it this way back in 1995 when Affiliate/affiliate software was not available. Updating the pages ate up days of my time.
There is also the fact that you can't offer any of your Affiliates real time statistics. They can't tell how much they've earned until the end of the month when you "manually" calculate it (which can take you a couple of days if you have 100+ Affiliates). They don't even know how many visitors they are getting or how many sales they are generating... they have no way of tracking it on this type of system. And on top of all that, they have to have 100% trust in me that I'm not ripping them off because I am the only one who has the "true" visitor and sales numbers… they have no idea if they are selling the numbers as I report it to them. It's a pretty primitive way of doing it. It was a very old way of doing Affiliate programs and you can "shoot yourself in the foot" because most people will not sign up with you if they don't feel comfortable that you are reporting to them in real-time, all the time, about how they are doing with sales. Heck some of the Affiliate program directories (which I will mention later) won't even list your site on their list if you do not have real time tracking software.
Now another problem could occur if you had a site selling four products, and you wanted people to roam around your site, read articles and all that kind of stuff; but still tracking the Affiliates visitors and sales. It's almost impossible to set up a reliable system using this method. There would be no way to track your visitors or Affiliates from webpage to webpage. The only way to do this is to set up a whole separate individual site for every Affiliate within your main website (a VERY big job!).
It would take HUGE amounts of room on your web server and there is no way you could manage it. If you ever wanted to change one small thing it would literally take you weeks to complete. It's totally unrealistic!
In our case, with thousands of Affiliates, this would be an impossible amount of work!
Ok, I know I have stated a lot of negative things about this method… so you may be asking, "What is the benefit to this method?" The answer, unfortunately, is only one benefit… it is really cheap for those who have no money and lots of time on their hands… as setting up takes only your time and knowledge of HTML. But remember, you may do more damage than good as many Affiliates will not join because they can't see their stats or have no confidence in you. Also you will get a low rating from many Affiliate related directories as you will look like a "basement operation". But I guess despite the negatives, having this system is better than having no system.
You could get away with this about a year ago, but not anymore. Some Affiliates will not sign up on a system this ancient as it offers them no control. But I thought I would mention it just in case you saw a few of these floating around online. They do work, but they are not competitive against all the other Affiliate programs, which have come out over the last 6 months.
This article has been taken from
www.marketingtops.com
All rights reserved
Arrgh me eyes
I found that if you scroll down really fast on the megapost above that
1) you can see the face of Christ in the text.
2) Fermats last theorem is revealed.
3) you pass out after doing it 5 times.
aren't first post allways the most fun to read...
<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/ohwell.gif ALT=":\">
My gawd the aliens have landed !
www.google.com/search?sou...vice%2E%22
Aliens or Cloning?????
badgeruk
Those sites all refer to 8 ways
I feel shortchanged
yeap ...STEAMLINING....obviously in such a dynamic area as this there are usually several univeristy professors working in an airtight lab somewhere with chimps wired up to electro sensors to determine the methods of producing the "GIMP" brainwave where you go read something and then sign up immediately even when your subconcious (homer brain) is saying nah that'll never work....
In time they will have refined the process, I predict in several millenia the 7 ways will have been distilled to one simple phrase .....CLICK HERE FOR FREE SEX.......
I am currently writting a PHD paper on the subject and need several willing ladies of less than upstanding morals to "assist" me with this...names on a postcard please...:rollin:
If that's 7 ways to double your profits then by following all 7 you ought to be able to increase your profits 128-fold!!
E.g. if you're managing to make £10,000 at the moment, then by following those steps you could make £1.28m!!
Shane,
Judging by my in basket I think your PHD paper is out of date as 'Free Sex' seems to appear in most of them already.
Do you errmm work in an airtight errr lab wibble?
(when I say work I mean errm wear electro sensors..)
kidding... <img src=http://www.gamers-forums.com/smilies/contrib/ruinkai/biggthumpup.gif ALT=":thumb">
I followed the 7 steps and now I own Mexico
...you could too, well not Mexico but Cuba's quite cheap,
I am now going to follow the 7 steps again and again...this time next year I'll be a gerzillionaire..
ok lets give it a go may be a holiday in space
I've spent the last 3 years looking for just one way to double my profits.
And blow me down if SEVEN of them don't come along at once.
They're just like buses really.
as this thread is nearly 3 years old you must have been looking in the wrong placeOriginally Posted by km8
I've spent the last 3 years looking for just one way to double my profits.
And blow me down if SEVEN of them don't come along at once.
They're just like buses really.
Keith ~ My Blog general ramblings. Internet Marketing Blogs UK all the blogs together in one place (pm for inclusion)
Oops, so it is!as this thread is nearly 3 years old you must have been looking in the wrong place
Must sign up for a speed-reading course.
Still good information
My affiliate program fits all the above :-)
Personalised roses are going to take over the world! lol
Mark Pearson - www.rosesbydesign.co.uk<br>Send Your Message on a Rose!
well i thought i would post something interesting but after reading everything here this is the most interesting thing
lets wake up and makes some money here
<a href="http://quityourjob.direct-marketing.tv/quityourjobnow"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/quityourjobnow.gif" style="border:0" alt="Quit Your Job"/></a>
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