Maverick MoneyMakers

Chances are you’ve made money as an affiliate – that is, you’ve recommended a product or service to your visitors, and earned commissions every time someone bought using your referral link.  If you’ve done this, you’ve no doubt realized that being an affiliate is a quick and easy way to make money.

However, you’ve probably also realized that the real money is not in being an affiliate, but rather being the merchant who’s running the affiliate program.  Instead of being one of thousands of affiliates competing, when you’re the merchant you have hundreds if not thousands of affiliates all working for you.

It’s also a good way to generate traffic for two reasons.

One, it’s extremely effective.  Affiliates often have their own lists and have built relationships with their subscribers.  So when they recommend your product to their list, you can expect to see higher-than-normal conversion rates.

Second, it’s a great way to generate traffic because you don’t up front for the traffic, but rather pay a commission only when someone becomes a customer.  For example, if you wanted to advertise in a newspaper, you’d have to pay for your ad first – and the amount you paid would be the same no matter how many people actually visited your site.  But when you’re paying affiliate commissions, you get to build a newsletter list and a customer list, and you need only pay commissions on actual sales.

As such, you should be paying as high of a commission as possible to your affiliates – and give special consideration to super affiliates (these are marketers who are capable of producing a large number of sales for you).  If you’re selling a digital product, the norm tends to be at least 40% to 50% commissions.  For super affiliates you may consider commissions well above 50% — entering into the 75% commission range.

From time to time you’ll even see smart marketers offering 100% commissions.  They know that the money is not made on front-end sales of the product, but rather on the back-end where they sell more products and more expensive products to their newly acquired customers.  Sometimes these offers are made immediately to customers as upsells or one-time-offers, and certainly smart marketers stay in touch with existing customers to sell more products to them.

So how do you start an affiliate program, and where do you find affiliates?

If you’re selling a digital product, starting an affiliate program is relatively expensive, quick, and easy.

You can use Clickbank.com which does all the affiliate tracking for you, and cuts checks to both you and your affiliates.  Their fees tend to be higher than some other solutions, but since they handle the entire program for you, it’s worth it.  The downside with this solution is that you don’t know who your affiliates are unless they make a sale or unless you personally recruit them.

Paydotcom.com is a popular affiliate tracking program available to those interested in using Paypal as a payment processor.  The upside is that you get listed in their market place when you use their service, so affiliates may find you through there.  The downside is that you have to pay affiliates yourself each month.

Of course if you’d like to get the benefits of all these solutions (such as being listed in both Clickbank’s and Paydotcom’s market places), then you can set up multiple affiliate programs.  Just be sure that you use different domains or at least different landing pages on your website.  In other words, use only one payment processor on a page, lest your affiliates get upset for unaccredited sales.

Once you’ve set up the affiliate program, the next thing you need to do is recruit affiliates.  Naturally you’d like “proven” affiliates – that is, those who are known to make sales.  Plenty of people will sign up and never even promote their affiliate link.  You want to focus on those who will actively do so without much encouragement.

Being in Clickbank and Paydotcom’s market places may land you a few affiliates.  Getting yourself listed in affiliate directories may help too.  Advertising your affiliate program on your own site is a good idea (but not on the sales page, as your current affiliates will worry about “affiliate link hijacking” and “commission theft”).

Another way to do it is to actively look for and recruit affiliates.  That is, write personal emails to them or call them on the phone to ask if they’d partner with you.

Just as with joint ventures, you need to ensure the proposals are tipped heavily in their favor, and that your proposal letters focuses on the reader and not you.  Without question, you’ll also want to give your potential affiliate full access to your product – after all, most honest people won’t recommend something without first reading it themselves.  And since they are doing you a favor, it would be a huge insult (and very short-sighted of you) to ask them to buy your product in order to review it.

You can look for potential affiliates all around your niche.  For example, talk to other marketers who have their own products, blogs, sites, newsletters and forums, as they probably already have an audience to sell to.  Check the market places at Clickbank and Paydotcom to find other authors.  Run a search in Google for your niche’s most popular keywords, and approach the people who hold the top spots on the first few pages, as well as those who are advertising using pay per click.

You’ll also want to keep an eye out for super affiliates.  For example, if someone in your niche is running an affiliate contest, join the affiliate program so that you can see who wins the contest …and then ask that person to be your affiliate.  Indeed, sometimes marketers publicly list their top 10 or 20 affiliates.  That’s “easy pickings” for you!

You can also find out who’s actively promoting products in your niche by running searches for product names.  Generally you’ll not only see all the affiliates who have the top search engine results for that product name, but you’ll also see who’s advertising using pay per click!

Tip:  Seems like every marketer has an affiliate program, and some of the top affiliates can only promote so many products.  As such, you need to ensure you make the short list.  What’s different about your product?  How will it benefit customers?

Also, what makes your affiliate program not only different but better than other affiliate programs?  For example, do you have exceptionally high conversion rates plus high commission pay outs plus cool contests for affiliates?

Answer these questions satisfactorily, and you’ll likely be able to land a few super-affiliates.

And finally, you’ll want to make it as easy as possible for an affiliate to promote your wares.  The very best affiliates will likely write their own ads rather than using the vendor’s “cookie cutter” ads.  However, that does not exempt you from providing your affiliates with tools like ads, email letters, and banners that they can use to promote.

You see, even those affiliates who won’t directly use your affiliate tools may still use them as a foundation that they build on.  For example, they may use your pre-written email promotion, but tweak it to make their own.

As such, giving your affiliates these tools saves them a lot of time.  The more time you can save them, and the easier it is to promote your product, the more likely an affiliate will come on board.

Tip:  This may seem extremely obvious, but it’s worth saying anyway: pay your affiliates promptly!  If you say you’ll pay in 30 days, then pay in 30 days.  Better yet, pay every two weeks or even weekly.  Some vendors even choose to pay daily.

Whatever you decide, don’t jerk your affiliates around and give them excuses as to why you were even one day late with payments.  When the affiliate promoted, they fulfilled their end of the bargain – if you want to fulfill your end, you need to pay promptly.

Of course using Clickbank.com makes this point moot, as they take care of your affiliate payments for you.  If you might have even a little trouble paying your affiliates on time (e.g., you travel a lot, or you’re afraid your Paypal account may get frozen), then use Clickbank.