Once you’ve had the opportunity to gather some experience as an affiliate, you’ll begin to think about how much you’d benefit from having an affiliate program of your own. After all, having a sales staff that only gets paid once they generate a sale for you.
A nice benefit of being an affiliate prior to starting your own affiliate program is that you will get to see first hand how an affiliate program works from the affiliate side of things. This way, you’ll be able to pick and choose what you like and what you don’t like about a particular program and incorporate the best parts of it into your own program. What never ceases to amaze me is that even moderately successful affiliate programs can launch sales to levels that you’d never see if you simply worked on your own to build traffic and generate sales.
When you make the decision to start your own affiliate program, you’re going to need to decide how you are going to set it up. Are you going to run it on your own? Or will you choose to have an outside company, such as Clickbank handle things for you? If you want complete control without paying fees to a company like Clickbank, you’ll need to set up your own program.
Fortunately, there are plenty of choices for scripts and software programs that will help you get your program up and running. The script I like and use for my business is one that’s offered by aMember. It runs right around $180, but it not only allows you to run an affiliate program through it, but it also provides you with shopping cart capability as well as managing access to the products you sell. If you are planning on offering memberships as part of your main product, or as an upsale, aMember can manage these memberships for your as well.
If you choose to go with a program other than aMember, you’ll need to ensure that it has three essential components.
1. Affiliate Center
The program will need to have a place where your affiliates can get their links, the creative you supply for them, email copy you provide as well as click and sales data
2. An Integrated Connection To Your Product
This is important! Not only will you lose sales, you’ll lose credibility if the links you provide to your affiliates don’t function correctly 100% of the time. To make matters worse, you’ll likely lose the affiliate for good.
3. A Real Time Payment, Sales & Click System
No professional affiliate will even consider promoting your product if you are not able to provide them with real time payment, sales and click data. They need to know exactly how their marketing efforts are working for them so they can make any needed adjustments as time goes on. Your system should be able to send an email to your affiliates anytime they generate a sale and anytime you have paid them for their sales.
