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The Two Sides To Affiliate Marketing [Alannah Moore, September 2003]
Affiliate program’s are an absolutely fundamental basis of doing business on the internet. Without any doubt at all, marketing affiliate products is one of the most powerful ways of making money online - whether you are from the US, the UK, or anywhere else in the world.
In this report I am going to recount some of my personal experiences with affiliate program’s, and go on to talk about several of the different ways a business can be built around them.
These are some of the key points I cover:
A Brief Outline Of Who I Am
Before I go any further, let me introduce myself. I am an internet entrepreneur, originally from London, and I make my living entirely from the web.
I recently published the ebook "The Totally Virtual Entrepreneur", which is designed to show some of the ways in which ordinary people can make a real living online, and focuses closely in on the businesses of twelve individuals who do so successfully, in a variety of different ways.
For two years I published an ezine for people involved in small business on the web, and throughout my time as an editor I received a steady stream of emails from my subscribers asking the question, "Is anyone really earning anything out there? - And if so, how can I do it too?"
I knew very well there were people out there making real money, and the ebook is designed to show people some of the ways in which they can join the ranks of successful internet entrepreneurs.
Now, as I was saying, wherever you are based in the world, making money through affiliate program’s is one of the very best ways of earning online, and in my ebook I talk to several people who are doing just that.
The immediate advantage, as you are well aware, is that you never need handle the product yourself, with all the extra work and financial input this entails: holding stock, paying for it upfront, organising distribution, etc.
Why I Use Affiliate Schemes As A Product Owner
I actually run an affiliate program myself, for my ebook "The Totally Virtual Entrepreneur", and I'm going to tell you a little about that.
Now, why did I set one up? By allowing people to take a large cut on all sales resulting from their recommendations, aren't I actually reducing the levels of my own profits, and rather dramatically at that?
Well the answer is, not at all. By making my product available to affiliates to recommend, I am in effect multiplying by many times the reach of my own sales website http://www.totallyvirtualentrepreneur.com.
Due to the affiliate program, all over the web, in ezines and on websites, in a very wide topic area, people are recommending my ebook, and sales profits, rather than being cut, are instead being multiplied many, many times.
Everybody's happy - me, and the affiliates who have got a fast-selling product at their disposal. We're all doing well out of it.
One of the beauties of the web is the multiplication factor, and nowhere more so than when you sell "digital" products (that is to say ebooks and software, products that can be instantly downloaded instead of being "physically" shipped out) - because your production costs are almost zero, no matter how many orders you receive.
Once you have got, say, a hundred affiliates and they all bring in say 10 sales a month (to give a fairly conservative number), what figures do you get from this? Suppose you make £10 from each copy of your ebook (or whatever product it is that's being sold) after the affiliates have received their cut.
That adds up to £10,000 a month!
This is pretty conclusive evidence that it's worth cutting your immediate profit on each sale and setting up an affiliate program, isn't it?
Incidentally, I offer more than half the sale price as an affiliate commission - 55% to be precise. This benefits me in the long run because I can get more affiliates this way. They sit up and take notice at the large cut they receive each time they make a sale, and it's really worth their while making a big effort to sell the product.
I have signed up as an affiliate before for products which I like a lot, but the commission is only 10%. I like the product and can offer a genuinely enthusiastic recommendation, but in the long run, even if I sell quite a few from my website or from my mailing list, the product hardly 'pays its way' at such a low commission. The space on my site or in my ezine would be far better used by a product that pays better, and besides, where's the motivation to go the extra inch promoting a product when the owner is so stingy towards his 'partners'?
So, tipping the commission in the affiliate's favour is something to seriously consider if at any point you are going to set up an affiliate program of your own.
Something else to remember if you're going to run your own program is to keep your affiliates motivated: make sure you have a way of keeping in touch with them, and email them regularly with updates, new promotion tools, articles, ideas, bonuses, and the like. After all, the more you can help them, the more they can help you!
Another thing about my product is that there is an absolutely huge potential target market for it. Affiliates can place ads for my ebook in a wide range of topic areas, some well out of the internet marketing arena. People who read golfing and gardening ezines, for example, are going to have some money to spare, and if they have a modicum of curiosity about the internet, or perhaps are looking to build themselves a "hobby" website and perhaps make a little cash on the side, they may well be candidates to purchase my ebook. This is something to consider when you’re looking for places to market your own affiliate products.
Why I Use ClickBank
Now I want to talk a bit about ClickBank. This is the way I organise my affiliate program. If you have been around on the web much, you are bound to know about ClickBank already as it is an absolutely wonderful tool for internet marketers.
Here's the low-down: it's an online payment processor that merchants who sell "digital" products of any kind can join up with to accept credit card payment from their websites. But makes it so unique is that within its system it has a built-in, optional, affiliate capability.
People who sell their products through ClickBank can assign a link to their affiliates, whereby they automatically get commission for products sold on their recommendation. They get their payments directly from ClickBank, meaning no action at all necessary on the part of the merchant.
So if you are looking for digital products to promote, ClickBank is a great place to get the best of what's available on the web.
If you are looking for "physical" products (rather than digital one’s, which are the only one’s you can sell using ClickBank), a very good place to look is http://www.associateprograms.com, which has products listed in absolutely every category under the sun, all of which you can sign up for as an affiliate.
My Success With A ClickBank Storefront
Talking about ClickBank brings me to the next thing that I want to share with you.
This is, my almost accidental and astonishing success with a ClickBank "Storefront".
Incidentally, I wrote about this in Joe Kumar's ebook “30 Days to Internet Marketing Success”, to which I was asked to contribute.
The idea of this ebook was to ask some well-known internet marketers how they would get themselves out of the nightmare scenario of finding themselves with no money and no joint venture partners and only 30 days to repair the situation or else risk losing their homes! The only "tools" available for them to do this with would be their phone line, their internet connection, and the knowledge they had already accrued through their internet experience.
Now initially I had to scratch my head, and quite honestly wonder whether I was going to be able to contribute to the ebook, flattered as I was to have been asked.
I am not one to normally recommend any "make a quick buck" strategies, you see, preferring to advocate a slow but sure growth, in order to build a business you're going to be able to depend on for years to come. In fact, throughout my writings on web business I have made it a point to get as far as possible away from any such kind of hyped-up claim.
I began to wonder if there was any way I could genuinely recommend that could make anyone a decent sum of money in just 30 days, and whether I was going to have to decline the offer of contributing.
Then I realised that I had the solution right under my nose, having tried and tested a ClickBank "storefront" - just as an experiment - a few weeks before, wishing to temporarily put one of my websites - which had quite a bit of traffic already coming to it - to good use while I was redesigning its content.
So it was this experience that I wrote about in Joe Kumar's ebook.
You can see what a storefront looks like in action by clicking here:
http://www.totallyvirtualentrepreneur.com/storefront.html
The "storefront" I chose was "1st Promotion" although there are several to choose from.
As well as just the storefront, they also offer you a whole toolbox of other gizmos you can download and put to use to generate affiliate commissions through ClickBank. I don't know about the other storefronts, but with this one, you get ALL the commission due to you - there isn't anyone creaming off a percentage of the profits that should be yours - as I have heard that there is for some of the other ClickBank storefronts. This is something you should check up on if you are investigating alternative ClickBank storefronts.
Now what happened when I put up the storefront surprised me very much indeed.
Almost immediately I started getting all kinds of purchases for a huge variety of products, most of which I had never heard of, coming through to my ClickBank account. I wasn't promoting any of these products directly - the sales were coming from people who'd stumbled onto the storefront, and while they were there, had done a bit of browsing. In many cases, it seemed, that browsing had turned into an impulse purchase! And who was benefiting? Me!
By the way, the storefront isn't on my home page any longer, so gets a lot less traffic than it did, but I'm still getting quite a lot of sales several months down the line which I attribute to the ClickBank "cookie" system.
This surprised me quite a lot because I'd never believed any of the hype you hear about making money "instantly".
I'd been working full-time on the web for two years, and the money I'd earned was though my own hard work. Writing my ezine, designing websites, carefully choosing affiliate program’s and reviewing the products for my readers. All fairly time consuming, though I was earning quite well. This was money literally for doing nothing, though, the kind I'd thought was fictional!
Remember, in the videos you have watched, that anecdote about the challenge presented to some internet marketers to set up an affiliate "store" and make profits while they were having a barbecue?
Don't think for a minute that this kind of success isn't available to you, because not being based in the US you don't have all the same drop shipping facilities on hand as they do. As my experience proved, there are many, many ways in which Europeans and other non-US residents can put affiliate program’s to extremely good use.
Right, I've told you a bit about my own experiences with affiliate program’s, firstly from the perspective of someone who runs a program, and secondly the story of my surprising success with the ClickBank storefront.
What I See Others Doing With Affiliate Program’s
Shall we go on and look at some of the other ways you can make money with affiliate program’s?
Mark Byers has told us about his web business HealthWealthandLifestyles.com and how he has persuaded a number of UK distribution companies and retailers to act as a drop shipper for him. This is a classic way of doing business, creating a link between buyers and suppliers, but what he's doing is using the internet as the means of doing the selling, and collecting the profits without going anywhere near the products.
Think of the potential out there just waiting to be tapped. So many people - even import-export companies and wholesale suppliers - are ignorant of the possibilities open to them thanks to cyberspace, and with a bit of research and some phone calls, you could arrange similar set-ups.
In my ebook "The Totally Virtual Entrepreneur" I interview marketing "guru" Harvey Segal, who is himself also UK based.
Harvey has made a name for himself as an expert on affiliate marketing - and the way he does it is no less creative than Mark's way, though utterly different.
Harvey's trademark way of earning with affiliate program’s is to create a "theme site" around a particular topic, and to include affiliate products directly relating to that topic area.
An example of one of his "theme sites" is http://www.clickbankguide.com.
In my ebook I reveal some of the tricks Harvey uses to make sure people do buy the products he's recommending, and a clever way he uses to find suitable niches around which to build a theme site.
Harvey was also the first person to really make the most of the technique of viral marketing using customisable ebooks.
This was an absolutely phenomenal idea and thousands of Harvey's free ebooks with his affiliate links inside them are circulating around the web right now, and probably will be for years to come.
Just think of how many click-throughs this is going to generate!
I'm not going to spell out his techniques though, either with the theme sites or with the virally distributed ebooks, as they are all talked about in detail in my ebook, and many readers will have chosen to include "The Totally Virtual Entrepreneur" when ordering this package.
Now another way of earning from affiliate program’s is by creating an "affiliate minisite".
The concept of the "affiliate minisite" has mostly been made famous by Phil Wiley in his ebook "Minisite Profits" and this has become one of the classic models around which to build an affiliate business.
"Minisite Profits" is the ebook that inspired Banbury-based internet marketer Steve Nash. Steve has put together not one or several, but a whole suite of websites based around the idea of the minisite.
Steve sells mobile phones, Palm Pilots, contact lenses, books, computer memory cards, etc., etc., etc..... but as you have realised, none of the products is his own. An absolute prime example of someone really cashing in on the vast possibilities offered by the affiliate program model.
So interesting is the information Steve Nash gave me in his interview for "The Totally Virtual Entrepreneur" that Mark and I agreed that it would be a good idea to include the entire chapter as part of UK Affiliate Gold. You’ll find it in this Case Studies section of the CD if you haven’t already read it.
When you are reading the excerpt from my ebook, make sure you take special note of what Steve says about the "mini-theme site" gradually taking over from the basic form of the minisite.
This is bang-up-to-the-minute information and should not be missed!
With broadband becoming more and more widespread in the UK, and surfing becoming easier and easier, now is the time to cash in on marketing Internet program’s via the internet.
The European market is not as mature as the US, so it is the ideal time to seek out your niche, set up your website, and start creating yourself your affiliate income stream.
Good luck to you in all your affiliate ventures!
Alannah Moore
The Totally Virtual Entrepreneur
(To keep in touch with me and be notified of any new products I release, special subscriber discounts, my own personal recommendations etc., please send a blank email to alannah@goldbar.net . This is not an ezine, and you won't be sent ads. It's just a way of keeping in touch with my internet friends and contacts. Equally, if anything I have mentioned in this report seems unclear to you, or if I can help you in any way, please contact me at alannah@ideasbypost.com , and I will do my best to answer your questions. You will have to click a verification link when you send me an email - this is simply to protect me from junk mail.)
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