If you’re selling information products, (such as ebooks, video training courses, wordpress themes, or anything else which is in a “digital” format), getting affiliates to promote your products is one of the fastest ways to leverage your time and grow your business.
For those of your who are newer to Internet Marketing and information marketing, an affiliate is anyone who promotes your product and is given a commission for each sale they generate (normally between 30% and 75% for digital products).
By building an army of affiliates, all sending traffic to your product, you can focus your time on other areas of your business such as refining the sales process, improving conversions and developing new products. This can give your business a new level of scalability and allow your business to grow much faster than if you were relying on driving all the traffic yourself (or through your own outsource teams). You will also find that traffic sent from affiliates is sometimes much higher quality than that you can generate through other traffic sources, particularly if it’s endorsed traffic where affiliates are building review pages or reviewing your products on their blogs.
In this post I’m going to discuss some of the basics to selling information products through affiliates, and discuss the methods I’m using to recruit more people to sell my products for me.
Step 1: Setup An Affiliate Program
This may seem like a really obvious step, but it’s the first hurdle you have to overcome if you want to get affiliates promoting your products. Below I’ve analysed three of the most popular affiliate management solutions on the market so you can see for yourself which is the best fit for your needs.
Nanacast (Packages from $97/month): This is the premium solution and has many features to allow you to run your entire information marketing business from this one main platform (this is what I use)
Advanced Affiliate Management Features
Create custom landing pages or offers for JV partners and affiliates
Tracks by IP and Cookie for maximum reliability (better for affiliates)
Built in marketplace with growing affiliate base
Tracks backend sales to further reward affiliates
Advanced product and membership management features
Pro level content delivery systems with security and iTunes integration
Higher monthly cost than most affiliate services
Ejunkie (Packages from $5/month): – E-junkie provide a simple but effective solution with all the main features you’ll need to start selling your product online and allow affiliates to promote it.
Extremely affordable affiliate system
Includes product delivery system
Get paid directly via Paypal
No advanced features like individual affiliate landing pages
Cookie only tracking & no backend tracking
No marketplace or built in affiliate base
Clickbank ($50 one off fee + 7.5% transaction fee) – Clickbank is one of the largest digital marketplaces in the world, and very popular with information marketers who sell digital products. They provide a simple affiliate solution which works well but lacks many of the advanced features you may require as your business grows.
Popular marketplace with huge affiliate base
Payment of affiliates and tax handled by Clickbank
High transaction fee per sale
Less secure commission tracking (cookie only)
Less flexibility with pricing and content delivery
Step 2: Set Your Commission Rate
The commission rate is the amount (in $ or percentage) of each referred sale that you will pay to your affiliate. The higher your commission rate, the more appealing your product will appear to affiliates, although you shouldn’t feel you have to give away 75% of your sale just to get affiliates on board.
I usually offer between 30% and 50% commission on my products, depending on the price of the product, and also if it is being sold on the front or backend of my business (generally you can offer a lower commission rate on the backend).
If you’re selling on Clickbank, you will notice that many products offer 75% commission, which makes it harder to compete at 50%. This is one of the reasons I usually advise my clients to avoid Clickbank – but if you are using Clickbank be sure to use the other methods discussed in this post to recruit affiliates away from the main Clickbank marketplace itself (you can still do very well offering 50% commission on Clickbank).
Step 3: Have A Good Looking Sales Page
As a designer, I regularly had conversations with marketers who stated that ugly pages often convert better. Now I’m certainly a big supporter of testing different designs to maximise conversions, but I’ve also found that many sites which have a nicer look and feel will be more attractive to affiliates looking to promote the product.
Having A Good Looking Website Can Help Attract Affiliates
If an affiliate is interested in promoting your product but finds your site looks awful, they’re probably going to think you haven’t invested the time and money in making your site look good, which may also reflect on the amount of effort invested in the product itself.
This may in turn have an affect on their decision whether or not to promote your product. As a minimum I’d also recommend you have an ecover for your product. You can get a designer to create an ecover for you, or use an application like Ecover Creator 3D.
Step 4: Setup An Affiliate Mailing List
As well as building a list of prospects and buyers, it’s also very important to build a list of affiliates who are interested in promoting your product. You can use this list to help motivate your affiliates into promoting for you, as well as sending them additional materials, training and other information. You can also leverage this list when you come to launch future products as you already have a built in affiliate base to help give your product an initial boost.
I recommend you setup a separate list in your autoresponder and add an optin form for this list to your affiliate area (which I’ll talk about in a second) or alternatively position the optin form on your affiliate area page and advise your affiliates they need to optin to get their affiliate training and tools.
Step 5: Create Your Affiliate Area
Building an affiliate area is one of the best ways to get more affiliates promoting your products. Your affiliate area is essentially a page on your website which has all the tools and resources your affiliates will need to promote your product.
Essentially, you should make it as easy as possible for your affiliates to promote your product. The more tools and resources you give them, the more likely they are to promote for you.
Here are some ideas of what you should include in your affiliate area:
- The Affiliate Link – You need to provide the affiliate link people should use to promote your product. They may have to signup for an account with your affiliate system first and replace their ID in the link, but you should still provide the main format of the link. If you’re using a system like Nanacast, the affiliate link will automatically be generated and added to the affiliate area.
- Introduction To Your Product - Your introduction should describe exactly what your product does, and who the main target market is. You can also give examples of who is already using your product or who is having success with your product which may give your affiliates more ideas on who they can promote to.
- Promotional Banners - These will be used by your affiliates to promote your product on their websites and blogs. I recommend including the following sizes: 125×125, 250×250, 468×60, 120×600, 160×600 and 300×250. You should also ensure that if you have animated banners, you also provide static/non-animated versions. If you need banners designing, I recommend BannersMall as they have some very reasonable packages.
- Email Swipe Copy – Marketers are mostly lazy, so they often don’t want to write their own emails to promote your product to their list. You should write a series of different emails they can literally plug into their email autoresponder to send to their list, just customizing them with their own name and affiliate link. You should also provide some subject line ideas for your promo emails.
- Promotional Tweets – Twitter is now a huge platform for getting the message out about your product. Many people may post a link to Twitter even if they are not a full-blown affiliate marketer. By providing a range of promotional tweets about your product that people can simply cut and paste, you’ll find even more people getting the word out about your product.
- Commission Information – You should let your visitors know exactly how they will be rewarded for promoting your product. Include the price of the product, details of any upsells and downsells (and the commission rate on those) and how your affiliates will get paid.
- Ideas For Promotional Opportunities - If possible, you should try and give your affiliates some ideas of where and how they can promote your product. If you have tried different places to advertise in the past, tell your affiliates what worked and what didn’t work for you. You want them to be successful promoting your product, and the faster they can make a commission, the more they will get behind your product.
- Conversion Proof (Show Affiliates Making Money) – This one is killer! If you can show your affiliates are making money, you’ll find it a lot easier to get affiliates on board. I realise that at first this isn’t a possibility, but as soon as you have some affiliates making sales, show some screenshots of your sales stats. If possible include how many visits they sent and the number of sales they made. You can usually get most of these stats from the control panel of your chosen affiliate management platform.
Example of Page Showing Commissions By Affiliates
- Your Personal Support & Details – Make yourself accessible by your affiliates, and show you are available to help. Many affiliates who want to promote your product may want to get you on a webinar or interview you as part of their promotion, so tell your affiliates you’re available for interviews etc, and let them know how to contact you
Step 6: Promote Your Affiliate Program To Your Existing Network
One of the best places I have found to recruit new affiliates is from your existing network. By this I mean friends and contacts you’ve already made in your niche. Here are some places to consider promoting your affiliate program within your network:
- Your Blog – If you have a blog in your niche, (which I always recommend you do have), this can be a great place to mention your affiliate program. There’s a good chance that your blog readers are interested in your products, so consider making a post about your affiliate program and show how your readers can make some extra cash promoting your products. If you don’t to make a post about your affiliate program, it’s a good idea to have an easy to find link to your affiliate program on your blog or blog product pages.
- Facebook – Facebook is a great place to share the word about your new products, and it’s also a great place to spread the word about your affiliate program. You could even post success stories from affiliates on your facebook account. If you wanted to take this a step further, you could even have a dedicated facebook page for your business affiliates and post all your affiliate news and success stories there.
- Twitter – Ensure you post a few tweets about your new affiliate program or your new products when they are ready to promote. Think about posting here before you launch your new products to allow your affiliates to get on board and get their affiliate tools ready before you launch.
- Personal Contacts - If you’ve built up relationships with people in your niche, consider mentioning your affiliate program to them when you speak to them. You could also add a link to your affiliate program in your status on software like Skype so it’s there to see for all your affiliates.
- Email Signature – Another great way to advertise your affiliate program to your regular contacts is to add it to your email signature. Just a simple link to your affiliate program is all you need to get some attention from your regular contacts.
Step 7: Turn Your Customers Into Affiliates
It makes sense that some of the best people to promote your product are those that use it or have experienced results from using it. So you should look at how you can try and get anyone who has bought your product to promote it as an affiliate.
There are a few ways you can do this. The most simple way is to add information about becoming an affiliate to your product delivery pages, so your customers are immediately exposed to this information after purchasing. They will also be reminded of it each time they login to check out your content.
The more advanced solution is that by using a system like Nanacast to manage your affiliate program, you can automatically sign every customer up as an affiliate when they purchase. This means you can immediately send them an affiliate link so they can easily promote your product with no further signup necessary.
It’s fair to say that inside the internet marketing space, it’s much easier to get people to promote your products as they’re already likely to have their own blogs and be familiar with affiliate marketing. However if you’re selling information products outside of the IM space, you can still get your customers to promote your product. One of the best ways to do this is by using a simple tell-a-friend script (such as this one) which your customers can use to send a pre-written message to their contacts via email.
Step 8: Start Tracking And Improving Conversions
Once you have all your affiliate program setup and you’ve started building your affiliate base, you should start to focus on conversions. Conversions are what really matter to your affiliates – the more sales you can generate from the traffic they send, the more effort they will put into sending traffic to your sites and products.
You should start by monitoring your traffic with a tool like Google Analytics, and then use Google Website Optimizer to start split testing new elements of your sales pages. If you need some ideas on what to start testing to improve conversions, have a look at my post – Powerful sales letter conversion boosters.
Advanced Affiliate Getting Strategies
If you’ve followed the steps so far, you should have set your affiliate program off to a good start, and might be looking for some more strategies for taking your affiliate program signups to the next level. Here are some more advanced strategies I’ve been experimenting with, or am planning to implement in my business.
Utilize Joint Venture & Affiliate Forums
One great place to advertise your affiliate program is special forums or discussion boards which are specifically setup for discussion about affiliate programs or finding JV’s (Joint Ventures). There are many different forums like this on the Internet, and you’ll find most Internet Marketing forums have a section dedicated to “Joint Ventures” or “Affiliate Program Promotion”.
In these forums you can usually post details about your affiliate program or product, and hopefully get some attention from new affiliates. Be sure to include links to your product sales letter and affiliate area, and details about your product and commissions.
You can also make use of Internet Marketing forums by joining in conversations and adding a signature to your forum posts (ensure you comply with the rules of the relevant forum). This can get you increased exposure for your product, and even if your product is not in the IM Space, advertising your affiliate program may get the attention of other affiliates who are in your niche.
Directly Contact List Owners In Your Niche
This is one of my favorite strategies. Here’s how it works…
First, do a search on Google for the main keywords you are targeting for your product. Look at every one of the top 10 results.
You are looking for any sites or blogs where the site owner is building a list or selling a product (look for a name and email capture form). If their product is a direct competitor to your own, then I would rule them out as it’s unlikely they will promote your product (not always the case outside of the IM niche), but if you find people selling similar products which complement your own, I recommend contacting them. You can find their details through a contact form on the site, or use a site like Who.Is to search for the owner of the domain and find their contact email.
In your email tell them who you are, about your product, and include a link where they can download it, and tell them how they can signup as an affiliate.
If you want to supercharge this technique, you can try and build a relationship with the person first by contacting them through social networks like twitter or facebook, as this will build a stronger bond. Also try building a relationship by commenting on their blog regularly as this will get you noticed fast (most marketers will still approve their own blog comments even if they outsource other areas of their business).
I recommend as soon as you can, you should automate this by outsourcing the research of the contacts. Give your outsource contact the instructions on how to search for names and email addresses, so you can write the emails. You could even template the emails and have your outsource contact send them for you, but ensure each email is personalized in it’s own way.
Submit To Affiliate Directories
I’ve had limited success with this strategy so far, but I thought I’d include it for completeness as I figure it would get mentioned later if not. Affiliate directories are exactly as they sound, directories of different affiliate programs which you can also submit your product or affiliate program to.
Most of these are free, although some do charge for inclusion, or offer a premium option (which I haven’t experimented with so far). You have to submit some information about your product, including commission rates and other details, and you will be included in the relevant category.
I won’t list all the different directories here, so just do a search on Google for “affiliate directories” or “affiliate program directories” and I’m sure you’ll find lots.
Improve Funnel & Backend Commissions
If you’re using a system like Nanacast, you can ensure affiliates are rewarded if their referrals purchase products further down the “funnel” of your business. To maximize this, you should try and create more products which increase in price and value so your affiliates make more for every referral they send.
This will encourage your top affiliates to send more traffic as they’ll start seeing a higher return on the traffic they send. Ideally you want to aim to offer the highest per visitor value possible, so for every visitor they send, the more you can make from them, the better it is for your affiliates (and for you!).
Ensure you also setup a followup sequence designed to increase the value of each customer by selling additional products on the backend. The longer the followup sequence, (which should deliver content as well as promotion), the better your results will usually be.
Give Your Affiliates Rebrandable Reports & Materials
Giving your affiliates rebrandable reports and other materials is a great way to encourage promotion of your product.
These reports can act as an introduction to your product and still provide value, but your main product will be the natural progression or provide more indepth training for those people who want more help and training. Your main product would be promoted throughout the ebook, or at the end in a special promo, but the ebook or report should be self contained so it provides value – which will make more people want to give it away.
Allow your affiliates to give these reports away and also ensure they can embed their own affiliate links inside the reports so they can be rewarded for anyone that comes back to your site after reading the reports.
Setup A Tiered Commission Structure
A great way to retain affiliates that are making you sales is to setup an exclusive VIP affiliates level for your highest achievers. These affiliates would be rewarded with increased commission rates or access to promote other backend products, or given other special privileges like custom landing pages or access to new sales funnels.
By rewarding your top affiliates, they are made to feel much more special and are more likely to stay with you and continue promoting your products.
If you’re using a system like Nanacast, these special changes such as increased individual commission rates and personalised landing pages can be setup quickly from the control center .
Go To Events
This is a biggie! Going to events can be huge in terms of building relationships in your niche. Meeting face to face with other people doing business online has a powerful effect as far as building a bond which is much stronger than what you might build just chatting regularly with someone over Skype.
If you’re going to go to events, I would advise you to be genuine and don’t just go into a discussion with the intention of getting someone to joint venture with you or promote your product. Build the relationship first, buy someone a drink, get chatting, and discussion about your business will follow naturally.
My other advice would be that you are in a much better position if you have a product already created, and ready to go. This way, you’re much better prepared to discuss your product, and if you mention it in passing people may ask more about it, which gives you the springboard to “sell” the benefits of your product to them, in a cool kind of way.
Provide services or help others
Something that many people overlook (myself included in the past) is the power that genuinely offering help to people has on establishing and building relationships online. I’ve built many great friendships online that started out with me offering help or support to people on forums, or even customers of mine. Over time, these relationships can be very valuable, and if you have a product you want promoting, it’s likely those who you have helped in the past will be more than willing to consider promoting your product.
Offer A Reoccurring Element
Developing some kind of reoccuring element to your products or upsells can be a great way to attract and retain affiliates. A reoccurring product (or continuity product) is any kind of product that is billed on a reoccurring basis, such as a membership site or subscription. This could be anything from access to a web application or tool, to monthly coaching or monthly video content.
If an affiliate promotes a normal product, they get paid once. But if you can offer them reoccuring commissions for the time that the member stays active, it can be a much more attractive deal.
Having a continuity program or product in your business is also a great way to really grow your income – so you should start thinking about what kind of reoccurring products or memberships you can create in your business.
Setup An Affiliate Blog
Keeping regular communication with your affiliates is a great way to keep them motivated, and ensure you are giving your affiliates what they want. By setting up an affiliate blog, which is totally separate to your main blog, you have a place where you can easily share news about your products. You can tell affiliates what is working well, what isn’t working, and tell them about new products or updates which can help your affiliates prepare for new promotions.
You can also use your affiliate blog to share success stories which serve to further motivate your existing affiliate base.
Are You Ready To Start Your Affiliate Program?
I hope this post has shown you why you really should consider building an affiliate program for your business, and has given you all the information you need to get started with starting your own affiliate program.
If you have any other ideas on how to get affiliates promoting your products, I’d love to hear them, and also feel free to post your questions about running and affiliate program and I’ll try and answer them in the comments below.