Want a way to make sales without paying for any ads and with zero risk of losing money in doing so? The obvious answer is a big YES, but very few business owners take advantage of running their own affiliate programs, which can do exactly that. In fact affiliate programs are a great way to bring in more sales with less effort and are definitely worth adding to your business.
What are affiliate programs?
Affiliate programs are where you offer others a cut of any sale that they send your way. When this is done online, you would normally create special “affiliate links” that they get from you. Each affiliate has their own link that tracks their referrals. When they send people through those links who go on to buy from you, they get credited for and paid a percentage of the sale.
You can do a similar concept offline just by letting others refer your prospects directly (and manually crediting them). Alternatively you can give out “unique” coupon codes to others to hand out to their prospects so you know where they came from. This could be a special coupon that you hand out, with a code or ID on it, so you know where it came from.
This is a great way of advertising because you only pay them after a sale is made. Your only upfront cost is printing the codes or cards with the codes on. Any risk free method of increasing your sales has to be a good thing.
If you go the online route, there’s various affiliate sites you can sign-up to, in order to have your offers on their networks. Common ones include Clickbank, Amazon (which is great to sell on just by itself), CJ.com, etc., as they are easy for affiliates to sign-up and start promoting your offers. Alternatively, there’s also private affiliate programs which allow you to be more selective about who can promote your offers. There are also scripts that are either free or fairly inexpensive to run your own affiliate program without the need for another network.
Build it and they will come?
So you have introduced an affiliate program to bring in more sales but what happens next? Regardless of which route you go, don’t expect to magically get lots of affiliates signing up and promoting your offer. You may need to work to find and recruit affiliates to get them promoting your offer. It’s sensible to begin byreaching out to anyone who you can also help in return. Do you know anyone with a complementary offer that you could promote them also?
If you have chosen a popular affiliate network like Clickbank then affiliates will be scouring those platforms looking for products to promote. This can work like a snowball because when the stats show that your offer converts then more people will want to promote.
It is vital that you have a great converting offer with good payouts to make your offer attractive to as many affiliates as possible. If your offer is inexpensive you will want to introduce a high value back end funnel to improve the payouts that your affiliates can earn.
You should definitely consider creating an affiliate program and recruiting affiliates to help promote your offers at little to no risk to you. Make sure that you have attractive offers and payouts, and that you proactively reach out to the best affiliate prospects out there. When you get this right affiliate programs will increase sales with little effort.
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