If you have an effective product that meets the needs of your audience, you might want to consider setting up your own affiliate marketing program. It’s an awful lot easier than you might think, the first steps will be to know what is essential in order to manage a program successfully.
The Essentials
There are certain key elements to any program that must be considered before you decide how to set up your program:
- How easy it will be to gain recruits through the system
- The ability to form special tracking links
- Good sales reporting
- Easy ways to pay your affiliates their commissions
- Varied commission rates
- Storing content (creatives) for your affiliates to use to sell your products
- Ease of contacting affiliates
The bottom line is that you need to be able to track sales in order to pay out commissions each month to those who have earned it, or else few people will want to be your affiliate. You may even get a bad reputation for being dishonest, rather than just disorganized and trying to take on too many things at once in your business.
Work overload and not being able to afford an affiliate marketing manager can both be solved through choosing the right system for your business or niche.
Choosing the Right System
If you can’t do all of the essential chores listed above, then there is no point in trying to administer the program yourself. Therefore, you will need to use an affiliate platform that will allow you to make the most of their system and tools to set up your program from scratch.
Your choice will in part depend on what you wish to sell. For example, if you sell physical goods, try Gumroad or Shopify. Create a store where consumers can buy your goods. Then organize an affiliate program through the interface so you can recruit affiliates. Each time they lead someone to your store and that person buys through their link, they will earn commission. The sale should be reported and credited to the affiliate, and you will then pay the affiliate for the sale – usually at the end of each month.
Links:
Gumroad – https://gumroad.com/
Shopify – https://www.shopify.com/
If you have a WordPress-based blog, you can also find themes and plugins that allow you to create your own affiliate program. In this case, it would be a good idea to set up a separate affiliate program area at your site in order to administer everything. There can be a learning curve to get everything set up from scratch, and you will have to maintain it going forward as well.
If you just don’t have time for all the do-it-yourself options, choose a top affiliate marketplace.
Affiliate Marketplaces
In terms of digital products, the top choices include Clickbank, JVZoo and The Warrior Forum. If you are selling physical products, your choices are cj.com, Linkshare and ShareASale. They have great tools, but also rules and regulations to follow, so read the fine print carefully.
Links:
ClickBank – https://www.clickbank.com/
JVZoo – https://www.jvzoo.com/
The Warrior Forum – http://www.warriorforum.com
cj.com – http://www.cj.com/
ShareASale – https://www.shareasale.com/
Now that you know how to start setting up your own affiliate program, start organizing all your essentials so you can lure lots of eager affiliates to start selling your products.
