SoloSavvy Blog for Solo Entrepreneurs » Affiliate Marketing

Create an Affiliate Program That Is Easy For Your Affiliates

Kim DeYoung — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:00:06 +0000

Entrepreneurs – if you want your affiliates to do a good job for you, you want to make it as easy for them as possible. I am an affiliate for many people whose products and services I love and I really appreciate those who make it easy. Many send me pre-written tweets, email blasts, and other content that is properly embedded with my affiliate code so all I have to do is tweak it to be in my voice, copy, paste and drop it in.

In contrast, there are people for whom I’ve become an affiliate (because I love what they’re doing) but they don’t make it that easy for me. I have to go digging through their back end, hunting for their banners, and seeing what I can dig up about their copy to do it. Realistically, few people will invest that time. Regardless if they love what you do, they’re busy and if it’s not easy, or even worse if it’s confusing, chances are they won’t do it.

So this means that you, as the entrepreneur, have to spend the time creating the content for your affiliates. The beauty of having an ongoing service or product is once you’ve set this up you can create autoresponders (automated emails) to go out on a predetermined schedule.

When you sit down to write to the person who has signed up to be your affiliate think about how you, the entrepreneur, can serve them. Ask yourself, “How can I give this person every tool I can so they can do the best job for me and so I can pay them the most amount of money?” This will help your copy to flow.

I’m so appreciative to all of my affiliates. They do a great job for me and I love having them in my circle of giving and receiving. Please click here to learn more about the Metromom Affiliate Program.

4 Simple Steps to Starting Your Affiliate Program

Alicia M Forest — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:19:04 +0000

I was one of those online businessowners who was hesitant to add an affiliate program to my business building efforts. But once my clients and customers starting asking me if I had one that they could join, I knew it was time to bite the bullet and conquer this particular piece of technology.

Now, of course, I wonder why the heck I waited so long (talk about leaving money on the table!). It couldn’t be simplier to get started with your own affiliate program. You can get very elaborate, but the basic set-up is easy, and once you do one campaign, the next one is a piece of cake.

(And after just generating about $1000 in affiliate commissions myself by sending just one pre-written email to my list, I’m a huge fan of promoting other people’s valuable products and programs too.)

If you’re not yet familiar with what an affiliate program is, it’s basically an easy way for your clients and customers to tell other people about your products and programs, by way of a special link, that rewards them with a commission on each sale they make for you. Basically, they get paid for referring clients and customers to you.

The great thing about affiliate programs is that they’re very easy to enroll your clients and customers into, because it’s a win-win proposition. They make a certain percentage in commission for each sale, and you make a sale you might not have otherwise.

And if you write the marketing copy for them, whether it’s for an email promotion or a simple graphic that your affiliates can post to their own websites, you’ll make it amost effortless for them to promote your offerings.

For you, besides the benefit of having a sales force on your team that you only pay when they make the actual sale for you, you don’t have to pay for advertising that may or may not pay off. It’s like Google Adwords. With Adwords, you only pay Google when someone clicks on your ad. With an affiliate program, you only pay when your affiliate makes a sale.

Here are 4 simple steps for harnessing the the power of your raving fans (via an affiliate program):

1. Choose Your Tool

Most shopping cart systems (like 1ShoppingCart) offer an affiliate program as part of their service. Or you could choose a stand-alone affiliate system. I like and use 1ShoppingCart’s affiliate tools because they intergrate with the rest of the technology I use in the cart as well as with some of my other systems, which makes tracking and managing my campaigns easier. And 1SC’s ‘look and feel’ is very familiar to online buyers, which helps attract potential affiliates.

2. Choose Your Tier

Then you’ll need to decide whether to offer a 1-tier program or a 2-tier program. Simply put, a 1-tier program is set up so that you pay your affiliates for any sales they make on your behalf. A 2-tier program is set up so that you pay a small percentage of any sales generated by affiliates they referred to your program. To start out, I suggest keeping it simple and choose a 1-tier program, as you can always add a second tier later.

3. Choose Your Campaign Method

For each product or program you want to offer an affiliate fee on, decide how you will promote it, whether it be via unique affiliate links, banner ads, or other product graphics with the affiliate links embedded.

Regardless of how you’ll format your links, you’ll want to provide promotional copy for your affiliates to use. It’s much easier for your affiliates to promote your offerings when all they have to do is cut and paste an email you’ve already written for them (and you’re really the best person to do that anyway, since you know your offering the best).

If you make the process of promoting as easy as possible for your affiliates, more of them will take action and promote your offerings, and you’ll both make more money.

4. Choose Your Commission

It’s important to pay your affiliates a great commission for each sale they make for you. Frankly, the more you pay, the more you’ll earn, because your affiliates will be much more motivated to promote for you. Not only do you make a sale that you wouldn’t have otherwise, you also now have a new client or customer, who is likely to become a repeat buyer (because as much as 40% of people who have bought from you once will buy from you again).

There you have it – 4 simple steps to creating your own affiliate program. Now the next time someone wants to refer someone to you for your product or service, you can thank them by way of paying them an affiliate fee.

Need help creating and managing your affiliate program? Join your colleagues is a fun and informative learning and DOING environment here.

1ShoppingCart price increase — save $389

Terri Zwierzynski — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:14:10 +0000

Tech Coach Sandra De Freitas posted a VERY timely tip on how to save some big bucks ahead of the 1ShoppingCart price increase coming December 1. (Rates are increasing 20% on the Pro Package.)

It’s unfortunate that there aren’t many good alternatives to 1SC out there to give them competition. Maybe this price increase will be incentive to get some new alternative shopping cart service providers going!

If you are a 1SC customer, visit Sandra’s Tech Coach blog for specifics on how to save up to $389 on your shopping cart services, including detailed instructions and screen shots. While you are there, sign up for her ezine, A Boost of Tech Esteem, and get more great technology tips like this one!

An Affiliate’s Quandary

Terri Zwierzynski — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 20:53:57 +0000

My relationship with members of Solo-E relies on trust. As does any solo business with it’s customers. And so I was dismayed last week to find that I had inadvertently done something that could betray that trust.

You see, at Solo-E I only recommend services and products and people I trust. I, or someone on Team Solo-E or occasionally a trusted colleague, reviews every article, ebook, and program. And we attend at least one teleclass from all of our teleclass leaders.

One of our criteria for approving teleclass leaders is that if they offer a “free” teleclass, that they deliver true valuable information during the class. It’s ok to promote their paid offerings briefly (after all, that’s why they offer free teleclasses), but it shouldn’t take up more than, say, 10 minutes max at the end of the class. Unless they’ve made clear that the purpose of the class is mostly promotion, offering some value but equally focused on explaining what will be covered in the paid class. So that when members sign up, they know what to expect. These type of “promotional” free classes are rarer, imho, because they aren’t as effective as the “lots of value” free classes.

And so I was disturbed to find that a free teleclass that I promoted last week (offered by a talented professional whom I’m an affiliate of) ended up being a “promotional” class. And I had promoted it as a “lots of value” class.

Ugh. Pit of the stomach, “will they ever trust me again”, ugh. Worst part: I’d started assuming that everyone who had started on the “lots of value” page, would stay there.

Now I know to be more careful. I’ll be reading the class descriptions more carefully, and asking questions if I’m not sure. Because I want Solo-E to be a trusted resource for solo entrepreneurs. And I know I need to earn it.

My humble apologies.

Classy affiliate links for FREE

Terri Zwierzynski — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 18:14:18 +0000

We noticed some technical problems with one of our cloaked affiliate links the other day. Below, we’ll share a couple of solutions for those with similar problems.

Now, you might ask, why do we “cloak” our affiliate links at all? No, we aren’t trying to fool anyone; we try to provide “non-affiliate” links for anyone who’s not comfortable with us getting compensation for our recommendations. (I used to have misgivings about affiliate links too — but that’s another story.)

We just think that a link that looks like this:

solo-e.com/irecommend.html (not a real link)

is nicer than

1shippingcart.com/af=159847?&p=1725&u=www.recommendedsite.com/greatproduct.htm (also not a real link)

I first discovered the concept of “cloaked links” on one of Andrea Lee’s sites. Of course I knew it was an affiliate link, and I figure most everyone else knew too. But the link just seemed classier — not messy, not likely to get wrapped/cut off in a text emaiil, etc. And in my way of thinking, solo-e.com/irecommend.html implies a sort of partnership — both names in the title, that sort of thing. Like an affiliate relationship.

So, I went off in search of software to cloak links. I discovered what is probably the most widely-known version, and purchased it. Got my VA to transform all of our affiliate links. But after a few months, I started running into a couple of problems:

When you click on the cloaked link, the content of the target site showed up, but the url in the browser address bar still shows solo-e.com/irecommend.html — even AFTER clicking another link on the site. Kinda annoying.
It wasn’t set up to handle secure (https) pages properly. So if you moved through to payment, the page wouldn’t show that nice little lock that tells you your data is secure.
Some target pages simply didn’t work properly — overlapping text, videos that didn’t sequence properly, etc.

Needless to say, I’ve stopped using that software and have removed it from our resource area.

Thank goodness for the Multiple Streams of Coaching Income list! Several people shared various solutions, all free, that I will share with you here:

Use www.tinyurl.com, or other similar sites that shorten long links. (Note: sometimes, spam filters don’t like these.)
Create a folder on your site with the name that you want to use; for example a folder called irecommend. In that folder put an index.htm file like this: Download index.htm, customized with your target link, of course; note that you could also add a tracking code as in this example. Then simply send folks to yoursite.com/irecommend. (Thanks to James Smith for this solution; James also suggests using this method to shorten other long links on your site for your user’s convenience.)
A variation on the index.htm solution is to instead put an index.php file in the folder like this: Download example.php (from Joe Taylor via Casey Truffo)
Simply create an html file wherever you want like this: Download example.html. This is really easy, no subdirectories, just one file per redirect. (Thanks to Tina Forsyth for this solution.)
There is a free script available from www.webmasterinabox.net. Look in the upper left and sign up for the newsletter and you get the script…you can always unsubscribe later. This script has one of the same drawbacks — the url in the browser address bar keeps pointing to your site, even when other clicks are made. However, that may be acceptable for your circumstances! (Thanks to Linda Dessau for this solution.)

I hope one of these solutions works for you before you spend $59 like I did!