By: Alice Seba

People have all kinds of questions about starting their own affiliate program and it’s always a good idea to be prepared. Starting and managing your own affiliate program isn’t something that can be done on the fly. It takes carefully preparation and planning, but the results are well worth it. Here are 3 commonly asked questions:

Question 1: How much commission should I offer in my affiliate program?

How much you offer will depend on the amount you can afford, taking into consideration the lifetime value of a customer, what your competition is doing and how attractive you can make your offer.

As a general statement, information products usually have a higher commission rate - often between 25-50% with the higher end being more common. Consumer products with smaller profit margins can be as low as 5%, but don’t often go above 20%.

But what you charge should be based on your own unique business. Here are some more things to help you come to a decision:

Sometimes it’s okay to pay a bit more for a first-time customer who will buy from you over and over again.

Always see what your competition is offering. You don’t have to get into a commission war, just be sure to make your program very attractive through good conversion rates, unique and useful promotional tools and other attractive features.

Question 2: What kind of affiliate tools should I provide to my affiliates?

The simplest answer is: Give them what they want.

Talk to your affiliates and see what they need to serve their unique audience needs, and where possible, provide it to them.

For hard-hitting promotions, you can craft email copy, conduct live teleseminars with content and sales pitch, special reports, etc.

For the content-starved webmaster (and there are plenty out there), give them things like articles, free ebooks and other informational content.

The important thing is to listen to your affiliates and watch which tools convert best.

Question 3: Can I have an affiliate program with a service-based business?

Sure you can. If you have a profit margin or a lifetime customer value that allows you to pay commissions, certainly.

If you have services available that are at a set price, it’s easy to automate everything and run your program, just like a product-based one.

If you charge by the hour or have to give project estimates, it’s a little tougher to automate completely.

Here are a few options:

- Have a script that can track who referred your potential client to you. Ex. Affiliate recommends your service through a tracking link. Potential client clicks the link, checks out your website and fills out a form for more information. Your system tells you who referred the client and if they purchase your services, you can give the affiliate a commission.

- You could do it as a pay-per-lead opportunity where the affiliate is paid a smaller fee for every person that fills out the form for more information. This would be easy to automate in most affiliate systems that can handle pay-per-lead transactions.

- Don’t want to go with a full-blown affiliate program? You can institute a client referral program where you simply allow your clients to recommend your service, in return for credit for services. When a new client comes to you, you ask where they heard about you and you add a credit to your referring client’s account

An affiliate force is an incredibly powerful thing and when you consider you don’t have to pay affiliates anything until they produce results for you, it’s one of the best deals going in Internet marketing today. Plan your program well and you’ll soon have your own active force of affiliates bringing you new customers every day.

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For more answers to your questions about starting and running your own profitable affiliate program that your affiliates will love, claim your copy of Alice Seba’s step-by-step Affiliate Manager Sweetie course at www.affiliatemanagersweetie.com

By: Russell Brunson

There are a lot of methods to driving targeted traffic to websites. One commonly overlooked method for getting free traffic to websites is writing affiliate marketing articles. Unfortunately, this is even more true for affiliate marketers who are trying to siphon traffic to their sites.

In this article, I am going to give you a brief outline for writing affiliate marketing articles. This will put you head and shoulders over your competition that will post affiliate marketing articles without caring about how they are written.

1. Don’t try to write the perfect affiliate marketing article. Frequently, when writing affiliate marketing articles, people tend to “overthink” the article writing process and think they are writing Shakespeare or are rivaling Stephen King. Thankfully, you don’t have to have a Masters degree in English to write excellent affiliate marketing articles. All you need to do is write in an interesting way that conveys the information.

2. Make sure your keywords are placed in the affiliate marketing article frequently. Ideally, when writing affiliate marketing articles, you’ll want to sprinkle your target keyword into the article. The ideal place for inserting your target keyword is the headline, the first paragraph of your article, and the last paragraph. Be careful not to “keyword stuff” your articles— the search engines can pick up on that really quickly and penalize you in short order.

3. Make sure you have a call to action in your affiliate marketing article. AT the end of the article, you want to have a call to action that refers them to a website for more information. Ideally, you want this to be the “money site” or the affiliate site where the person can buy the product.

4. Make your affiliate marketing article informative. You must make sure that your affiliate marketing article makes the reader feel good that they read it. They must learn something or feel like your affiliate marketing article was worthwhile if you want them to check on your “call to action button:” to your affiliate page. If you just have an article the wastes the reader’s time, they are not going to request further information from you.

5. Make sure you are not too “salesy” in your article. When writing affiliate marketing articles, you don’t want to write a sales-letter. Articles are supposed to be a “soft sell” that nudges them toward a buying decision. Be sure to remove “salesy” language such as “ground-breaking,”breakthrough,” and “cutting edge.” Also remove the pronoun “You” so it looks like it is informing a wide audience—and not a sales letter that speaks directly to a single person.

Writing affiliate marketing articles also gives you a perfect change to get free traffic to you’re website. Why is that? Since you are usually getting a percentage of total sales (around 50% for most information products) it limits how much you can spend on common advertising methods such as pay-per-click and banner advertising. Writing affiliate marketing articles that subtly promote your affiliate product or service can reap huge dividends for your affiliate marketing efforts.

To discover affiliate email marketing strategies from the internet’s most experienced email marketers, get this free video.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

About the Author: Russell Brunson has been a successful internet marketer over the last 4 years, he is actively helping other people to achieve their goals online. For more information go to Internet Marketing also located http://www.dotcomsecrets.com/

By: Johanna Piittala

Myths concerning affiliate marketing are appealing and attractive. People who do not know the entire system the wrong way round are prone to believing that it is something capable of giving them great fortune overnight. Stories concerning affiliates who earn tremendous amounts of money swim in their heads, and while these stories are as true as they can be, there are those who believe that they are going to have the same fortune once they indulge in this particular business.

It is true enough that affiliate marketing is financially rewarding. People who have gone through everything to be able to succeed in this business are reaping the seeds that they untiringly sowed. Many of them enjoy the kind of existence that was not possible for them to have had under ordinary circumstances. Having gone through the A-Z of affiliate marketing, however, these people are the ones who know that while such business is lucrative, there is absolutely no easy money in it.

Ignorance of this fact is one of the main reasons why there are people who fail miserably in the internet business. There are those who believe in myths concerning the easy money involved in systems such as affiliate marketing. They do not know that there are those who have wasted time, effort and too many resources in trying to pursue the life of ease that they believe this business will give them. And so they go into affiliate marketing armed with nothing but myths and fantastical notions of wealth swimming in their consciousness, never realizing that they bound to make mistakes that would prove to be their downfall.

What may be the reason why in businesses such as affiliate marketing, many are called but few are chosen? Perhaps the answer lies on the fact that many affiliates make mistakes that result from their ignorance of facts concerning how the entire business runs. Affiliate marketing is not as simple as an affiliate promoting a merchant’s wares through his website and getting paid for it. It is also about knowing the market and the customers at hand.

Discovering what the most common mistakes affiliates make can perhaps dispel the gloom about myths surrounding affiliate marketing by correcting some wrong notions about it. It might also be able to make those concerned understand that like any other business, there are dos and donts involved in this one if they want to make each of their steps count. The first common mistake affiliates make is their lack of knowledge concerning principles involved in their business. This refers to the affiliate’s knowledge of search engines in particular.

Affiliate marketing involves advertising, and advertising through the internet could not have been better without the existence of search engines. What every affiliate has to do is to make these search engines his best friend through studying search engine optimization closely. This way, he is able to know what to do in connection with building a better website to ultimately use for his business.

The second is that affiliates make the mistake of stuffing their sites with banners that do not provide enough information about the product at hand. The best way to battle this mistake is to provide good content hand-in-hand with such banners. It is important for customers to know and understand the features of a product, and good content will be able to help them realize this goal.

The third is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting only one product. Consequently, customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales as compared to having more options for customers ponder about. It is always better to give them a few better alternatives than to give them only one.

The fourth is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting too many products. As a result, customers are confused and end up beyond making a choice. It is perhaps good to give them only the best choices. This is because it is ultimately up to them to judge which one is the best for them to patronize.

All in all, affiliates that are doomed to fail in this business are those who do not exert enough effort to understand everything involved in the industry that they are in. Knowing their path step by careful step will prove to be beneficial to them, as there is no other way to succeed than to go through any path slowly but surely.

Article Source: http://www.article-buzz.com

Information about the Author:

By Johanna Piittala
Johanna got scammed several times and now wants to help others not to make the same mistakes by sharing proven tactics. Johanna recommends projectnetincome.com/ and financialfreedom4all.typepad.com/

 By: Theo Swan

When choosing an affiliate program, the commission offered is - obviously - very important. So is the commission type. Should you choose a program that pays you for every visitor you send their way, so called PPC? Or should you go with the option of sharing the revenue for that particular visitor? Fixed commission or a percentage? The options are many, there is no general answer to what is best. It’s up to you to decide where to send your visitors, to experiment, evaluate and finally choose one or a few affiliate programs best suited for your needs.

PPC - Paid per click

Many affiliate programs offer you a - fixed or varied -commission for every visitor you send their way. Often these programs are similar to Google’s Adsense program, namely contextual advertising

The advantages of this are many, but so are the limitations. The main advantage is just the contextual bit, the task of placing relevant ads on every page is gone, and all you need to do is choose what program to join. Another great advantage is – because of the flexible nature of these programs, you will only need to join one program, making it easier to reach the payout threshold. The downside of it all is the revenue. If you can target your visitors, and subsequently what they are looking for, you can make a much larger profit with other types of affiliate programs. But, it WILL require far more work.

PPM – Paid per mille

This is roughly the same as PPC, the difference being you get paid for every visitor viewing the ad, they do not have to click it. Many companies, offering contextual advertising, have this option included in their program. The good part about it is the possibility to get paid while visitors stay on your site, instead of referring them to someone else. This option is most suitable for high traffic web sites - with small quantities of visitors, this rarely adds up to a good profit. It can, however, be a good way of targeting often viewed pages on your site.

PPS – Paid per sale

This type of commission is based on the activities of the visitors you refer to the affiliate website. If you send active visitors, who shop a lot, this can be a goldmine compared to PPC and PPM. The type of commission varies as well. It can be a percentage of the sale, a fixed amount per sale/signup or a combination of both. What to choose is very dependant on your audience, and what category of program you are looking for.

In some cases, often with a recurring commission, the option of sharing the revenue, thus getting a percentage of the total order, rake or what have you, will be far better than choosing a fixed amount per sale. The dynamics of percentage vs. revenue sharing will be looked at more deeply later on.

PPL – Paid per lead

This is roughly the same as PPS, but you get paid for leads instead of sales. This is a fairly uncommon commission method, but it often applies to specific categories of affiliate programs; Insurance companies, financial institutes and other companies with high priced products in competitive markets. If you have a site targeting visitors looking for these kinds of products, this can be a highly interesting revenue model for you.

There are other, less common, alternatives. Many of them are individual, and are mainly for very specific niches, or for experienced affiliates.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

Read more about affiliate programs at Theo’s affiliate program blog or find an affiliate program at Affiliate Ranker

By: Leonard Cecchetto

At last a sinsere and honest guy tells you how to make a killer living online with affiliate marketing.

He has left no stone unturned in his in-depth book, teaching you everything you have to know to succeed.

1. So you want to get into affiliate marketing. This is very competative so you’ll have to know some insider tricks first.

2. You’ll need to know where to find the best prodicts. Digital one’s are the best as they can be downloade immeditately by your customer. They just love the ability to receive their product within seconds.

3. Next you should have a lead capture page, building your list is imperative if you want to succeed in this business. Having a good squeeze page allows you to capture a prospects name and email address. Which you can mail over and over again, but don’t over do it.

4. Then you’ll need a good autorespoder, this email software is essential for anyone doint business on the net. You can find them on the net, just do a Google search, the most popular ones are, Aweber and Getresponse.

5. Offer a FREE product to get them to signup for your news letter, this way they feel like their getting something of value. You should offer something good, people don’t want junk. Help them, people love help, it will gain you credibilty. This is very important, for people to trust you.

6. Follow up with them, keep sending them good content from your autoresponder, stagger the time you email goes out, like every 2 days, then 3 and maybe 4 days. Let them know of somethin you’ve found that could help them.

7. Promote your affiliate site, you can use Google Adwords, but you’ll need to know how to do this if you’re just starting off. You can join forums and get yourself known, remember don’t spam them or you’ll get yourself thrown off. Then you can write articls like this one, this is an awesome way to get backlinks to your site.

8. Look for some joint venture partners, a lot of top marketers use this tactic. Look for your niche keyword on say, Google, then go to the top sites on your search. Contact them if they have conact details, and ask them if they’d like to help you promote your product. Offer them something really good, like a percentge of the profits.

9. Don’t forget, look for your products on sites like, Clickbank, Commission Junction, which are some of the favourties. Check out the percentages they offer. Above 50% is good, a lot now offer 75%. Choose the ones on the front page as they are the most popular.

10. Now, once this campaign is going ‘gung ho’ repeat the whole process. At this stage you should know that there are programs that help you do all of this. By joining a solid site that has a proven track record, you’re going to fast track your ability to get up and running. So where do you find one of these sites, well, check out my resource box and you’ll find out.

So to succeed at affiliate marketing, you have now seen what is needed. The steps are quite involved but help is out there if you know where to look. Check out my resource box to find out more.About the Author

Len Cecchetto is an affiliate marketing contributor and self proclaimed marketer. His website http://www.lencecchetto.com/acs/ offers simple yet informative and powerful tips on how to succeed at affiliate marketing. Lens FREE e book’s offers the reader in depth necessary information for the person who wants the guts on how to do it and succeed in the shortest amount of time.

http://www.lencecchetto.com/acs/