KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays by Comm, Joel (free e books to read .TXT) 📕

you traffic. A software program tracks that code automatically assigning the right commissions to the right referers.

It’s a simple idea that’s helped individuals and companies make millions online, both as publishers and as affiliates.

There are two ways to get your product into the hands of affiliate sellers.

The first is to build your own affiliate program. As always, there are a number of different software programs available that make the process relatively painless. (Once a system is shown to work on the Internet, you can be sure that it won’t be long before some smart people bring out tools to make that system easy to use.) For example, iDevAffiliate (www.idevdirect.com) is just one program among many. It lets you hand out affiliate codes, track sales, and manage commissions.

These sorts of programs can be a little complex, but it’s worth putting in the time to play with them and understand how they work—and how they can work for you. Consider it part of your online business training. Even if you decide to focus primarily on third-party affiliate agencies, it’s still worth having your own affiliate system in place so that you can recruit sellers directly.

You might well find that it’s those connections that bring in the biggest affiliate sales.

I constantly receive e-mails, tweets, and messages from people asking if I’d be willing to promote their product to my web site users. With their generous affiliate commission, they tell me, we’re both guaranteed to make a fortune, so what do I have to lose?

The answer is trust, which is why I turn down just about all of those requests. I’m not going to recommend a product that I haven’t tried or that I don’t know. That doesn’t mean that I never offer affiliate products to my lists. As you’ll see in Chapter 5, I do that frequently and make good money from those offers. But they always come from people I know, people I trust, and usually people I’ve met at conferences. Because I know they deliver good information, I want to tell my readers about them. And because they know me, those publishers are prepared to tell their readers about my products—on an affiliate basis—in return.

In addition to creating your own affiliate management system, you should also be looking at using third-party agencies. You can think of these as giant wholesale warehouses in which producers pitch their wares to retailers. Those retailers can look at the details of the product, view how well they’re selling and the commissions they offer, and decide whether to promote them themselves.

There are a bunch of different sites offering this service, but the market leader is ClickBank (www.clickbank.com). It costs $49.95 to join as a seller, but that can be recouped with just one or two sales, so the price shouldn’t be an issue (Figure 4.5).

What will be an issue is the competition. Because ClickBank has such a massive collection of affiliate sellers and such a wide range of publishers, you’re likely to find that your product is battling for eyeballs with lots of rivals—even if many of them are just plain poor.

ClickBank affiliates and buyers look for products that are growing in popularity, so to stand out on the site, it’s important to generate sales from multiple affiliates. That will get your product rising up the ranks and attract attention. Use your own affiliate network, promote your product on your site and to your own mailing list, and you’ll find that success breeds success. The more sales you make on your own, the more affiliates you’ll pick up on ClickBank—and the more sales those affiliates will generate for you.

Figure 4.5ClickBank brings your information product to cash registers across the Internet.

There is one more thing that you can do to boost your affiliate sales: Encourage your sellers, especially your biggest sellers.

The 80/20 rule applies to affiliate networks as much as it does to every other part of your business: You’ll find that most of your sales are coming from just a small section of your affiliate network. (It’s likely that you’ll also find that those super affiliates are the people you’ve recruited personally after meeting them at a workshop, seeing them at a conference, or communicating with them for a while online. They will often be people you know.)

Send all of your affiliates regular e-mails telling them about new product launches and suggesting the benefits of promoting your product. And send small gifts to your biggest affiliates to show how much you appreciate their work.

Add a Shopping Cart to Your Site

So you have a product. You have copy for your sales page, and you know how to recruit an army of sellers motivated to bring in a load of customers. You’re almost ready to throw open the doors and hear your online cash registers KaChing out.

There’s just one small problem.... You don’t have any cash registers.

In order to sell your information product, you need a way for customers to choose the products they want and process a payment. As you might have guessed, that’s all been systematized, simplified, and made a breeze. Just as you can now have a complete affiliate management program by doing little more than paying a few bucks for a piece of software, so is it possible to pay a company to handle the payment process for you.

Again, a number of different companies offer this service, but one of the best is E-junkie (www.e-junkie.com), which comes with all of the features that you’ll find most useful, including buttons that you can just copy and paste, the ability to accept discount codes (allowing you to organize seasonal sales promotions), calculators for sales tax, VAT and shipping, and even an affiliate management program (Figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6E-junkie (www.e-junkie.com) gives your shoppers carts to load up on your goods.

For a fee that starts as low as $5 per month, you can upload your product to E-junkie’s servers. E-junkie will give you a button that you can paste onto your site and