Pages

22 February 2010

How to Succeed as an Affiliate on the Net

Once a company has a product or service that they want to sell they will often enlist 'affiliates' to do the job of finding customers for them.

You can recognize an affiliate with a different name, for example: agent, reseller, associate, communicator.

Once an affiliate has managed to get the customer to make an order his job ends. The whole process of handling the order, collecting payment for transit of goods, performed by the company (or distributor).

Who benefits?

This is a fantastic deal for both parties.

The dealer just waiting for orders to arrive, and has no involvement in the marketing phase. The affiliate simply gets a customer, for example, visits to a site and takes no further part.

Commission is paid to the affiliate on the value of orders made.

It is the power of the Internet with the possibility of cheap or free advertising for a large audience which makes reselling such a unique business opportunity.

And if you have your own website, where you have the luxury of putting your own ads for free, so you have an effortless income-producing system.

Two things which make reselling even more exciting

If the product can earn you residual income, for example a monthly commission, while the customer continues to renew it. If you can recruit your own affiliates and collect the Commission, either for each affiliate or for the products they sell.

What should you be aware of?

Here are some rules for checking out affiliate opportunities:

# 1 Company

Firstly, there would be no point in creating massive Commission on 'paper' only to discover that it is unreliable, do not pay on time, or eventually fold.

Try it first.

Conduct an investigation, as if you were a potential customer. Review the quality of their responses, and their literature or website.

How quickly can they respond? If their customer service is bad this does not give much hope for how they will handle their affiliates.

Are they an ethical company, what guarantees have the option of refund?

# 2 The product

Is the product a product which is in good demand?

What is the commission rate?

These two factors will determine your potential earnings.

As a guide commission should be between 25 to 50%.

# 3 Assistance with promotion

Does the company provide advertising material for their partners?

Especially you can get a personal homepage?

# 4 Costs

What is the cost of becoming a partner?

This can range from completely free to pay an initial one-off payment to pay a monthly subscription.

You need not be deterred by affiliate opportunities, where payment is involved. These can provide greater benefits, such as advanced promotion techniques and commissions, which could be rapidly offset payments.

For example $ 30 per month may seem a high figure, but if you look at it as a dollar a day to get the company's products displayed 24 hours a day for the whole world on your own personal website that could be perceived as the purchase of this century.

Can anyone become a partner?

Affiliate opportunities are ideal for both experienced online marketers and newbies to the internet. Here's why:

# 1 Experienced online marketers

If you have created a website, at least, you need to do is send an ad on your own site.

And there is no reason to stop at a product.

Assuming you do not overload your site with ads, you could have many - and you can monitor how they perform, so you can judge which of them to put more emphasis on.

# 2 Newcomers

One of the first and most important skills you need for an online business is how to place ads.

Here are some of the things you begin to learn when you submit your ads:

The different places where you can place an ad to newsgroups, forums, Web sites and the different rules and methods applied to each one as the frequency and size of posting ads.

How to send information to a mailing list or newsgroup for free, but using a signature file to promote your products.

How do you code your ads so you can identify where the answer comes from.

How to organize your e-mail files to handle responses.

How to simplify your own systems, so you have standard replies to common questions.

How to set up auto-reply if necessary to take away chord to respond manually.

How to handle the unexpected (for example, although you can clearly spell out in your ad that a reply should be made to an auto responder many people will still reply to you directly).

By taking on an affiliate operation you have an ideal opportunity to use these methods. This will provide the experience, whatever online venture you plan as well as an excellent source of supplementary income.

No comments: