What are Affiliates & Affiliate Programs?

If you’re just starting your business and you are trying to ramp everything up at once – we feel for you. We’ve been there. We enjoy helping new entrepreneurs get started – usually we recommend our in-depth online training courses which give you the big picture – and not assume you know parts of the puzzle you don’t know yet.

Affiliates are basically like sales people online for your business. Affiliates sign up to sell your products/services for some commission. You can create an affiliate program on your own or use an Affiliate Program.

Affiliate Programs put publishers (content producers; product producers; services producers) together with other sellers that hope to sell their products to earn a commission. These are places like E-Junkie, Clickbank, and Commission Junction.

If your business has a product or service to sell you can sign up at Clickbank or one of those mentioned above and list whatever it is you have to sell.

Website owners review what products are available to sell and sign up as affiliates to promote those products on their own websites. Clickbank takes care of all the money handling and sends you a Paypal deposit or a check when balances are high enough. It’s quite a nice system and enables you to sell your products with greater reach than you have just using your own business website, which doesn’t have the traffic of all the affiliates that sign up to sell your products.

What you could do instead is knock-out the middle man. Create your own affiliate program. It’s not as difficult as it might seem at first glance. Here’s a quick and easy solution.

1. Put a message on your website about your “Affiliate Program”. Tell visitors they can earn commissions on your business products they sell at their site(s). Make it easy for them to sign up.

2. Copy the pages for your business products and payment pages and put them in a folder on your business server with the affiliate’s name, ie: “www.yoursite.com/aarons/index.htm” will be the index page that only visitors from Aaron’s site(s) are sent to. Aaron’s gets a commission from everything that sells through this section of the site. You can give your new affiliate access to the Google Analytics that covers the aaron’s subsite. Note: You’ll need to “noindex” your affiliate folders so Google doesn’t count it as duplicate content and penalize your site.

As an alternative you could allow affiliates for your business to create their own sales pages which send the buyers to your business site for the final payment transaction. Some allow affiliates to collect the entire amount and forward it on and to collect the commission first. Problems can arise there because there will inevitably be returns and damaged products that need to be compensated. Much better for the product producer to handle the money and not to allow exceptions. (In our opinion.)

Affiliates can increase your business sales by a very large factor. One of the toughest parts of the ecommerce puzzle is bringing enough traffic to your site to be able to sell enough of your business’ products and services in order to survive and thrive. Affiliates already have traffic of their own – and, if they’re in a niche that similar to yours you’ll find that some of their traffic will convert to sales for you. Often times for sites with traffic, they’re having trouble finding products to sell to their visitors.

It can be a very productive match – each side serving the other’s needs. Affiliates can be the biggest producer for a business in many cases. If at first you’re not having good success with your affiliate program you need to stick with it and keep working at it to make it an income source for your business. Most product producers using affiliates find that only about the top 5% of them are producing 80% of the sales. Keep playing the affiliate game until you find those 5%. They’re like striking oil!