Affiliate Program As It Should Be  

Every off- or online business has a target of growing its
market share. Under all other equal conditions the percent of
the market, occupied by a company, means certain level of
recognition, brand, exposure and, therefore, sales and income.

For small business owner a shift from 0.01% internet market
share to 0.04% may result in tremendous four times income
growth, the problem is in the limits of resources this
particular owner has access to. Usually they are weak enough
to allow such expansion at their own cost.

Help may come from two massive marketing instruments: - viral
marketing; - business partnership based on outsourcing
necessary resources.

Today we are going to speak about latter instrument of gaining
exposure you deserve.

Business partnership is an agreement between two or more legal
entities to cooperate together in order to reach mutually
beneficial results. By extrapolating such statement into a
framework of gaining market exposure, we can narrow this
meaning down by focusing on uniting promotional efforts for
reaching mutually beneficial results.

In practice the owner of affiliate program with the aim of
gaining extensive market exposure attracts fellow marketers to
promote the owner`s(s`) product(s) for a reward usually in the
form of commission from retail price per sale. A commission
for popular info products may vary from 5% to 70%.

Promotional materials (like, endorsement letters, reviews and
articles) can greatly assist your partners in promoting your
product as highly effective pre-selling tools.

The dilemma of joining affiliate programs

The most common mistake beginners do is registering with all
possible and impossible affiliate programs they see in hope to
promote them all and collect all the money they were promised
to get on the page of respective affiliate program owners.

In dominating majority of cases they end up with wasted time
and money. The reason is simple, they don`t have necessary
resource - a database of consumers, subscribers, business
partners - people who may be interested in such type of offers.
Instead, those newcomers decide to start their online
businesses by promoting other people`s products, what is
extremely hard, because you will build client database and
credibility for the company products of which you promote, not
for yourself. The only thing you can do is to grow the
subscription database, unfortunately, the most valuable asset -
loyal clients - won`t be accessible in any case.

Some well-known internet millionaires, making fortunes cross-
promoting 3rd party products may truly support the idea of
"easy income with affiliate programs", but they tend to forget
that all their profits were possible due to huge subscriber
databases, thousand of affiliates and customers a newcomer
does not have!

That is why start wise by creating your own product, grow your
credibility, circle of loyal customers and then join and
promote as much 3rd party products as you consider necessary.

Setting up partner program

Every partner program you will create or setup should have, at
least, basic must-have features: Database driven registration
of affiliates. Tracking affiliate sales in order to count
commission. Admin control panel to support affiliates and
track their sales.

There are 3 basic methods of having fully functional partner
programs application, not going far into science, they are "do
it yourself", "setup 3rd party application", "use 3rd party
service".

The first method is for those, who are knowledgeable
programmers and fortunate enough to invest a lot of time in
creating such a solution for personal needs or those, who are
lucky to have a lot of money and hire those knowledgeable
programmers. Responsibility for taking under control all
support and function-related issues would lie on your
shoulders.

Setting up 3rd party affiliate program solution requires much
less time or money, if any. The result will be the same as
above - fully functional partner program and inevitable
support problems. The only difference is that you won`t be
able to develop that partner application the way you need and
like.

The main advantage of 3rd party service is the ability to stay
unaware of how your partners sign up, track sales, receive
checks and so forth, because in this case servicing your
partners or affiliates will be the headache of independent
company, not yours. For such "reluctance" 3rd party affiliate
program provider would charge you on monthly or per sale
basis, slightly decreasing your net profit at each sale.

Having your own affiliate program in place enables you to
expand your market boundaries exponentially.

Written by Gian Luigi Ruggeri © 2001 - All rights reserved
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