Starting your own affiliate program

By David Callan

Utilizing affiliate programs is the most powerful way to market a product online. All the top marketing professionals agree with this and most of them have used affiliate programs to make hundreds of thousands of dollars online in a very short time.

Simply put, affiliate programs are one of the few things in life that can make you get rich quick. Affiliate programs are the ultimate online joint venture. You joint venture with other webmasters and only pay them when you make a profit so you never have to pay for advertising that doesn't work and you never have to pay anything up front.

If your product has a medium to high profit margin then you can be assured starting an affiliate program for it will make it much more successful and will in turn make you much more profit.

The beauty behind affiliate programs is that they allow you to build an army of sales reps, all these sales reps have their own websites, visitors and opt-in lists. These sales reps are your affiliates and they use their visitors and opt-in lists to advertise your product. You don't have to pay them a penny until they make a profit for you.

Imagine having 250+ high traffic sites all advertising your product via banners, text links, recommendations in their Ezine and on their website, through ebooks they write and freely distribute and all of the other available methods. If your product is good and you have decent sales copy your sales are going to go through the roof, you could be making $30,000+ a month within six or seven months with your own affiliate program.

It's easy to recruit new affiliates, especially if you run an affiliate program that operates on two-tiers. A two-tier program is a program whereby affiliates earn commission when someone they referred to the program makes a sale. This encourages webmasters to find other people to join your affiliate program so your affiliate base quickly multiplies itself and continues to grow all the time.

I know of an affiliate program which uses a two-tier system that has 50,000+ affiliates all promoting the programs products. You can imagine the profits that 50,000 affiliates can make you, can't you? To be honest it's very rare any program will ever get as big as to have 50,000 affiliates but 5,000 is much more achievable, after that the quality of your program will determine it's growth.

Here's a few numbers to get your temperatures rising. First imagine you've loads of affiliates, now say that after you give your affiliates their commission you make $20 a sale, the below figures are what you could earn. The more affiliates that join the more money you make, it's generally as simple as that.

Here's the main advantages of starting your own program in point by point format.

Automated advertising campaign

An affiliate program is an automated advertising campaign. Today's affiliate software allows you to advertise your products and services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week all automatically. Even new affiliate sign ups and stats generation is all done automatically. Remember with modern systems having 100,000 affiliates is just a easy as having 10.

You only pay for results

Unlike traditional banner or classified advertising where you've to pay up front and wait to see if you've made any money afterwards affiliate programs require you to pay only when someone makes a sale. This means you only pay when someone makes you profit. You won't ever have to buy advertising that doesn't work ever again because you can test your ad copy and banners on your affiliates sites for free.

Unlimited growth potential

Affiliate programs give your business unlimited growth potential especially if you start a two-tier program which encourages your affiliates to recruit other affiliates by rewarding them with commission every time someone below them makes a sale. If you've a good quality program then more and more people will want to join.

Extra benefits of affiliate programs

Having an affiliate program for your products and services brings a number of other benefits too. The first being the amount of traffic you get, it's going to be a lot. You can use this traffic for free because even if visitors don't buy they might subscribe to your Ezine or opt-in list and then you could follow up with offers of your product or recommend other products via an affiliate program that your a member of.

You could also use the traffic to attract advertisers and then sell banner space on your site at a premium rate. The third and final extra benefit you'll get from starting your own affiliate program is better search engine rankings. This is because nowadays link popularity is a big factor among many of the major search engines, since affiliates have to link to your site to earn commission you can easily have thousands of links pointing your way.

You simply can't lose with affiliate programs, you invest nothing up front except the cost of the software which in most cases is ridiculously low, usually you can make the cost of the software back within a very short time and you don't have to pay for advertising unless you make money first!