Start An Affiliate Program
Want a way to make sales
without paying for any ads and with zero risk of losing money in doing so? The
obvious answer is a big YES, but very few business owners take advantage of
running their own affiliate programs, which can do exactly that!
Affiliate programs are
where you offer others a cut of any sale that they send your way. When this is
done online, there’s traditionally special “affiliate links” that they get from
you. When they send people through those links that later buy from your site,
they’d get credited for and paid a percentage of the sale. You can do a similar
concept offline just by letting others refer your prospects directly (and
manually crediting them), or even by handing out special “unique” coupon codes
to others to hand out to their prospects so you know where they came from. This
could be a special coupon that you hand out, with a code or ID on it, so you
know where it came from. Regardless, in either case you only pay them after a
sale is made, which makes it virtually risk free for you.
If you go the online route,
there’s various places you can sign-up to, in order to have your offers on
their networks, like Clickbank.com, Amazon.com (which is great to sell on just
by itself), CJ.com, etc., as they can instantly let affiliates sign-up for and
start promoting your offers. Alternatively, there’s also private affiliate
programs/scripts out there that you can get free or for fairly cheap to run
your own affiliate program without the need for another network.
Regardless of which
route you go, don’t expect to magically get lots of affiliates signing up and
promoting your offer without you raising a finger. It can take some work to
reach out and recruit these affiliates to get them promoting you. It’s best to
reach out to those who you can also help in return first, as well as to make
sure that you truly have a great converting offer with good payouts to make
your offer attractive to these affiliates.
Takeaway: Try creating an
affiliate program and recruiting affiliates to help promote your offers at
little to no risk to you. Make sure that you have attractive offers and
payouts, and that you proactively reach out to the best affiliate prospects out
there.
