AFFILIATE PROGRAM AS IT SHOULD BE

AFFILIATE PROGRAM AS IT SHOULD BE

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copyright (c) Pavel Lenshin
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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:
1. Database driven registration of affiliates.
2. Tracking affiliate sales in order to count commission.
3. 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.