How to Find Affiliates and Get Them to Sell Your Products

One common form of internet business model is the affiliate marketing program.

Affiliate marketing is where one party has something to sell, and another party promotes it for them to their own contacts or via their own site. It is beneficial to both parties because the person with something to sell gets greater reach, and therefore wins more business, and the person doing the marketing for them gets to make money without having to develop, stock or ship products of their own. Here we look at one side of the affiliate marketing program model – how you can find affiliates and get them to make sales for you.

Affiliate marketing is where one party has something to sell, and another party promotes it for them to their own contacts or via their own site. It is beneficial to both parties because the person with something to sell gets greater reach, and therefore wins more business, and the person doing the marketing for them gets to make money without having to develop, stock or ship products of their own. Here we look at one side of the affiliate marketing program model – how you can find affiliates and get them to make sales for you.

The main reason why you would want to sell through affiliates is that it gives you a route in to other people’s customers. People who are already doing well at selling other things and have established relationships with their own contacts will, if your product fits in with their own business and they are happy with the commission structure you’re offering, be happy to push your product to audiences you would otherwise be unable to tap. It also gives you a chance to leverage other people’s skills. Many top affiliate marketers make their money by having a very good understanding of search engine optimization and bringing high volumes of traffic in to their websites. If your products are advertised on these high volume sites you are bound to convert some business (assuming the sites are relevant and your products are good). By paying commission to an affiliate rather than buying ad space to get your products marketed on sites like this, you are only paying on sales made, so it is a pretty safe way to promote yourself.

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People who are already doing well at selling other things and have established relationships with their own contacts will, if your product fits in with their own business and they are happy with the commission structure you’re offering, be happy to push your product to audiences you would otherwise be unable to tap. It also gives you a chance to leverage other people’s skills. Many top affiliate marketers make their money by having a very good understanding of search engine optimization and bringing high volumes of traffic in to their websites. If your products are advertised on these high volume sites you are bound to convert some business (assuming the sites are relevant and your products are good). By paying commission to an affiliate rather than buying ad space to get your products marketed on sites like this, you are only paying on sales made, so it is a pretty safe way to promote yourself.

But, it’s mostly about other peoples’ customers, because if we’re starting a business and we’re creating products, whether we’re going to sell dog leashes online or whether we’re going to sell “how to train your dog” information products online with us as the expert, the fastest way to build those businesses is by getting in front of other peoples’ customers. In this example, the best way to find affiliates is by looking for people who are already selling into the dog owner market. For people that want to sell their own products or have their own site, getting in front of other peoples’ customers is vitally important.

So let me give you an example. One of my friends had never sold a product online at all. He figured out that the fastest way for him to sell a bunch of products would be to get a whole bunch of other people who had email lists and had customers to recommend his program. He was a salesman type guy, and comfortable with approaching people and making deals with them. So, he went through a process of contacting people and selling them on why they should help him. In doing this, he developed a strong network of affiliates who were actively and keenly marketing his program to their existing markets. They wanted to make sales to make money for themselves, so they pushed his products hard and he in turn made a lot of sales. That strategy to find affiliates is powerful.

Another route you can go down with this, if you are not the type to start approaching people whose markets you’d like to tap into and suggesting affiliate marketing partnerships, is to have a great website with a lot of good, free content to bring in visitors on a repeat basis. If your products are good, you may find you have people asking you how or whether they can promote your products for you. This approach takes longer, but again, it is about reaching other people’s customers.

The easiest way to find affiliates

So there are a few ways to get other peoples’ customers, but the first, the best, the easiest, and the fastest way is to find affiliates. What that means is, if I have a product and I know that my friend has a website where he has built up an email list and he has the right people, the right niche market that I want to get in front of, then I want to convince him to be an affiliate for my product.

This is actually very easy to organize from an infrastructure perspective. If you use a service designed to help you sell using affiliates, you can manage the whole process end to end with no real technical set up. If you are selling through ClickBank it’s very easy, or through Infusionsoft or 1ShoppingCart, the services have been created to make it very easy to get set up so that people can become your partner in affiliate marketing. You just give them a link, they put this link on their site, in their email, or in any other promotional thing they want to do (tweets and blog comments are other examples). Then, when somebody clicks on that link and comes to your website and they buy your product, it’s automatically recorded as that person being the affiliate who drove the sale. This is all tracked, so you can easily monitor how effective your affiliates are at selling for you, and organize commission payments.

Higher commission = Easier to find affiliates

How much commission you offer your affiliates is up to you. Higher rates will be more attractive to potential partners in affiliate marketing, but will of course eat in to your profit margins. Generally, the highest commission rates are offered on information products. This is because you, as the owner of the product, can produce as many of them as you want at little or no additional cost after the initial development of the product, and also because you have no overheads in terms of maintaining stock or shipping – for a product like an ebook or other downloadable, you can just keep on selling as long as there is demand. Of course, because you only pay commission on sales made, the return on investment from this type of marketing is always good.

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If you have a product you want to launch and sell online, affiliate marketing is certainly a great way to start doing it. Whether you choose to have this as your sole route to market or combine it with other marketing activities of your own will depend on your own skills and business model, but it is definitely a pain free way to tap into markets and get your product noticed.

Now, go out there and find affiliates!