Coach Virtual Assistant Blog - View from The Edge

It has all been quite frustrating around here recently.  My internet and telephone lines have been dropping off repeatedly and it has become increasingly difficult to get any work done.  The AT&T repair man came this morning, he returned again at lunch with a colleague and by the end of the day a third colleague had joined them.  They cannot see what the problem might be so they are sending in the dig team in a couple of days to REALLY tear up our yard trying to find what they think is an improperly grounded cable.  Wish us luck!!

For people looking for an online community with a lot to offer, Craigslist is a natural choice. With billions of page views every month it’s not a surprise that Craigslist has the ability to offer many financial opportunities for the alert internet marketer willing to learn how to cash in on Craigslist’s popularity. Internet marketers in the know use affiliate marketing to increase their online profitability. Craigslist is beneficial to ecommerce business owners looking for affiliate marketers to promote their offers. It is also beneficial for people who do affiliate marketing searching for new businesses to promote for. This article is an overview of locating affiliates to promote for you or to locate affiliate offers to promote.

Affiliate Marketing Basics

Basically, affiliate marketing is a marketing technique where business owners pay someone (an affiliate) on a performance basis. In conventional marketing business owners pay upfront for advertising. No matter what outcome is produced by the ads. Affiliate marketing is different in that business owners pay only when specific actions occur. Businesses typically pay online affiliates for performing one of three certain actions. This could be paying per click (PPC), per sale(PPS), or per lead(PPL). All three of these are also referred to as ‘pay per action’ or PPA.

In PPC affiliate marketing campaigns an affiliate uses a coded link in their email or website. Each time someone clicks the coded link it goes to business’ website. The business can tell which affiliate generated the click using the code embedded in the link. The affiliate then receives the agreed upon payment. For PPC this usually varies from fractions of cents to several cents.

With PPS campaigns an affiliate doesn’t get compensated just for sending visitors to the sponsoring website. The visitor also has to purchase something for the affiliate to get credit. Again, payment varies. Typically ranging from several cents to several dollars per sale or sales. This can be a flat rate or percentage of sales the affiliate generates.

In PPL programs an affiliate gets paid if visitors click through the affiliates coded link and then follows through on giving the additional information the sponsoring business wants. This could be as simple as visitors sharing their email address for an online newsletter, or as complex as filling out a loan application. Again, payment varies, but is usually a flat rate.

Finding Potential Affiliates

A business owner that is interested in locating affiliates for promoting their offer can use Craigslist to help them find such affiliates. Though it seems logical to list affiliate opportunities under the jobs category at Craigslist, it’s important to know that this goes against the sites rules for job postings. This simply means that if you are looking to find affiliates you’ll have to do so by using different areas on Craigslist.

Any discussion forums that are related to your offer are a way to locate potential affiliates. If you use this method, though, be careful to avoid spamming the forums with sign up links for your program. Spamming techniques like this make you look unprofessional to any potential affiliates and if the Craigslist moderators see fit, they will ban you from the forums. Making a logical and relevant contribution to discussions and getting to know other forum participants is an ideal way to connect with potential affiliates. Then you can add a link for more information about your affiliate offer when you make posts.

Affiliate Opportunities

People who earn an income by being an affiliate promoter for business owners can locate new affiliate programs on Craigslist. Even though there are rules against it, sometimes such listings do end up in the jobs section. These ads will probably removed quickly, but it’s possible to take advantage of them if you act before they are taken down. Of course, some forum postings may contain links to affiliate programs as well. Another way is to post requests in the services or resumes section.

This guy watches over me at my desk all day.  Is it just me, or do you see him too?

I’ll start this article with a question: Are you be willing to share part of revenue from sales that you would not get otherwise? For most cases, the answer would be YES. There are many methods to market your business online: e.g. pay-per-click campaigns such as Google’s Adword, CPM (= cost per thousand impressions) of your banner on high-traffic sites, ads in newsletters etc. etc. What is common for these marketing methods? You never PAY FOR RESULTS that campaign actually generated. Idea of affiliate marketing is to PAY ONLY FOR RESULTS. Don’t spend money on ineffective advertising; build your own advertising channels instead. Build partnerships - and partners will work for you. That’s why people refer to affiliate marketing as “cost-effective”, “performance-oriented” or “risk-free”.

What kind of business can I market with affiliate program?

Well, hard to find one that you can not. It doesn’t matter if you sell hardware, mortgages, site membership or a service. You can even pay for traffic: pay per click or pay per CPM

Structure of affiliate program

There are 2 basic kinds of rewards: flat fee (=fixed amount) or percentage commission.

Your commissions to affiliates can be based on:

Pay per sale - most common, you pay commission (flat or percentage) for sales referred by your affiliates

Pay per lead - suitable for e.g. membership sites or sites offering paid content: similar to “per sale” model, but you pay for new member subscription.

Pay per CPM - you can pay even for thousand impressions of your banner

Pay per click - if you want to reward each click referred: if you are considering this kind of affiliate program, make a careful research about fraud protection features of solution you choose - otherwise it can cost you a lot of money..

A lot of programs are 2-tiered (2 levels of affiliates) - it means affiliates - parent affiliates can have subaffiliates - and parent affiliate get commission for their subaffiliate’s sales. Subaffiliates are those, who have been invited to your AP by parent affiliate. 2-tiered structure has its advantages: it motivates affiliates to recruit subaffiliates to your AP and maybe even train and communicate with them - which saves your time and generates your revenue.

How to start affiliate program?

There are 3 main possibilities:

Stand alone software

Hosted software

Affiliate network

Stand alone solution - requires software that is installed on your website (called also “affiliate tracking software/script”). Affiliate program is under your total control and responsibility.

Hosted solution - is similar to stand-alone solution, but the software is hosted on 3rd party server - usually offered as service (=monthly payments).

Affiliate network - software is again installed on 3rd party server, in addition to the affiliate tracking you gain immediate access to a network of potential affiliates.

Which solution should I choose?

As regards price:

Stand-alone: one time fee for the software

Hosted: monthly fee, sometimes even progressive charging according to the growth of your affiliate program

Networks: will charge you a transaction fee on each affiliate sale or the will ask you to make minimum monthly payment or combination of those two. Also some fee to join might be included.

Technical skills:

Stand-alone: requires basic skills to install the software (usually installation wizard is available) and to integrate with other systems on your website (such as shopping carts/payment gateways/website itself).

Hosted: almost no skills required

Networks: almost no skills required

Benefits of stand-alone solution.

Since Amazon started its affiliate program, affiliate marketing grew rapidly. Due to its cost effectiveness and undisputed advantages, this field became very competitive. And competition is always good for customers: prices go down.

There is a lot of software sold on the internet today - and not always the highest price means the highest quality! Do not fall for success stories and don’t spend hundreds of dollars for products that are just well marketed: you are probably not “the lucky guy”.

Affiliate marketing is competitive - if you are new to this field you will surely not find the best way to market your business at once. This is MAJOR benefit of stand alone solution: while hosted or network solution offer you few possibilities to change your program, with stand-alone solution you have total control over your program. You can find the best way to market your products. Try and choose the best for you. ALWAYS want software with a lot of features. You might use a few of them at the beginning, but after several months you will certainly use more and more - would you like to pay for them? Or even pay for switching to another solution with extensive features? NO!

We already mentioned the PRICE advantage of stand-alone solution: you pay one time fee - no need to discuss this any more - if you pay monthly, consequently you pay more than even for the most expensive stand-alone software on the net. It is worth to mention that solid software is sold for $150 or even less.

Another benefit is positive effect of affiliate links on your search engine ranking: because the software is installed on YOUR domain, they can help you to improve ranking of YOUR website - not domain of hosted solution.

Also stand alone solutions can be usually better branded for your business and customized for your specific needs.

Cons of stand-alone solution

Everything has its pros and cons. I’ll explain possible cons of stand-alone solution and what it takes to overcome them. If you feel that you’ll not be able to cope with what follows DO NOT choose stand-alone solution.

1. Technical skills - will help you during installation and integration of the software with your shopping cart / payment gateway / website. Usually, very little technical skill is required, which depends also on the level of support provided by vendor and how sophisticated the software is. Generally, if you’ll be able copy/paste some code snippets to certain places on your website or to a template page of your shopping cart, your skills are sufficient…

2. Affiliate recruitment - this is strong selling point of affiliate networks - your program gets immediate exposure to a network of affiliates, while for stand-alone software you’ll need to recruit affiliates yourself. The fact is that you must motivate affiliates of the network as well - if you don’t, they’ll stop promoting your products. Registering your affiliate program to numerous affiliate directories (for free) and setting up appropriate multi-tier structure helps you to recruit affiliates to your program. But it takes time and efforts…

3. Security - with hosted solution you do not need to back-up your database, upgrades are applied by team of people in charge of maintenance. If your solution doesn’t have feature to back-up your database / history this can be serious problem if some hacker attack occurs or something just “goes wrong”.
Martin Melisek is marketing executive at QualityUnit,
vendor of award winning affiliate software Post Affiliate Pro

“A secret to leading with Right Intention is to love your work. When you believe in your company, service, or product and know that it makes the world a better place, your intention stays crystal clear.”

Nancy Spears

(Source: Buddha: 9 to 5: The Eightfold Path to Enlightening Your Workplace and Improving Your Bottom Line)

Hi,

Just to let you know that I have not forgotten about our topic for the month. It’s been a busy couple of weeks and The Edge has welcomed some new client-partners. Getting new clients set up does take a bit of time as I learn new systems and practices but the week ahead looks to be much calmer and I have some interesting posts planned. Stop by again soon!

Ros