If you are a person who wants to create and market your own products and services, one of the marketing methods that works well is to create an affiliate program. Today, it’s easy to create an affiliate program with services such as ClickBank and E-junkie. However, just uploading your products and moving on is not enough to create a winning affiliate marketing program. You need more than a product.

Choose a Relatable Niche

The first step in creating a winning affiliate marketing program is to choose a niche to which you can relate, or in which you’re willing to do the research required to truly know the audience and what products or services they need. You can’t sell everything to everyone and be a successful affiliate marketer. Pick a niche and stick to it.

Offer Great Products

When creating products, always under promise and over deliver. Your marketing copy should talk up your products and services but once the end user gets it they should feel as if they are getting so much more than they thought they would get. The way to do that is to actually create great products that you’re super proud to represent. Continue reading →

Throughout the lifetime of your business you will be making many decisions about many different issues. As your business grows and you mature as a business owner, the objectives you develop today might appear vastly different than the objectives you had when you first started. When that happens it’s very important to consider a commission restructure.

1 – Study Your Audience

It’s important that you continually study your audience to enable you to continue to put out products that resonate with them, providing solutions for their pain points. If you don’t really know who your audience is, down to their sex, income, hopes, dreams, desires and fears, you can’t create good products for them. If your products or audience has changed significantly over time, it might be time to restructure your commissions.

2 – Know Your Customers’ Lifecycle

For every new customer you get, they have a particular trajectory depending upon where they came into your product funnel. Study the metrics so that you can understand the lifetime value of each customer based on where and when they became customers. Identify any changes over time that might suggest you need to re-evaluate how you get new customers.

3 – Understand Your Affiliates

Who are your affiliates? Can anyone join your program or do they also have to be customers to become affiliates? There is no rule that says they need to be customers, but customers can often market your products better because they have first-hand knowledge of how good your products are. Can you afford to give a higher commission to customers over other affiliates? Continue reading →