Ten Reasons to Start an Affiliate Program
Starting an affiliate program is the best way to increase your income and build a bigger business fast. You have a whole army of fans promoting your product, pushing your website up on search engine results, and talking about your product. There are so many reasons to have an affiliate program that you should just almost stop reading now and get to work on starting one. But, if you’re not convinced yet, keep reading.
1. Low Startup Costs – There is hardly any business that you can start that has a lower startup cost. Depending upon what type of software you want to use and the functionality you want, you can start your affiliate program for just five bucks through E-junkie.com, or for about 50 bucks via ClickBank.com, or a little more by using software like aMember.com.
2. Low Cost Marketing – Face it; marketing isn’t cheap. But, when you have an affiliate program you get other people to foot the bill for a lot of it. You will need to create marketing materials for your affiliates, but they will often pay for ads and PPC campaigns if your payout is high enough for them to do so.
3. Winning Business Model – When you consider the business model, it really is just hiring sales people who work on commission only. This means your labor force is very cheap and essentially free unless they make a sale. Sales people have always been around and will always be around. Just because you’re good at making your product doesn’t make you a good sales person, but hopefully you can attract good sales people via your affiliate program.
4. Easily Scale Your Business – When you have a practically free sales force, that means you can scale your business easily. Once you have enough affiliates you can close or open the program as you wish. You can start focusing on building products instead of selling, and still keep growing your business.
5. Increases Your Streams of Income – If you already sell products of your own as well as other people’s, then you know what it means to have multiple streams of income. Having many ways to bring money into your household keeps you from having financial problems, because you’re not reliant on just one source of income.
6. A Key to Higher Profit Margins – Getting other people to do work for you is a huge key to making more profits in your business. Once you get your affiliate program going, and your affiliates are promoting and selling your products, your main job will be to create new products and marketing materials and then let them go for it.
7. Word-of-Mouth Marketing at Its Best – In many cases affiliates are also users of the product or service. In fact, you can make that a criterion for promoting it if you want. Then you can take advantage of the idea of word-of-mouth marketing with a boost. Affiliate marketing is like word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.
8. Improves Traffic to Your Website – When you have multiple people sending traffic to your sales page, this is automatically going to create links outside of your website. Many of these will be considered authoritative in nature, which Google Search likes.
9. It’s Team Building That Gets Results – When you have an army of affiliates working for you, you can get them together and work on team building, even offer them training to help them sell your products better.
10. Helps Expand Your Entire Business – When you start and run a successful affiliate program, it will shift the emphasis of your business drastically. You’ll be able to hire customer support, outsource more (maybe even product creation) and focus on running your business instead of working in your business.
An affiliate program is not hard to start, and it’s something that you should definitely consider doing if you sell products and even services (especially if you outsource). Give your affiliates a lot of incentives, awesome products to promote, great promotional materials and you will be successful.
