Karen Repoli — November 28, 2016 Follow @karenrepoliWhen you sell products online, a great way to get the word out about your offerings is to have an army of people beside you. These people will represent your brand, refer your brand, and encourage people to buy your brand. As a result, you can end up with loyal customers, who will eventually do that for free. But, if you want to hurry that process, the best way to accomplish this is to pay people a percentage of your profits to promote your business.
What Are Affiliates?
An affiliate is someone who is a sales person for you. The great thing about an affiliate is that you don’t have to pay them unless they make a sale. The way it works is you use a system that keeps track of sales for each individual affiliate, the affiliate posts links to your sales pages, and when a sale is made via their link they get the percentage promised for that individual sale.
For example, if you’re selling a 250-dollar product such as an informational product, the seller (affiliate) will make commissions, based on the percentage you’ve set up. Percentages range from 5 percent to even 50 percent depending on the goals of the campaign and the type of product you’re selling. If you’re selling something that demands that you invest personal time, you may want to lower the percentage. If you’re selling something that is a digital product that has basically one investment of your time, you can give a larger percentage.
So in short, an affiliate is a salesperson who earns a percentage of the price from every single sale that they make for you using their special link.
Why You Need Affiliates
The best way to make a profit on anything is to sell quantity and being that you’re only one person you can only promote to so many people about your offerings. But, imagine if you could double, triple, or quadruple yourself by getting other people spreading the word about your offerings? Wouldn’t you do it? The cost of having an affiliate program is minimal. It’s also less expensive than other types of marketing such as placing ads, social media, etc. and what’s most important if you plan it right, it really works.
Increase Your Reach
If you know there are other audience members out there who haven’t heard of your products and services, finding affiliates to help promote your products to their audience will definitely increase your reach and enable you to close more prospects.
Grow Your List
Encouraging affiliates to promote you not only increases sales but once a sale is made, they’re now part of your audience and are on your list. Now that they’re on your list, you can market directly to them the rest of the items in your funnel.
Build Relationships
Once your affiliate program gets momentum you’re going to notice some true movers and shakers. These people make the most sales and the most noise about your products. When you notice that, reach out to that affiliate and offer them a special deal such as doing a joint webinar or offering them a larger percentage of sales to encourage them to do even better. You can become quite close to your affiliate people and even get ideas for new products from them if you listen.
Grow Bigger Than You
You’re only one person, working from your home office, or your kitchen table. But with affiliates, you can grow a literal army of sales people to promote your products and services making your job one of management and creation rather than just sales. Eventually, you can grow a business that earns multiple six figures for yourself and others.
These reasons are great reasons to find affiliates to promote your products. The most important thing to learn from this is you can sell more products with other people doing the work for you than you can on your own. While giving out a percentage of profits might seem painful at first, it’s really one of the least expensive options to improve sales.
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