To Affiliates

Alicia, most of the answers you will get here are from people still trying to learn how to peddle Clickbank digital products. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but you're playing in a different yard than they are.

If I'm reading you correctly, you're looking for people who can bring investors to the table. Am I correct?

Or are you looking for people seeking investments or crowdfunding?

Although I've not worked in that market, it seems like you'd need different approaches depending on which side of the table you're on.

If it's the first, it will boil down to ROI. How much can the affiliate reasonably expect to make per unit of time/effort/expense expended? If you can craft an offer that pays better than what said affiliate is currently doing, you have a good chance of landing them.

So put together your best offer and compare it to what the kind of affiliate you're seeking can make with other opportunities.

I's also look for people who already have significant contacts within your market - financial advisors, tax advisors, CPAs, etc.

That really depends on the numbers involved with what you are dealing with of course. For instance, a number of the programs I'm dealing with might only pay what might sound at first like a tiny "1%" to "3%" but which are actually among the highest commissions in affiliate marketing, where 1% to 3% can actually earn you an average of ~$2,xxx all the way to $60,000+ for a single commissionable deal.

In other cases, 30% to 50% to 75% might be desirable but still earn much less on average.

Okay, since I was not aware you were thinking about having a third party handle your program, that changes things. With rare exceptions for me, the famous "third party aggregators" are exactly what I'm completely sick of and don't even trust to begin with. In fact I was just posting in another thread earlier how things were much better when Match.com was running its own program, despite that they too only had "one-time" commissions which was undesirable, but when they outsourced everything disintegrated into nothing. I virtually never even log into my old accounts with the more famous names among them, and usually the programs listed in them have no appeal at all, and are not even "real" affiliate programs in my view.

But it's understandable that perhaps most people do not have the resources or wherewithal to create, run and manage their own program and software, and would seek out third parties. So all I can say is choose carefully and make sure the offering does not resemble the MYRIAD of unappealing offers a lot of the third party aggregators contain.

You can, however, consider using third party software while running and managing yourself, such as iDevAffiliate, Post Affiliate Pro, etc. You may also need to link up with services like InfusionSoft or Velocify. In fact one of the highest paying affiliate programs I know of does that.

Great...