How to Sell a Product

Never tried to do both at the same time, but I personally find that Clickbank attracts far more affiliates than PayDotCom.

Although you need to be proactive about getting on board most affiliates, the big players especially need to be nudged.

It's not necessarily a bad idea but the big thing would be not to put the different payment buttons from different processors on the same sales page. Experienced affiliates look for this and if you do it then good luck in getting anyone to promote for you.

Affiliates want to sell what's selling already. If something isn't selling, affiliates will avoid it.

Focus on getting sales, then on getting affiliates.

SALES should always be your focus. If you can prove that you're getting daily sales for a product, and that your conversion rate is healthy, you won't have any problems getting top affiliates to promote you.

Without such evidence joining multiple affiliate programs is pointless. You may get a few affiliates, but most affiliates make zero sales. You'll never get a top affiliate to promote without evidence that your product's hot because they're investing time and money, and there are thousands of products they could promote.

The affiliate program you choose is up to you. I can't see that point of multiple sales pages (which is what you'll need for multiple aff programs) if you're not split-testing various areas of a page.

Always, always, always, focus on SALES.

Affiliates aren't the answer if you're not making sales.

Hope this helps.

First of all this question comes up a lot, and there have been several good threads on it. The bottom line is always stick to one affiliate program, and avoid doing anything that might cause your affiliates to lose their commissions (which is the chief argument against using multiple affiliate programs).

The ironic thing about this thread is that after being nudged into giving thanks for a pretty basic response you didn't actually acknowledge the true gem of a post in the thread - specifically Angela's. She is correct - in order to attract the affiliates that will actually make the big sales you will have to show them the products track record. They will want numbers - conversion rates, sales per day, refund rates etc. The only way to get those statistics is to sell it yourself.

Use AdWords or your own list and get those sales statistics. Fine tune your sales funnel, and make sure there is no way that an affiliate could lose their commissions in the funnel - for example don't provide a PayPal option on a ClickBank sales page!

Once you have statistics to back up your sales you can then approach the big affiliates or JV partners. Remember, these guys get dozens of offers a day to promotes stuff. You have to make yours attractive to them or they won't even look at it.

Alexa Smith posted an excellent guide to what she looks for in an affiliate program, sorry I don't have the link to the thread handy but it is worth searching for. She is a perfect example of the kind of affiliate you want to attract.

Happy Holidays and best of luck with your product.

Bill

There's been some excellent advice about getting your product selling first, and then you're more likely to attract active affiliates (note: "active" means the 5% or less of your affiliates who will ever actively promote your product).

On a practical note, let's just think it through a bit. If you have both Clickbank and Paydotcom affiliates sending visitors to your site, what happens when visitors click on your order button? That button will have to be connected to only one order processor. Say you put up a Clickbank order link. All the visitors sent by your Paydotcom affiliate will go to Clickbank, meaning the Paydotcom affiliate will be getting cheated out of his commission.

The only fair way to do this would be to build a separate website for each of the affiliate programs.

Now, it may look tempting to try and cover all your bases like this, but it's just that... a temptation. You wouldn't be diversifying your marketing, you'd only be fragmenting your efforts. When starting out, it's wiser to pick a single proven plan and put all your energy into that - because focus is good and scattering your energies is not.

Once you've got one program up and running strongly, if you want to diversify, then you can think about it. But one of the grandaddies of Internet marketing, Jimmy D. Brown, has used nothing but Clickbank for years. No other processors, no other affiliate programs, and he's done pretty okay.

I hope you have great success in the coming year. And please do keep us posted on how you're doing.

Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles