To Clickbank Vendors - Is it Detrimental To Have Affiliates? | Warrior Forum - The #1 Digital Marketing Forum & Marketplace

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

Is it worth setting up an affiliate program? Or is it better to just promote the book by yourself?

I ask this question because I fear that an influx of affiliates will give me more keyword competition (I use SEO for Google rankings), so my site will drop more in the SERPS. Plus I have to do more work to keep my site's pages ranking.

Do keep in mind that when I get a sale through an affiliate, I only get a small percentage of the sale in my pocket, so I much prefer those sales I am getting without affiliates.

Thanks in advance ^_^

The whole point of affiliates is to get the word out about your product using their marketing skills. You get to tap into a larger portion of the market all at once from 1% of everyone elses efforts instead of 100% of your own efforts.

When having affiliates you should always have another product planned to sell your new list of people affiliates generate for you. Now you don't have to sell the new product right away, build credibility with your list of prospects and buyers.

Then make them an offer they cannot refuse.

It takes planning and once you have your plan stick to it and make it work.

For example:

1) Release product on ClickBank
2) Attract affiliates
3) Work your list of prospects (build trust and credibility)
4) Service your buyers (Give them far more than they ever expected)
5) Create useful content on a regular basis (articles, audio's, UStream broadcasts)
6) Become your market
7) Make them an offer (build upon your other product and or offer something more)

This is just a rough example but you get the point. There are so many different ways it's mind boggling but the best way is to start with looking at what result you want to have. What end result do you want your customers to have. What experiences do you want your prospects and customers to have?

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Mike Hill

13 years ago

Further to my last... Go to ClickBank and look at all the top products in any category. Search for their exact product name in Google and you'll see the power of affiliates first hand.

They didn't get to the top of ClickBank by themselves...

They relied on their affiliates to do the heavy lifting but they also had a plan to follow and they each offered their customers something else later on...

They also offered their affiliates even more commissions a while after their launch to keep the momentum going. So have your ducks all in a row and then slay it!

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Snow_Predator

13 years ago

Thanks a lot for your informative reply there Mike.

Trouble is I haven't yet started capturing emails. The only sales I make are from the visits to my salespage and the articles that point to my salespage.

From what I understand, capturing emails on a page that receives traffic from affiliates, is frowned upon by affiliates, as this is a considered a salespage 'leak'.

Or are you suggesting capturing the emails of my buyers?

Thanks

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Alexa Smith

Banned 13 years ago

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

when I get a sale through an affiliate, I only get a small percentage of the sale in my pocket, so I much prefer those sales I am getting without affiliates.

Just a suggestion, but look at it a different way round, Snow Predator.

Which is better: to make 30 sales yourself at $30 each (I'm using round numbers) or to have affiliates, make only 5 sales yourself instead, but have your affiliates bringing you in 80 more sales on which you pay them 75% commission?

At the moment, your answer is that you make more money the first way, without the affiliates.

That's true, but shortsighted.

The point is that the second way, you have 85 customers instead of 30 customers to whom to promote your second product later for $60, and you don't have to pay affiliates any of that.

One is a business. The other is just "rinse and repeat".

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

From what I understand, capturing emails on a page that receives traffic from affiliates, is frowned upon by affiliates, as this is a considered a salespage 'leak'.

Yes, that's definitely right. You won't get many serious affiliates promoting your product with a sales page leak like that.

But there's nothing to stop you from having two different versions of the sales page, you know? One for affiliates without the opt-in and another one just for yourself, with an opt-in. Many vendors do this ...

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Snow_Predator

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Hill

Further to my last... Go to ClickBank and look at all the top products in any category. Search for their exact product name in Google and you'll see the power of affiliates first hand.

They didn't get to the top of ClickBank by themselves...

They relied on their affiliates to do the heavy lifting but they also had a plan to follow and they each offered their customers something else later on...

They also offered their affiliates even more commissions a while after their launch to keep the momentum going. So have your ducks all in a row and then slay it!

Yeh, some of these Clickbank products are immensely popular and promoted to death all over the net by affiliates. Despite how crap a lot of these products are, the shear presence on the net is persuasion to buy in itself.

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Just a suggestion, but look at it a different way round, Snow Predator.

Which is better: to make 30 sales yourself at $30 each (I'm using round numbers) or to have affiliates, make only 5 sales yourself instead, but have your affiliates bringing you in 80 more sales on which you pay them 75% commission?

At the moment, your answer is that you make more money the first way, without the affiliates.

That's true, but shortsighted.

The point is that the second way, you have 85 customers instead of 30 customers to whom to promote your second product later for $60, and you don't have to pay affiliates any of that.

One is a business. The other is just "rinse and repeat".

Yes, that's definitely right. You won't get many serious affiliates promoting your product with a sales page leak like that.

But there's nothing to stop you from having two different versions of the sales page, you know? One for affiliates without the opt-in and another one just for yourself, with an opt-in. Many vendors do this ...

I think I recognize you from before. Your arguments are more persuasive than I'm comfortable with *growls*

Rinse and repeat is all I've been doing to be honest. I do need to take things to the next level, and list-building is definitely something I should be looking into. After that maybe I'll even look into recruiting affiliates.

Thank you both for your input.

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MarketingVet09 13 years ago

Unless you have something that's flying off the rack like hotcakes, has a huge search volume, and you have a very low cpc, making an incredible return on investment (and the above is highly unlikely to impossible), round up affiliates..

Make that you're sole mission to recruit as many affiliates as possible, and if you have something that converts you're guaranteed to make more money in the end even if you aren't building a list to sale to again.

CPC is 1 out of what, 8 to 10 other primary traffic methods... It's not going to be possible for you to dominate every last one of them... We all love money, and no one can blame you for this crossing your mind, but thoughts of greed in this situation will actual leave your pockets flatter.
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Anonymous Affiliate

13 years ago

Never mind. Not related to this thread.

Thanks
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Snow_Predator

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Fenris Lloyd

Another thing is the deal about having to compete with your affiliates for your keywords...

If your going to have affiliates then that isn't really something to be concerned about. Once you have a sales force you should be leaving the selling to them. Those affiliates that start outranking you will be bringing much more traffic to your sales page than you could ever do by yourself. Why not just let them?

Every keyword that your affiliates are dominating will be due to their own work. If they outrank you it's because they're doing the work. If you start seeing your affiliates outranking you then it means they're actually doing there job. Once you start seeing multiple affiliates outranking you for many terms then really you don't need to be promoting yourself anymore anyway.

The worse thing any company can do is compete with their own sales staff. It takes away the incentive for the sales people to want to work for you. That's what affiliates are after all, a bunch of independent salesmen wanting to make sales for you. Promote your site enough to make some sales while your building up your sales force, but once the affiliates are doing their job then back off.

As others have said you'll make more money from 100 sales where you make $10 each, than you will with 10 sales at $30 each ($1000 vs. $300). Now carry that logic on to the SEO/SEP. You might get on first page for one or two, even a few keywords working on your own. If you have enough affiliates then they can dominate the whole page 1 for those keywords as well as many more.

Would you rather work hard to get a single position on the first pages of google for 3 different keywords and get $30 for each sale that those listings in the serps bring you? Or would you rather have all 10 positions on each of the first pages for 30 different keywords and get $10 for each sale that came from those clicks. I guarantee you'll make much more money with a bunch of affiliates dominating the serps than you'll ever make from your own individual SEO efforts.

Best thing you can do is NOT to compete with your affiliates, but rather give them whatever support they need in order to dominate the serps themselves. Work with them, not against them. Let the affiliates do the work for you, so you don't have to do the work yourself.

Not only will you make more money, but you'll have more time to concentrate on making your next product, and then the next, and then the next.... All the while your sales force will still be promoting you're earlier products making you more and more sales.

That's excellent mate thanks.

As silly as it sounds, I didn't much look at affiliates as being my employees in any way. I suppose these folks are sort of my employees in a way or rather private contractors that are paid on commission. Daft of me not to make that connection.

So competing against my own affiliates is like the owner of a shop physically going down to the shop floor and trying to out-compete his own sales staff who are paid on commission, just so he can save on that commission money by making as many sales as he can for himself. I'd say he was off his rocker.

Definitely food for thought.

Originally Posted by Anonymous Affiliate

Never mind. Not related to this thread.

Well thankfully I just read your post before you took it down there Anonymous Affiliate. That is definitely something I have thought about as an affiliate myself in the past. Definitely a topic of debate I will bring up as soon as I start recruiting affiliates and getting into list-building.

Thanks
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Anonymous Affiliate

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

Well thankfully I just read your post before you took it down there Anonymous Affiliate. That is definitely something I have thought about as an affiliate myself in the past. Definitely a topic of debate I will bring up as soon as I start recruiting affiliates and getting into list-building.

I took my post down because it was not 100% related to this thread, but what you read is 100% true and I can prove it from first hand experience. Keep it in mind.

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Fenris Lloyd

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Anonymous Affiliate

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

Well thankfully I just read your post before you took it down there Anonymous Affiliate. That is definitely something I have thought about as an affiliate myself in the past. Definitely a topic of debate I will bring up as soon as I start recruiting affiliates and getting into list-building.

I took my post down because it was not 100% related to this thread, but what you read is 100% true and I can prove it from first hand experience. Keep it in mind.

@Anonymous Affiliate - now you make me wish I had come back to this thread sooner so I could have seen your post.

Even if it was only 75% related to the thread, if it was really useful I wish you would have left it up.

Thanks
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Anonymous Affiliate

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Fenris Lloyd

@Anonymous Affiliate - now you make me wish I had come back to this thread sooner so I could have seen your post.

Even if it was only 75% related to the thread, if it was really useful I wish you would have left it up.

It was about sending affiliates' traffic to a page with an optin form instead of sending them directly to a sales page, and how some affiliates believe that such thing would hurt their conversions (incorrectly so).

Power affiliates know otherwise, trust me.

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Fenris Lloyd

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Anonymous Affiliate

It was about sending affiliates' traffic to a page with an optin form instead of sending them directly to a sales page, and how some affiliates believe that such thing would hurt their conversions (incorrectly so).

Power affiliates know otherwise, trust me.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I touched on that in my last reply also.

A lot of affiliates think it's automatically a bad thing, but that isn't the case. As long as the vendor has it set up in such a way as to not use a hoplink to overwrite the affliliates cookie, then having an optin form can actually increase the sales dramatically and the affiliate will still get credit for those sales.

It's only a very small percentage of vendors setting up optin forms that do the emails wrong. I like to think that it's just because they didn't realize they were doing it wrong and will fix it if anyone points it out to them. (I know that isn't always true, but I like being optimistic)

All an affiliate needs to do is follow the sales flow all the way to the order form and see if their aff id still shows on the bottom. If after following your hoplink you find an optin form then sign up on it. As soon as you get the email that will be sent click on whatever link is there, follow it wherever it goes, then from there click on the order button. If your aff id still shows up at the bottom of the order form then the optin form is set up right.

If that's the case then as an affiliate you will probably see higher sales than you would other wise. If it's not then you can either just go look for another product to promote, or you can email the vendor and ask him about it. In many cases he might have just not realize something was wrong. It might be worth at least checking with them.

Anything that can increase conversions and keeps the affiliate cookie intact is always a good thing for the vendor and affiliate alike.

Thanks
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Anonymous Affiliate

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Fenris Lloyd

A lot of affiliates think it's automatically a bad thing, but that isn't the case. As long as the vendor has it set up in such a way as to not use a hoplink to overwrite the affliliates cookie, then having an optin form can actually increase the sales dramatically and the affiliate will still get credit for those sales.

On top of ensuring that the vendor doesn't hijack your affiliate cookie (which is a given among professionals), you need to avoid other affiliates stuffing their own cookie from the moment you send the prospect to the vendor's squeeze page to the moment the sales funnel finally gives them access to the sales page.

In order to do so, you want to create your own individual email sequence for that specific product, timing up the vendor's email sequence with your own, so once the sales page is finally disclosed to the prospect, you mail the prospect hard to make sure your cookie is the one to get the sale.

So in a nutshell, you campaign hard to get the prospect to sign up to the vendor's opt-in form. From that point on, the vendor does the pre-selling job because that's what he does best. He knows his market/product better than the affiliate, so he should do the prospect "warm up" by presenting quality content, answering the prospect's questions, delivering case studies, building social proof, etc.

And then, X days later when the prospect is finally given access to the sales page, you (the affiliate) gotta campaign hard again to make sure your cookie gets the prize.

That is what power affiliates do. I do it myself, and it works... very well... MUCH better than sending traffic directly to a dead-end sales page...

Thanks
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Fenris Lloyd

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Anonymous Affiliate

On top of ensuring that the vendor doesn't hijack your affiliate cookie (which is a given among professionals), you need to avoid other affiliates stuffing their own cookie from the moment you send the prospect to the vendor's squeeze page to the moment the sales funnel finally gives them access to the sales page.

In order to do so, you want to create your own individual email sequence for that specific product, timing up the vendor's email sequence with your own, so once the sales page is finally disclosed to the prospect, you mail the prospect hard to make sure your cookie is the one to get the sale.

So in a nutshell, you campaign hard to get the prospect to sign up to the vendor's opt-in form. From that point on, the vendor does the pre-selling job because that's what he does best. He knows his market/product better than the affiliate, so he should do the prospect "warm up" by presenting quality content, answering the prospect's questions, delivering case studies, building social proof, etc.

And then, X days later when the prospect is finally given access to the sales page, you (the affiliate) gotta campaign hard again to make sure your cookie gets the prize.

That is what power affiliates do. I do it myself, and it works... very well... MUCH better than sending traffic directly to a dead-end sales page...

That's exactly how it should work, and typically does work among the professionals. That's why it's best for affiliates to find professional vendors and vendors want to find professional affiliates.

The affiliates job is to find the prospect and send them to the vendor. Everything the affiliate does is with the express intent of sending the very best prospects to the vendor. That's what they've spent time learning to do, and the good ones do it VERY well.

The vendors job is to make the sale once the affiliate sends them the prospects. That's the point of the product they created, the sales pages they created, whatever optin and email campaigns they created. Once they have the prospect, then it's the vendors responsibility to actually make the sale and do it in such a way that the affiliate who sent the prospect will get credit for that sale.

I take it from you're replies that you're a professional in your field, and hopefully thanks in part to the discussion in this thread, Snow_Predator now understands what it takes to be a professional as a vendor.

From his replies in the thread I think he does see that this really is a profession and will deal with his products with that mindset as well.

When both the vendor and the affiliate understand the roles each other play in the process then they both benefit. The professionals in this business understand that and typically both make a lot of money together because of it.

IM is a sales profession. The best affiliates know what they're doing. They make a lot of money because they are good at what they do. As a vendor you want to set everything up professionally so that the professional affiliates might be interested in promoting for you. For a vendor, just getting a few affiliates at that level can really make a huge increase in sales.

Thanks
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Snow_Predator

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Fenris Lloyd

That's exactly how it should work, and typically does work among the professionals. That's why it's best for affiliates to find professional vendors and vendors want to find professional affiliates.

The affiliates job is to find the prospect and send them to the vendor. Everything the affiliate does is with the express intent of sending the very best prospects to the vendor. That's what they've spent time learning to do, and the good ones do it VERY well.

The vendors job is to make the sale once the affiliate sends them the prospects. That's the point of the product they created, the sales pages they created, whatever optin and email campaigns they created. Once they have the prospect, then it's the vendors responsibility to actually make the sale and do it in such a way that the affiliate who sent the prospect will get credit for that sale.

I take it from you're replies that you're a professional in your field, and hopefully thanks in part to the discussion in this thread, Snow_Predator now understands what it takes to be a professional as a vendor.

From her replies in the thread I think she does see that this really is a profession and will deal with her products with that mindset as well.

When both the vendor and the affiliate understand the roles each other play in the process then they both benefit. The professionals in this business understand that and typically both make a lot of money together because of it.

IM is a sales profession. The best affiliates know what they're doing. They make a lot of money because they are good at what they do. As a vendor you want to set everything up professionally so that the professional affiliates might be interested in promoting for you. For a vendor, just getting a few affiliates at that level can really make a huge increase in sales.

Eh, snow_predator is a bloke (what woman would ever choose such a stupid nickname?).

The secret to long term success in any business lies in how you treat your customers and how you treat your employees. I know this. I understand it in theory and have applied the former with all of my customers to date.

Seeing my affiliates as my employees and treating them as such may yet be the biggest shift in my IM career to date. Empower your employees, give them your trust and treat them as you would a faithful business partner and they will bring you success.

Thanks
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Fenris Lloyd

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

Eh, snow_predator is a bloke (what woman would ever choose such a stupid nickname?).

The secret to long term success in any business lies in how you treat your customers and how you treat your employees. I know this. I understand it in theory and have applied the former with all of my customers to date.

Seeing my affiliates as my employees and treating them as such may yet be the biggest shift in my IM career to date. Empower your employees, give them your trust and treat them as you would a faithful business partner and they will bring you success.

Ok I changed my last reply to reflect that snow_predator is "he". lol, sorry about that.

Glad we could help you see IM from the same perspective that you have in all your other business ventures. Just that one adjustment in your mindset can really have a huge impact in your business.

btw - You seem like someone that approaches things as a professional, that's one of the things I like to see in a vendor. PM me a link to your product and I may consider promoting it myself.

Good luck to you.

Thanks

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Fenris Lloyd

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

...As silly as it sounds, I didn't much look at affiliates as being my employees in any way. I suppose these folks are sort of my employees in a way or rather private contractors that are paid on commission. Daft of me not to make that connection.

So competing against my own affiliates is like the owner of a shop physically going down to the shop floor and trying to out-compete his own sales staff who are paid on commission, just so he can save on that commission money by making as many sales as he can for himself. I'd say he was off his rocker.

Definitely food for thought...

That's it exactly.

A lot of vendors don't get that concept, but the ones that don't "get it" will never get the best affiliates.

Compete with the affiliates to make sales without commissions and soon the better affiliates will get tired of competing with you and move on to more professional vendors.

Another thing inexperienced vendors do sometimes is make a subscribe box to collect emails. Then when they send out emails to the list they include their own hoplink. If you do that then anyone coming back to your page will hop through your links and overwrite the original affiliates cookie. It might seem like a good idea because you won't have to pay a commission to those second chance buyers, but it was you're job to actually make the sale with your sales page. If you give them an option to subscribe instead of buying right then it isn't the affiliates problem. They originally sent the visitor, even if you now have his email for your list. If you make a sale from that customer then the affiliate deserves the commission.

Whatever you do, don't make that mistake. Any experienced affiliate that looks on your page and finds an optin form will probably optin so they can see if your email is going to overwrite their cookie. If they follow a link from your email back to your page and then to the order form and they see a different aff id than their own, they will just move on to other products. It amounts to stealing their sale and they won't want anything to do with it. In some cases they might even let other affiliates know about it in marketing forums like WF and others. A lot of the best affiliates do a lot of networking amongst themselves and you don't want to get a bad rep as a vendor that way.

If you want to build a list so you can make a second attempt at a sale, then send them directly to your sales page, not through a hop. If a cookie is already set then the original affiliate will still get the deserved credit for the sale, if there isn't a cookie already set then you'll still get the sale as one of your own whether you used a hoplink or not. As long as you do it right then most affiliates will see you building an optin list to send a reminder email to the prospect as a good thing. It's just one more thing you're doing to increase conversions, which should actually help increase their sales. The key is to do it in such a way that you aren't overwriting the affiliates cookie.

Remember these people aren't actually employees, they're independent sales agents, but if they decide to promote your product then they will be working for you. They expect the same professionalism in return.

Keep that in mind and do what you can to work with them and you'll find you can get some people that are very good at what they do.

Provide them a good product to sell.
Provide a good converting sales page.
Make sure that you're sales flow doesn't overwrite their cookie.
It's also a good idea to provide an affiliate page; share advice on what the best niches and keywords work for you product, some premade banners, maybe even some good copy for emails, articles, etc.
Basically provide them the same type assistance that you would if, like you say, this was a traditional offline company and these were your salesmen.

Take care of your affiliates and they'll take care of you.

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petelta

13 years ago

If you create a product, I don't see why you wouldn't try and find affiliates. It's the greatest part of the product creation gig. You can have a massive army of people selling your products.

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MarketingVet09

13 years ago

Just noticed you said you're doing SEO and not PPC... That's even more reason to recruit affiliates. I'd rely solely on PPC before I relied solely on seo.

Thanks

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Snow_Predator

13 years ago

CPC is 1 out of what, 8 to 10 other primary traffic methods... It's not going to be possible for you to dominate every last one of them...

A very valid point there Jusumax.

Thanks
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ripsnorta2 13 years ago
What is better:
1. 100% of 100 sales, or
2. 25% of 1000 sales?
For a $30 product, option 1 gives you $3000 and option 2 gives you $7500.

Don't forget you also get all those extra names for your email list that can be used for later upsells.

What would you prefer?
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Codeboss -- Useful Software Tailored For Your Business
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shabit87

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Snow_Predator

Is it worth setting up an affiliate program? Or is it better to just promote the book by yourself?

I ask this question because I fear that an influx of affiliates will give me more keyword competition (I use SEO for Google rankings), so my site will drop more in the SERPS. Plus I have to do more work to keep my site's pages ranking.

Do keep in mind that when I get a sale through an affiliate, I only get a small percentage of the sale in my pocket, so I much prefer those sales I am getting without affiliates.

Thanks in advance ^_^

Look at it this way. Let's say your product is $10 and you can reach 10 buyers, no prob. Great! You've made $100.

Now you got 5 affiliates who can reach 10 people each and they get 50% commission. Now you got $250.

You've made $350 where you would've made only $100. On top of that, they may have actually used paid advertisement so thier $5, may only be more like $2.

If anything I don't think having affiliates cuts into your profits, just expands. If anything, you'll have less work to do on your part and you'll build a nice buyers list in the process (to market more products to in the future).

Thanks

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Fenris Lloyd

13 years ago

Another thing is the deal about having to compete with your affiliates for your keywords...

If your going to have affiliates then that isn't really something to be concerned about. Once you have a sales force you should be leaving the selling to them. Those affiliates that start outranking you will be bringing much more traffic to your sales page than you could ever do by yourself. Why not just let them?

Every keyword that your affiliates are dominating will be due to their own work. If they outrank you it's because they're doing the work. If you start seeing your affiliates outranking you then it means they're actually doing there job. Once you start seeing multiple affiliates outranking you for many terms then really you don't need to be promoting yourself anymore anyway.

The worse thing any company can do is compete with their own sales staff. It takes away the incentive for the sales people to want to work for you. That's what affiliates are after all, a bunch of independent salesmen wanting to make sales for you. Promote your site enough to make some sales while your building up your sales force, but once the affiliates are doing their job then back off.

As others have said you'll make more money from 100 sales where you make $10 each, than you will with 10 sales at $30 each ($1000 vs. $300). Now carry that logic on to the SEO/SEP. You might get on first page for one or two, even a few keywords working on your own. If you have enough affiliates then they can dominate the whole page 1 for those keywords as well as many more.

Would you rather work hard to get a single position on the first pages of google for 3 different keywords and get $30 for each sale that those listings in the serps bring you? Or would you rather have all 10 positions on each of the first pages for 30 different keywords and get $10 for each sale that came from those clicks. I guarantee you'll make much more money with a bunch of affiliates dominating the serps than you'll ever make from your own individual SEO efforts.

Best thing you can do is NOT to compete with your affiliates, but rather give them whatever support they need in order to dominate the serps themselves. Work with them, not against them. Let the affiliates do the work for you, so you don't have to do the work yourself.

Not only will you make more money, but you'll have more time to concentrate on making your next product, and then the next, and then the next.... All the while your sales force will still be promoting you're earlier products making you more and more sales.

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M Thompson

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Fenris Lloyd

Best thing you can do is NOT to compete with your affiliates, but rather give them whatever support they need in order to dominate the serps themselves. Work with them, not against them. Let the affiliates do the work for you, so you don't have to do the work yourself.

100% the best advice in this thread.

Find affiliates and nurture them, if possible get them on a list and help them to promote your articles.

Do capture your customers email addresses but do it on the backend,

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Nisip

Banned 13 years ago

clickbank without affiliates would not be even in Top 1,000,000 websites in traffic.

Clickbank IS affiliates.

All Top products have 92% sales through affiliates and 8% sales
in which the affiliates didn't get paid because the users deleted their cookies before ordering

Thanks

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GeorgR.

13 years ago

Of all things, promotion, advertizing, SEO is actually the hardest part of IM, in my opinion.

You know, i make a good looking site in 30 minutes. No problem.
Product creation? Give me a day and i create a ebook.

But promoting this, make it known and getting traffic is a different story.

The affiliates are the ones doing all that work FOR YOU. You have a good product with an attractive payout? People are fighting each other, THEY are the ones making sites featuring your product and doing SEO and paying the advertising (eg. adwords).

So..its a no-brainer to get affiliates in my opinion. 75% payout to someone else is better than a product no one knows!

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Snow_Predator

13 years ago

Originally Posted by GeorgR.

Of all things, promotion, advertizing, SEO is actually the hardest part of IM, in my opinion.

You know, i make a good looking site in 30 minutes. No problem.
Product creation? Give me a day and i create a ebook.

But promoting this, make it known and getting traffic is a different story.

The affiliates are the ones doing all that work FOR YOU. You have a good product with an attractive payout? People are fighting each other, THEY are the ones making sites featuring your product and doing SEO and paying the advertising (eg. adwords).

So..its a no-brainer to get affiliates in my opinion. 75% payout to someone else is better than a product no one knows!

Bloody hell George, tell me about it. When I started IM I thought I was becoming a copywriter. But I now find myself spending some 90%++ of my time on just SEO!!!

Finding a market, creating a product, writing a salespage - all hard work, but rewarding in the sense that it requires the use of thought and intellect. But SEO... boring, repetitive, mundane crap in my opinion, but just as important as all the other steps.

Like you say George, I can create a site, write an ebook and get everything ready in just a few days, and I have done so with 2 different products. But then it takes MONTHS!!!!! to get everything ranking and get traffic to your site!!!!!!! Arggghhhhh so frustrated lol.

Thanks

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edwink

13 years ago

Having your own affiliate army is the best thing you can have for any digital product.

Who cares about the search engine competition? Your affiliates are going to send backlinks to your site and increase YOUR rankings! People would pray for more affiliates.

Even if you give them 99% commissions, you still profit becuse you wouldn't have made that particular sale and that 1% commission anyway.

Just get affiliates, the more the better. More publicity.

As they say best in entertainment, it doesn't matter if it is good publicity or bad publicity, as long as it is publicity.

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Paul Gram

13 years ago

I definitely love having affiliates. In a past launch, I hand picked just a few and it went great but my next launch will be full blown with many affiliates. The reach that you get with affiliates is amazing and is definitely where I am headed in the future.

I want affiliates happy and I want them making TONS of money because if they do that, so will I.

Thanks
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Fenris Lloyd

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Paul Gram

... The reach that you get with affiliates is amazing and is definitely where I am headed in the future.

I want affiliates happy and I want them making TONS of money because if they do that, so will I.

Well stated!!

The more money your affiliates are making means the more money your making.
Based on that fact alone, every vendor should want their affiliates to get rich.

Thanks
1 reply

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Snow_Predator

13 years ago

Originally Posted by edwink

Having your own affiliate army is the best thing you can have for any digital product.

Who cares about the search engine competition? Your affiliates are going to send backlinks to your site and increase YOUR rankings! People would pray for more affiliates.

Even if you give them 99% commissions, you still profit becuse you wouldn't have made that particular sale and that 1% commission anyway.

Just get affiliates, the more the better. More publicity.

As they say best in entertainment, it doesn't matter if it is good publicity or bad publicity, as long as it is publicity.

I think you are right edwink. I know quite a few clickbank books that are promoted like crazy by affiliates, to the extent where as a person looking for information in the field, you are lead to belief that these books are the creme de la creme. But in actual fact the books that I have seen are completely rubbish!!!

It makes me think what I can do with a decent book.

Originally Posted by Fenris Lloyd

Ok I changed my last reply to reflect that snow_predator is "he". lol, sorry about that.

Glad we could help you see IM from the same perspective that you have in all your other business ventures. Just that one adjustment in your mindset can really have a huge impact in your business.

btw - You seem like someone that approaches things as a professional, that's one of the things I like to see in a vendor. PM me a link to your product and I may consider promoting it myself.

Good luck to you.

Thank you Fenris.

I need to beef up my products with more value and info so I can charge a higher price (currently selling for just $22 a piece). That way my affiliates will get a decent commission per sale.

I'll PM you as soon as I start recruiting affiliates.

Actually the reason I started this thread was because I was sent an email by a delighted customer who told me that my product was awesome and she wanted to promote it because all the other ones on Clickbank were rubbish.

I turned here down at the time because I don't know how the whole affiliate system works on Clickbank from a vendor's perspective. But at least I know people would like to promote my products.

Thanks

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