Best Practices for Paying Affiliate Bonuses

With regard to your process, I'd say it's too much work for the affiliate (or JV partner). If you were to do this bonus thing (which I wouldn't do btw...more on this later), you should do all the monitoring of sales and just pay out the bonuses accordingly.

To be more clear on what I would do in your situation, what I'd do is to offer bonuses during your launch. Releasing your product on Clickbank and hoping for affiliates does not count as a launch. Recruiting JV partners, doing a pre-launch, and creating an event out of the whole thing does count.

So during this launch event, what you should consider doing is to reward your top performers with cool prizes or reward any and all JV partners who meet sales requirements. For example, you could give everyone who gets you at least 25 sales a Wii or something. Obviously, the requirements you set and the prizes you give for each milestone would depend on the price point of your product and the depth of your sales funnel, but you get the idea

I know I haven't covered everything, but the topic of "how to get affiliates and/or JV partners" is a big one - much too big to be covered in one post.

Curtis

Curtis, thanks for your great suggestion.

I like the idea of creating rewards for meeting launch sales requirements. For example, sell X units and win a WII. But, sell XX units and you get a laptop. Or, something similar.

This is much easier as I don't have to track everyone's progress for the launch.

Yep, and it doesn't have to be electronics. Of course, cash works just fine a lot of the time. Or you could get creative

Massage chair? Giant TV? Exotic vacation? Vespa? The cooler your prizes are, the more excited your affiliates or JV partners will get about promoting.