Hi Dean,

I use to be an affiliate manager... so from my experience more is better. In all your questions.

How much should you pay your affiliates? As much as possible.
Should you include banners? Yes.
Should you include articles they can edit? Yes.
Should you have pre-written emails? Yes.

Instead of thinking "should I give them this?" you'd be better off thinking "What else can I add to make the affiliates life easier?"

Hi James,

Thanks for the input.

So far I will provide:

- A researched keyword list
- 10 articles for spinners
- 7 part autoresponder series
- various sized banners

Any other thoughts on what I could add?

Would you say that a 40% commission on a $97 product is enticing enough to attract some powerful affiliates?

Thanks!

Hi Dean,

40% commission on a $97 product makes about $33 per sale, I think. It's the usual Clickbank average, however affiliates usually have to make $50 sales to make this much, not $97.

Of course some $100 products can indeed sell better than the same product only priced $50, but I think having to try to sell a $100 product to get the same commission as an usual $50 product might put some affiliates off.

As for the affiliate section.

I am an article marketer and thus prefer having some articles about the niche/product in the affiliate section - this is mostly the only thing I really care about.

Then comes email campaigns, and if possible, a brandable free report for your affiliates to offer as an optin bonus.

While I say "I am an article marketer therefore I prefer articles," I think every affiliate can use some articles in which they can gain quick insight into the niche and the product. After all, even within a certain niche different products have vastly different approaches to solve the "problem".

Even an affiliate who is not an article marketer has to write at least a couple of article-ish stuff for their websites. So I think those articles can be beneficial to any article marketer.

I hope this helped!

Like I said, think more.

Could your affiliates use pre-written blog reviews for their affiliate sites? Yes.
Could they use multiple pre-written blog reviews taking multiple points and making comparison between your competition. Yes.

It's a digital product and you only want to give 40% commission? I wouldn't touch it. Especially if it's in the IM niche...

You only had to create it once and there is no additional cost to you if you sell 10 copies or 1,000 - I'd personally prefer the 1,000 sales. That's why my CB products gives my affiliates the max CB allows.

You're making less on each sale, but making more overall (because more affiliates will want to promote it) and building a bigger list of buyers.

I don't think you're going to impress anyone with 40%.

Thank you for the insight, James.

A lot of what you say makes total sense.

It looks to me that 60% may be a better deal for affiliates.

I also like your idea about written product reviews and a series of blog posts.

How about videos, for that matter? Could that be valuable as well? Perhaps a pack of say 5 promo videos?

Thanks again, man...this is all truly a huge help for me.

Hi Dean,

I think it's a very good, valid and important question.

I think the single commonest mistake that vendors make, in this connection, is "trying to please everyone", which amounts, perhaps to "trying to attract as many affiliates as possible".

There's a huge, concealed problem in doing so, in my opinion.

It's not unlike the mistake that some article marketers make, when they "write for clicks", imagining that "getting as much as traffic as possible" will necessarily correlate with getting them as much income as possible. Sometimes it will; all too often it won't, because they'll attract a large number of "readers" at the expense of quite a few "buyers".

Here, too, the problem is that if you're not careful, it's pretty easy to attract the 90% of affiliates who collectively produce 10% of the affiliate-referred sales, at the expense of losing a few of the potential 10% of other affiliates who collectively produce 90% of the affiliate-referred sales.

In terms of "numbers of affiliates", it's very trivial, imperceptible and widely ignored. But it can have an overwhelming effect on your bottom line.

In my opinion, a far better question than "What do affiliates want and how I can attract the highest possible number of them?" is "What do full-time, professional affiliates want and how can I not lose any of them?"

These things interest almost no professional affiliates. The affiliates who can produce 90% of your sales for you, as a vendor, are not feeding articles into spinners! (I'm not suggesting that providing those, in itself, will put anyone off, in this instance, but there are other features of the sales page, in particular, that will).

Now you're talking. A $97 price-tag will interest some serious affiliates.

Commission level is probably about 9th in importance on my own list of 10 criteria, but obviously I do take it into account: I take them all into account.

I promote $97 products, at the moment, which pay 75%, 65% and 50%. I'd look at anything from 30%+, though, depending on all the other criteria much higher on my list than the e.p.s.

In short, what I'm suggesting is that if you're measuring your results in terms of money made, it may pay dividends to forget the majority and just make very sure you don't lose any of the minority who actually produce the money for you. Don't assume that the more affiliates you have, the more money you'll make: that could be a big mistake (and is related, of course, to why some of the low-gravity products by far outsell some of the high-gravity products).

It's five times as good to have 3 affiliates selling 500 copies each than it is to have 100 affiliates selling an average of 3 copies each. The important thing is to avoid losing any of those three, not how to attract the other 100 people.

(My own little list, if it interests/helps anyone, is set out in this post.)

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Hi Alexa,

Fantastic input. As a budding student of the 80/20 rule...I see your points and overall agree.

Thanks to all!

By the way, I wanted to add this as well.

I think it will be a good offer for $97.

Without getting into what the product actually is, it will contain 20 editable Word documents, 20 PDF documents, and 20 tutorial videos.

I feel like it will be a good offer for the price. I'm in the middle of creating the product myself, I'm not outsourcing ANYTHING. I want quality to be 100% on point.

Is this something that affiliates take into consideration?

It seems that if the product is good, at a fair price, that refunds should be somewhat low.