Recruiting Affiliates to Promote Your Products

When you sell products online, a great way to get the word out about your offerings is to have an army of people behind you. These people will represent your brand, refer your brand, and encourage people to buy your brand. You can end up with loyal customers, who will eventually do that for free. But, if you want to hurry it along, incentivizing people by recruiting affiliates who will make a percentage of sales to help you promote is the best way to accomplish that. I’ve been a part of this world from both sides since coming online in 2006 and can attest to the importance of this piece of your marketing.

What Are Affiliates?

An affiliate is someone who is a sales person for you. The great thing about an affiliate is that you do not have to pay them unless they make a sale. The way it works is that by using specialized software, that keeps track of sales for each individual affiliate, the affiliate posts links to your sales pages, and when a sale is made via their link they get the percentage promised for that individual sale.

For example, if you’re selling a two hundred fifty dollar product such as an information product, the seller (affiliate) will make commissions, which you’ve set up in your affiliate software to pay. Percentages range from 5 percent to even 100 percent depending on the goals of the campaign and the type of product you’re selling. If you are selling something that causes you to use personal time, you may want to lower the percentage. If you’re selling something that is a digital product that has already used time, you can give a larger percentage. Fifty percent is the standard for digital information products.

So in short, an affiliate is a salesperson who earns a percentage of the price from every single sale that they make using their special link. Recruiting affiliates on a regular basis can significantly increase your bottom line.

Why You Need Affiliates

The best way to make a profit on anything is to sell a lot of it and being that you’re only one person you can only tell so many people about your offerings. But, imagine if you could double, triple, or quadruple yourself by getting other people to spread the word about your offerings? Wouldn’t you do it? The cost of having an affiliate program is minimal. It’s also less expensive than other types of marketing such as placing ads, and what’s most important, if you plan it right, it really works.

• Increase Your Reach – If you know there are other audience members out there who have not heard of your products and services finding affiliates to help promote your products to their audience will definitely increase your reach and enable you to help more people.

• Make More Money with Less Effort – While it may seem expensive to pay for a sale when you’re dealing with digital products, remember that your costs do not go up with each additional sale, as they do with physical products. You can give a larger percentage of the price and still end up making more money, with less effort on your part.

• Grow Your List – Encouraging affiliates to promote you not only increases sales but once someone buys from you, they’re now part of your audience and are on your list. Now that they’re on your list, you can market directly to them the rest of the items in your funnel.

• Build Relationships – Once your affiliate program gets momentum you’re going to notice some true movers and shakers. These people make the most sales and the most noise about your products. When you notice that, reach out to that affiliate and offer them a special deal such doing a joint webinar, or offering them a larger percentage of sales to encourage them to do even better. You can become quite close to your affiliate people and even get ideas for new products from them if you’re open to it.

• Grow Bigger Than You – You’re only one person, working from your home office, or your kitchen table. But with affiliates, you can grow a literal army of sales people to promote your products and services making your job one of management and creation rather than just sales. Eventually, you can grow a business that earns multiple six figures for yourself and others.

These reasons are great ones to find affiliates to promote your products. The main point to take away is that you can sell more products with other people doing the work for you than you can sell on your own. While giving out a percentage of profits might seem painful at first, it’s really one of the least expensive options to improve sales. Focus on recruiting affiliates and your online business will prosper. I have been a “super affiliate” for almost a decade, meaning that product creators depend on me to help launch and sell their information products.

Be sure to check out my exclusive training at Really Simple Affiliate Marketing and learn how to both earn income as an affiliate and to get involved with recruiting affiliates for your own products and services.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future.