Let’s look at using affiliates to grow our business.

Affiliates are like sales representatives for our business who get paid a commission for every sale they make.  For us, as business owners, this makes great economic sense in that we only pay them once they make a sale, instead of having to pay out on advertising and marketing and hoping for a return on that investment.

The first question to answer is – Where Do I Start?

The best place to start is by thinking about the overview of your affiliate program.  There are several questions you will need to answer and once you’ve answered these, you will be able to best move forward in setting up your affiliate program.

1.  Do you want to maintain and administer your affiliate program yourself?

2.  Do you already have people you could ask to become affiliates in your affiliate program?

3.  Do you have enough technical knowledge within your business to setup your own affiliate program?

4.  Do you have the time to run your own affiliate program?

5.  Do you want to set up an affiliate program for just one product/site or several?

6.  Is the product you are going to sell a standalone product on it’s own domain or part of an online store?

7.  Do you want to include upsells/downsells in the sales process?

As you can see there are quite a few basic questions that need to be answered before even settling on which affiliate program to go with.  The questions above are to help you decide whether you want an inhouse affiliate program, where you control everything and it usually sits on your own server/hosting.  The other option is to use a third party affiliate program where you pay them a fee each month and they administer your program for you, paying affiliates, delivering your product and letting you get on with other things.

As setting up an affiliate program should be thought of as an investment, you don’t really want to rush into setting up the first, cheapest thing that you find.  There is more to it than that and you also have security to think about too.

Think about how you want to grow your business over the next 6 months to a year.  Does it involve creating a range of products to sell?  If they are related products, could they all be placed under the same affiliate program?  If you have several products you are selling, do you need different affiliate commissions for different products?

I’ll be taking each question and giving it a full answer in later posts so please keep an eye out for them.  Setting up your own affiliate program can be highly profitable for your business and help it grow at a fantastic rate, but getting the right foundation to start with is crucial.

Although it may sound like a dream come true, it’s not always as straightforward as it may sound as there is A LOT of bad quality plr products out there, however on the flip side, there is also a lot of quality plr too.

So what is the easiest way to create products from plr?

There are a few.  You can buy some plr articles that are on the same subject and compile them into a report to give away or sell.  You can do the same with any articles that you’ve written on the same subject too.  Getting extra mileage from each product that you create is the key to fast product creation and increased profits!

Another way is to buy plr reports or ebooks and edit them to make them unique and brand them with your own business details.  When adding your own details, remember to promote your other products and services as a way of cross promoting and increasing your chances of getting a sale.  Also remember at the back in the resources section to add related products that you can recommend with your affiliate link attached.

Not only are there plr reports and ebooks, but plr videos are also increasing in popularity.  Buying plr videos can save you lots of time and effort and they should allow you to brand these videos with your own details too so that it looks like you have created them.
The last thing that you will need to do is create an ecover for your newly created product.  Although some plr products may come with their own graphics, it’s better to make your own because it makes it more unique to you.  There are lots of places online that you can get cheap graphics created which I will be creating a blog post about shortly.

There are 3 suppliers of plr that I would highly recommend (1 is my own plr store!)

eBusinessPLR.com
EasyPLR.com
PLRMiniMart

Which product you decide to create depends on where you are in the business funnel. By this, I mean:

1. Do you have a business niche already?

Whether you are already building a business in a particular niche, usually a services business, or whether you are starting from scratch can make a huge difference in which product you should create first. If you have an existing business then the decision will be easier than starting from scratch. Although many marketers will say that you can make money in any niche, even if you are not interested in it, I strongly advise you to start with a niche you are passionate about, whether it’s a hobby, past work experience or something you know about. The internet marketing curve is much simpler to understand and apply the results on later projects doing it this way!

2. Do you have a mailing list/following already?

If you are just starting out and don’t have a reputation for producing great products/services and a stream of eager buyers, then it may be a good idea to start off creating a product at the lower end of your product funnel, just to get buyers into your sales funnel and on your mailing list. The usual price bracket for these types of products are $7 to $27. If however you are starting from scratch with no mailing list and no followers then it might be a good idea to create a free product to give away and build your mailing list initially. You can always add a paid product as a one time offer when people sign up for your mailing list as your second product.

3. What Product Type?

Choosing which product type to go for will depend on your markets preference as well as your own preference. Rather than spending hours debating which is best, I usually go for a short report initially. Other options that have worked well were offering free teleseminars but you really need an audience to promote these to – I had a Facebook group, one way to get round this is to interview an expert in your field and record it, using their reputation to build your list. Videos also work well and very popular so choose which you think you could create the fastest. Remember you can always use plr to get started!

4. What topic?

If you’ve been in your niche for any length of time you will have come across many clients who ask the same types of questions. This is a great opportunity to answer these questions in a “top 10 secrets to … ” report. However, if the niche you have chosen is relatively new to you, then visit forums related to the niche and see what others are asking, and also check out the answers as you can often use these to compile your report!

5. What Product Delivery System?

When you first create a product it is often the question “how do I deliver the product after the customer has paid?” that stumps people. If you are only ever going to sell 1 product then using PayPal’s return to page can work and is simple but open to thieves! It is a good idea to take a moment to think about future expansion and how you are going to deliver other products you may decide to create. Are you going to create an online store of products? Are you going to have a separate website for each product you create? More often than not when you are starting out it comes down to the question – What’s your budget? Often all you need is the $7 script to get started.

Once you’ve answered all these questions all you need to do is to start creating!