There is one thing that I’ve learned whilst running my own online business and that is, that we can’t build a successful and profitable online business without help.  Whether that is by outsourcing certain tasks, joint venturing with partners or using affiliates to help sell your products – or all 3 – we really need outside help to grow our business.

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.