Moms Online Business Coach

Affiliate Marketing is one of the fastest, easiest ways to add a revenue stream to your business. Either by promoting affiliate products to your customers, readers or subscribers, or by creating your own affiliate program. Earlier this month, Moms-Business-Coach.com was the first stop of the Blogging Tour by Moms Talk Network where we started with the topic “What Is Affiliate Marketing?”

It’s no secret that I love affiliate marketing because if you are a true (ethical) affiliate marketer, you are helping to spread the word about good, quality and worthwhile products and resources. The same products and resources that you would tell your friends and family or co-workers about during a normal conversation.. the difference is you have a little tracking code and get a little (sometimes big) kickback commission for it.

I provide all my offline class participants a resource list that is full of my affiliate links at http://www.internetbusinessexpress.com/resources.html but I have personally purchased, reviewed, or used every single one of those products. I have also removed products or services from that list.

Having an affiliate program is often an overlooked, but easy, way of building traffic to your website. After all, who would you link and promote first- a website that is going to pay you for visitors you send them or the website that just gives you link back to your site? Of course, backlinks are valuable to any website, IF they are providing a quality and worthwhile backlink and not just seeping the “Google Juice” from your site…. but that’s another blog post.

When starting an affiliate program there are many areas to consider including software for tracking, promotion and recruiting and your overall strategy and desired end goal.  In Moms Talk Biz, How To Start An Affiliate Program , they cover the Pay Per Lead strategy in addition to paying your affiliates a commission on sales.

Are you a Clickbank Publisher struggling to recruit new affiliates? Many people have the idea they can become an instant information publisher by creating an ebook and posting it for sale on Clickbank and thousands of Clickbank affiliates will flock to them and sell, sell, sell.  While this is possible, I found this great trick that unless you spend some serious time on Clickbank or use it often you may have missed for easily letting people know about your Clickbank Affiliate Program.

From the Clickbank blog:

# Join My Affiliate Program link: With ClickBank’s Join My Affiliate Program (JMAP) link, you can also recruit affiliates directly. Just keep in mind that affiliates are required to establish a ClickBank account so that we can track their sales, send them checks and provide them with the information needed to refer potential customers to your products. In order to enroll your new recruits, all you need to do is add the JMAP link to your affiliates page, if you have one. Here’s what happens when you submit a potential affiliate via the JMAP link:

1. We ask them for their ClickBank nickname. If they have no nickname, we ask them to sign up with a ClickBank account, which is FREE for affiliates
2. We show them how to make a HopLink to promote your products
3. We close our JMAP window so they end up back at your site

Your JMAP links must be targeted to a new window, and should be in the following format:

That would end up looking like this….

CLICK HERE

Here’s how to make it work…

1. Replace VENDOR with your vendor nickname.
2. Replace CLICK HERE with any promotional text or image you prefer.
3. Leave target=jmap alone. This is what makes the link open in a new window.

That simple strategy can make it easier for you to mention your affiliate program in emails or social media outlets.

Do you already have Affiliates?

What Are You Doing To Motivate Them?

My Top Five List:

1. Tools – Make it drop dead simple for an affiliate to promote your product. Give them banners, copy, Twitter Tweets, peel away ads, articles they can spin, blog post reviews. If you think you’re busy, remember super affiliates are promoting more then just you and the faster you can help them get their job done the better for you both.

2. Contests- Get interactive and find some cool prizes – the kind people wouldn’t splurge on themselves and then set up a contest for sales, leads, optins..

3. Provide Training- There are plenty of “newbie” affiliates that are just getting into affiliate marketing and especially for those niches that are not Internet Marketing the concept of “How To Be An Affiliate” is one they are still learning. My Simple Affiliate Training program is perfect for those busy business owners that want to help their affiliates learn all the different ways and resources they can promote their money making links. The Best Part? Business owners can put an entire year of affiliate training into place in less then 30 minutes of work- woohoo!

4. Video, Video and More Video – Video is such a heavy hitter now- you can use just a simple FLIP camera and record away or screen capture videos, it doesn’t matter your choice of style, just that you are doing them. Check out the free resource articles on using video at bud AskMrVideo and see just how easy it is to build traffic and recruit more affiliates while training the ones you have. You will build instant repertoire and creditability with your affiliates once they “get to know you” through video. If you really don’t like doing video? Simple Affiliate Training comes with video tutorials you can put into your affiliate center that show them how to set up a blog, do php redirects, submit Ezine articles and video reviews and more!

5. Viral ebook -Provide your affiliates with a re-brandable viral ebook that they can send out to their list and spread around that has there links cloaked inside. Everyone loves getting Freebies, and your affiliates will thank you for this sales making tool that again, they didn’t have to put much effort into.

Of course, never forget about the import topic of legalities around your affiliate program.  If you need insights and samples check out @eprussakov blog post on Affiliate Program Terms and Conditions

Here is to YOUR successful affiliate program!