Affiliates

Affiliates are - people who sell your product for you.

Affiliate programs are a good thing for all parties in the transaction:

• The manufacturer - Gets greater 'market penetration' (i.e. sells more) because he has an army of eager affiliates to sell his product in new and innovative ways...
  
  
• The affiliate - gets a decent product to sell, and a fair commision on each sale. They provide a means of getting the product 'out there' that the manufacturer wouldn't have on their own.
  
  
• The customer - gets a product that they may not have heard of at all if it wasn't for the affiliate.

As a webmaster you can be any of the above parties. Obvious business opportrunities present themselves with the first two:

• Selling your product via affiliates.
  If you have a good product - the chances are you're not a salesman. Even if you are you'll not dismiss the fact that people are endlessly inventive, and given a decent reward they'll sell your book, course, whatever for you in ways you'd never have thought of.
  
  Your affiliates will do a better job of selling than you would on your own.
  
  
• Creating a website to sell other peoples products.
  You may have the technical know-how, the energy and enthusiasm... but not the product. You may just want to learn web programming and need an aim... You may see a great product and think you could market it better. Other folk's affiliate programs could be just the thing!
  

If you have the product, you can do one of the following things to get an affiliates system in place:

• Use my Free PHP Affiliates Tracking Script!
  
  
• Use one of the cool affiliate systems listed in the resources section below.
  
  
• MakeLinks Super Affiliate Generator is a package of info and tools to help you find the best affiliates for your product.
  
  
• You could use a combination of the above to see which is best.
  
  

In theory, you should have found your most profitable keywords, created a spreadsheet with your potential allies etc... You should know exactly what your site is aiming for before choosing affiliates (See the keywords page for more details). If you do it the other way round - you might find that there are 10,000 other web-folk out there also trying to sell the same product!

If you're basing your theme-based website around a few carefully chosen affiliates (as current thinking goes), then you need to be very careful about which products you promote.

A superb free ebook on affiliates programs is: 'The Affiliate Masters Course' which is available in the free ebooks library. It's a touch biased towards their own product and longwinded, but it contains some really very useful info. If you're interested in creating a site to sell other peoples products I strongly suggest you read it!

James Martell's 'Affiliate Master Course' is well worth a read if you're serious about becoming an affiliate.

There's more affiliates programs on the 'net than you can shake a stick at!

Here's a list of excellent resources for the keen webmaster...

• Commision Junction. An affiliates management engine with loads of the greatest affiliate programs out there. Free to join. Definately worth checking out!
  
  
• AffiliateGuide.com A list of affiliate programs available, with top picks, categories etc...
  
  
• Want to know who's making the most at the affiliate game? Check out this fascinating page from ProfitPuppy
  
  
• ClickBank can help with either side of this transaction! If you have products to sell - you register them with Clickbank. Anyone can come along and sign up as an affiliate to sell any of the products on Clickbank's database. - Check out clickbank's huge database of affiliate programs!