The Easy Way to Set Up an Affiliate Program

Most of you are already familiar with
affiliate programs, but for those who are
not, here's a brief description from the
affiliates point of view.
In essence affiliate programs or associate
programs are revenue sharing arrangements
where companies (merchants, which would be
you) pay webmasters commission for sending
them customers.
You are paid a commission if the person buys
a product or service, (Pay Per Sale - Most
Popular Option), clicks on an affiliate link
(Pay Per Click - Less popular due to fraud)
or simply fills out a form (Pay Per Lead -
Also Very Popular).
Basically affiliate programs are programs
that enable you to sell other peoples
products for a percentage of the sale. They
are also a very hot topic at the moment. To
see a comprehensive list of affiliate
programs you can join, visit
. You can
virtually sell anything online now thanks to
affiliate programs.
So let's say you sell a book on how to
improve your golfing game on the Internet
and you've exhausted your pool of
advertising sources and you need fresh
leads. The best way to go about this would
be to start your own affiliate program and
pay people a percentage of the sale.
For example, if your book is selling for
$47, don't be afraid to give people 50 to
60% of the profits of each sale. Why?
Because it's costing you nothing in
advertising and you get to keep the customer
for life. So imagine if you then had another
product for sale for $97, you could then
advertise this product to your existing
customer base and it would cost you nothing.
Affiliate programs are great for the
merchant (product owner) because it's risk
free. You only pay your affiliates when they
get their leads to perform an action (IE,
buy something from you) so it costs you
nothing. Of course if you have physically
create and ship your product, those would be
your only costs, and even now that can be
avoided by going solely online.
So by using the example of the golfing book,
you can do this. Instead of having a "real
book" so to speak, you could turn it into an
e-book and your customers can download it
online and it costs you nothing to ship or
create! Pure profits all round.