How
to Increase Sales Through Affiliate Programs
Affiliate
or associate programs pay commissions to you when you refer visitors
to their products or services who make a purchase. You can profit
from setting up your own affiliate program to sell ebooks at other
web sites or through joining other affiliate programs.
Imagine
the leveraging power of having hundreds of web sites selling your
ebooks. Ebooks are ideal products for affiliate networks. Match
your ebook content to appropriate web sites, offer a percentage
of each sale to the web site and your network of partners will quickly
grow.
I
highly recommend the affiliate program at ClickBank
. for your ebooks. Their system attracts many high traffic
web site owners and the process is completely automated.
Many
of the profitable companies selling books and products online actively
seek affiliate partners. Amazon.com
and BarnesandNoble.com
have several hundred thousand affiliates. Some affiliates earn
upwards of thousands of dollars each month.
Increase
your own web site profits by joining other affiliate plans and display
links or ads to their product on your site. They pay you a commission
on every sale. One of the keys to affiliate marketing success is
promoting products or services related to your subject matter and
that you use and enjoy yourself.
Ebooks
provide an excellent avenue for promoting additional products and
services by linking to affiliate web sites online. You can include
hyperlinks embedded with your affiliate code to resources your reader
can click straight through to.
You
can set up affiliate links to any product or service related to
your ebooks. Simply join appropriate affiliate programs and place
your affiliate links in your content.
Setting
up your own affiliate program
Consider
paying out from 20% to 50% on each sale. Commissions for less than
20% will most likely fail to attract and motivate many associates.
Seek
web sites with a related customer base. That is, if you were looking
for dealers of your ebooks on angels, you would approach or market
to web sites with angel and related themes. For example, potential
affiliate web sites for angel ebooks include art or crafts selling
angel products, religious sites, gift cards and posters.
With
a little imagination, you can probably come up with hundreds of
potential affiliate sites. Email the webmasters or site owners announcing
your affiliate program. Your message can be brief and friendly while
pointing to your web page affiliate FAQ for further details. Offer
partnering sites autoresponders with free sample chapters that include
their affiliate partner's link for purchasing the ebook.
Services
that manage affiliate programs
Rather
than setting up your own management system, its much more profitable
to use software or a service provider that automates the entire
affiliate management operation.
Most
software package programs I have seen are fairly expensive - from
$200 to $750. Even with software to help, you still need to maintain
the operation which takes time. See http://2-tier.com
for a list.
An
easier solution is to use a service provider who can set up and
manage your affiliate program through a web site that automates
the tasks of enrolling new members and tracking commissions.
The
following services cost from $49 to $500 or more to set up, but
they offer you the most freedom and the fastest set up time for
managing your affiliate program. They are also the place to shop
for other affiliate programs you might want to join.
If
you have programming experience and choose to do it yourself, see
the list of perl scripts suitable for affiliate programs at http://www.perlarchive.com/guide/Affiliate_Programs/.
Making
money from other affiliate programs
Another
way to profit from online bookstore affiliate programs is to get
your books listed on Amazon and BarnesandNoble. Then, approach web
sites with related content to yours and encourage them to become
affiliates with the online bookstores so that they can profit from
recommending your books. Since you are the publisher, all orders
eventually have to come from you or your distributors.
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[affiliate program]
 This
article is copyrighted and excerpted from the book Your
Guide to Ebook Publishing Success by James
Dillehay, past member of the advisory board to the National
Craft Association.
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now
No
portion of this material may be published, resold or reproduced
in any form including electronically for any purposes.
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