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Affiliate or Referral Program

If you own a website that sells a service, hand-made products, or an informational product that you’ve created, then an affiliate program can help you to get more traffic - and make more money in the process.

What is an Affiliate Program?

Affiliate or referral programs reward people for bringing them customers.

There are three types of affiliate programs:

Pay Per Click, Pay Per Lead or Pay Per Sale. If you’re considering paying for traffic, then you’ll want to check out our article about benefiting from pay per click traffic.

In this article, we’d like to talk about Pay Per Sale. That means that you’ll only pay your affiliates for sending you customers, not just for sending you leads or traffic. So, you pay them money only if they make you money.

I like to compare the Pay Per Sale model to Realtors. They make a commission from each house they sell. If they don’t sell any houses for six months, they don’t make any money during that time. If they sell 100 houses, they make a lot of money.

What are the other benefits of starting an affiliate program?

The benefits are great with an affiliate program. You get exposure from having others spread the word about your product or services, and your work is less than if you tried to do it all alone. You and your loyal affiliates both benefit.

How do you start an affiliate program?

There are several programs available for starting an affiliate program. Before you start, really consider how much growth you plan to have in the coming year.

If you only plan to launch one info product (or electronic product) and want to get it out quickly, then we recommend Clickbank.

Pros: Simple and inexpensive to start. They handle all payments.

Cons: Difficult to track and train your affiliates. You pay per transaction so, if your product becomes very successful, your monthly expenses may become higher than if you had a shopping cart.

If you plan to grow and have multiple products (or you have products that aren’t electronic, like food or skin care), you may want to look into a shopping cart system that has an affiliate program built in like WAHMCart or QuickPayPro.

Pros: All-inclusive. No "per-transaction" fees. Includes a follow-up responder.

Cons: Monthly fee.

That gives you an idea of where to begin to set up your affiliate program. How do you keep your affiliates loyal and happy? That’s another article.