Before you create your ... program, or in the early stages, you need to make it is as easy as possible for your ... to make a sale. You should have your site tweaked to the point that the
Before you create your affiliate program, or in the early stages, you need to make it is as easy as possible for your affiliates to make a sale. You should have your site tweaked to the point that the only work your affiliates have to do is bring visitors to your site.
How do you do this? You have to keep testing your site, sales copy and so on till you get the best visitor to sale ratio you can.
Some of the things to test are the headline (extremely important), which benefits of your product you emphasize, price, your ad copy, and whatever you think may make a difference.
You also want to test to see which ads bring in the most visitors. The same is true for banners. Then you want to share all of these with your affiliates.
If you find that a particular text link works well, share the wording with your affiliates. Don't assume that your affiliates can write winning ads or create great banners, because they probably can't. Plus, by doing a little more work you'll be making a lot more money in the long run.
In my article, "Joining the Right Affiliate Program," I stress that it is important to realize that most of your success when you join an affiliate program depends on the amount of visitors you attract to your site. Simply put, you can't sell a product if you don't have a buyer.
You may want to make this clear to potential affiliates. A lot of people with affiliate programs complain about someone who builds their first web-site, joined their affiliate program, put a banner on his/her site, and a month later e-mail them to find out why they didn't make $1000 last month.
So what am I rambling about? You should decide whether you're going to let anyone sign up, only sites with good traffic, or maybe even warn of the difficulties sites with low traffic might have making sales.
The reason is that usually 10% of your affiliates make 90% of your sales. So it is a lot easier only having that 10%. They know what they are doing so you don't have to answer simple questions. It's easier sending out the checks. Basically you have more free time and less problems.
If you accept anyone who wants to join, you'll make some more money but you'll spend a lot more time on paper work, you'll have a lot more e-mail to answer and in general you'll just have more tedious work.
Only you can decide which is best for you. Some things to think about are how much money you want to make, how much free time you want to have, what kind of lifestyle you want to live and so on.
