What if you could get thousands of other websites bloggers, and businesses to send you customers to you…

Would you share the sale with them as well?

This is a strategy that many of our mentoring clients have used to multiply their sales and their profits many times over.

Using this strategy, you could literally develop an ARMY of associates that will sell your product for you.

This week’s video clip explains s the steps involved in setting up your own affiliate commission program.

Here’s the video clip –

Click here to watch the video

If you have any questions about this topic, please leave a comment below or join us for the next live training on Wednesday at 11am Pacific Time.

Talk to you soon,

Chuck Anderson & The IMC Team

P. S. Could you use some help with your business? Click this link to learn more about the weekly Internet Entrepreneur Club training webinars … click here for details.

Tip 1: Try The Product First

Have you found an affiliate product you’re interested in promoting?

We strongly urge you to try it yourself first.Then you’ll be able to offer an honest recommendation. Talk to other people who have purchased it as well. Make sure you are recommending a high-quality product from a company that is reputable enough to back up what they sell.

And check their customer service too. How do they treat you over the phone? Do they put you on hold for hours? Then you should be concerned that customers you refer to them will have similar experiences.

Tip 2: Hold Out For Generous Commissions

It’s perfectly reasonable for you to expect to be paid 20% to 50% of the profits on each product sold. If the company only offers 5% to 10%, keep on looking. You should only do business with affiliate companies that understand the “lifetime value” of new customers you refer, and appreciate your efforts enough to offer the commissions you deserve.

Tip 3: Look For A High Sales Conversion Ratio

Before you join a company’s affiliate program, make sure the company’s website is turning a reasonable number of visitors into sales. If their website doesn’t have a decent conversion rate, then all the effort you put into directing traffic to their site will be wasted.

Look for sites that have at least a 1% conversion ratio (in other words, 1 out of every 100 visitors makes a purchase). Check out their website and their salescopy to see if it makes YOU want to buy. After all, it’s your job to send them targeted traffic — but it’s their job to turn these prospects into paying customers.

Tip 4: Make Sure You’ll Get Credit For Every Sale

Before you join a company’s affiliate program, find out what kind of tracking software they use. Look for a program that uses reliable affiliate tracking software that tracks all of your sales.

You want to make sure that they track phone, fax, and snail-mail orders, as well as any that are made directly on the website. Many companies only track online orders — which means their affiliates don’t get credit for anywhere from 5% – 10% of the sales they help the company make!

Also, make sure the affiliate program you join uses “cookie tracking.” This ensures that you’ll be credited for the purchase made by people who don’t buy on their first time to the site, but return to buy something on a future visit.

Tip 5: Make Sure They Offer Sales Statistics in Real Time

When you join an affiliate program, the company should give you a special username and password that you can use to access your own personal affiliate sales information on their website whenever you want. These should be real-time statistics that allow you to see exactly how many sales you have made.

With real-time statistics, you can discover exactly how well different banners, text links, and recommendations are doing. For example, with a bit of testing, you might discover that a product review on your Reviews page doesn’t pull nearly as well as a personal recommendation on your blog.

That’s the kind of information you need to ensure that your affiliate marketing efforts are yielding maximum results.

Tip #6: Make Sure They Offer Resources to Help You Generate Sales

A good affiliate program will provide you with everything you need to be successful. They’ll provide you with traffic-generating banners, text links, and recommendation letter templates. They’ll tell you which techniques work well in which circumstances.

Because their success is linked with yours, the affiliate program you join should be ready, willing, and able to teach you everything you need to know to start earning excellent commissions.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #1: Choose Quality Products

You must remember that when you promote affiliate products on your website, every recommendation you make reflects directly on you. If you recommend a good-quality affiliate product or service that is reasonably priced, your customers and subscribers will trust you and be interested in future recommendations that you make.

… But if you recommend something that fails to live up to its claims, then your visitors are going to assume you’re just another marketer who’s only trying to sell to them and your credibility will take a major hit.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #2: Try the Product First

Have you found an affiliate product you’re interested in promoting? Then we strongly urge you to try it yourself first. It’s hard to offer an honest recommendation of a product or service you have no experience with. If you are really serious about joining a particular affiliate marketing program, we recommend that you do your homework first.

Try the product or service yourself. Talk to other people who have purchased it. Make sure that you are recommending a high-quality product that comes from a company that offers great customer service and is reputable enough to back up what they sell with a strong guarantee.

That’s the best way to ensure your visitors value your recommendations and come back for more.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #3: Hold Out for Generous Commissions

It’s perfectly reasonable for you to expect to be paid 20% to 50% of the profits on each product sold. If the company only offers 5% to 10%, we suggest you keep on looking. You should only do business with affiliate companies that understand the “lifetime value” of new customers you refer, and appreciate your efforts enough to offer the commissions you deserve.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #4: Look for a High
Sales Conversion Ratio

Before you join a company’s affiliate program, make sure the company’s website is turning a reasonable number of visitors into sales. If their website doesn’t have a decent conversion rate, then all the effort you put into directing traffic to their site will be wasted.

Look for sites that have at least a 1% conversion ratio (in other words, 1 out of every 100 visitors makes a purchase). Check out their website and their salescopy to see if it makes YOU want to buy. After all, it’s your job to send them targeted traffic — but it’s their job to turn these prospects into paying customers.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #5: Make Sure You’ll Get Credit for Every Sale

Before you join a company’s affiliate program, find out what kind of tracking software they use. Look for a program that uses reliable affiliate tracking software that tracks all of your sales.

We emphasize “all” because you want to make sure that they track phone, fax, and snail-mail orders, as well as any that are made directly on the website. Many companies only track online orders — which means their affiliates don’t get credit for anywhere from 5% – 10% of the sales they help the company make!

Also, make sure the affiliate program you join uses “cookie tracking.” This ensures that you’ll be credited for the purchase made by people who don’t buy on their first time to the site, but return to buy something on a future visit.

With cookie tracking, you can be sure that you are being credited for all of your affiliate sales… including online orders, mail orders, faxed orders, phone orders, and orders from customers who come back weeks or even months later.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #6: Make Sure They Offer Sales Statistics in Real Time

When you join an affiliate program, the company should give you a special username and password that you can use to access your own personal affiliate sales information on their website whenever you want. These should be real-time statistics that allow you to see exactly how many sales you have made.

This is important because real-time statistics allow you to see how well your promotions are doing. You can see…

• How many visitors have clicked through from your site to theirs
• How many of those visitors made a purchase
• How many sub-affiliates you have
• Your sales totals for that month and previous months

… plus a whole lot more!

With real-time statistics, you can discover exactly how well different banners, text links, and recommendations are doing. For example, you might discover after some testing that a banner on your resource page doesn’t pull nearly as well as a personal recommendation under your newsletter subscription box.

That’s the kind of information you need to ensure that your affiliate marketing efforts are yielding maximum results.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #7: Make Sure They Offer Resources to Help You Generate Sales

A good affiliate program will provide you with everything you need to be successful. They’ll provide you with traffic-generating banners, text links, and recommendation letter templates. They’ll tell you which techniques work well in which circumstances.

Because their success is linked with yours, the affiliate program you join should be ready, willing, and able to teach you everything you need to know to start earning excellent commissions.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #8: Make Sure the Company Has a Good Reputation

This might seem obvious, but we can’t help but stress the importance of doing business with a reputable company. We know many people who have worked really hard, made a lot of sales for a company, and then have never been paid (or have been forced to wait months and months to get their money).

If you have any questions or concerns about an affiliate marketing company, ask for references and do some checks on them. You want to make sure they are very professional before you join their program.

For example, if you phone them and they’re rude to you, they put you on hold forever, or you get an answering machine, then you should be concerned that customers you refer to them will have similar experiences.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #9: Do NOT Sign An Exclusivity Clause

Before you join any affiliate program, read all contracts and agreements very carefully. Pay very close attention to exclusivity clauses in the agreement.

Some companies will stipulate that you only sell “their” affiliate products on your website and won’t let you join other affiliate programs. For example, if you joined a book-selling program, they might state in their contract that you can only sell “their” books.

We strongly urge you NOT to sign any affiliate agreement or contract that restricts you like this. Otherwise you will be missing out new opportunities to make money on your affiliate site — and any company that denies your right to make more money doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #10: Only Promote What’s Relevant to Your Market

And here’s the big one – make sure the products you’re recommending are products your niche market would want to buy! You could recommend Internet marketing materials on your fly-fishing site until you’re blue in the face, but you’re not going to make any money, and you could even drive visitors away.

To be successful as an affiliate you should zero in on a niche market and give them valuable information that makes them trust you. Then you can recommend affiliate products that they would be interested in… and they’ll respond.

So those are our top 10 affiliate marketing tips on how to identify profitable affiliate marketing opportunities. If you’d like to learn more of our top affiliate marketing tips, share your questions with us in the comments.

Here’s our best advice to you: If you want to join an affiliate marketing program and make lucrative commissions promoting that company’s products through your website, then you have got to find a viable niche market FIRST.

…Because if you join a bunch of different affiliate marketing programs and start promoting a bunch of different products to a large, unfocused, general group of people, you’re going to find it extremely difficult to succeed online.

You need to be able to identify a narrow, targeted group of people who share a common problem — and THEN offer them products that solve that problem. It’s the only way to guarantee your chance of success with an affiliate marketing program.

So. Before you even *think* of joining an affiliate marketing program, we strongly urge you to do extensive research using a keyword analysis tool such as the Google AdWords Keyword Tool or the keyword tool built into our complete point-and-click online business builder, BeBiz.

Or, if you want to save yourself many hours of time and effort, you could use our 5-Minute Business Finder software tool, which walks you through all the steps involved in keyword research and crunches the numbers for you so you can discover viable niche markets in five minutes or less. (Click here to learn more about this one-of-a-kind Internet marketing tool.)

Your keyword research will help you identify a niche market of people who are searching for a solution to a common problem without much success. Once you find your niche, only should you start searching for an affiliate marketing program to join. Look for a company that offers products your niche market would be interested in buying.

By recommending affiliate products you’re sure your market will love, you will go a long way to ensuring the success of your website.

To find out where to start your search, check out this article: Three Great Ways to Find Profitable Affiliate Programs.

If you’re looking for a reputable affiliate program to join, we recommend you stick to the better-known affiliate directories and networks when you start your research.

There are three kinds of places where you should focus your search for good affiliate programs…

1. Affiliate directories

Affiliate directories are a great source of information about affiliate marketing programs. In order to be listed in
the more reputable directories, like AssociatePrograms.com and AffiliatesDirectory.com, affiliate programs must submit a formal application for review. Only programs that meet certain specifications, such as reliable tracking,
are accepted.

In fact, AssociatePrograms.com freely admits that they reject over half of all applications for listings they receive.

2. Affiliate networks

Affiliate networks are third-party solution providers who list hundreds (usually thousands) of affiliate marketing programs, all indexed and managed using their own personal systems and software.

Essentially, the affiliate network acts as the middleman between you and the affiliate marketing program, tracking your sales independently and making sure that you get paid. You sign up as a participating affiliate (it costs you nothing), and you’re given access to their list of affiliate marketing programs.

There are fees for the affiliate program to join, though, so chances are if they’ve paid those fees, it’s unlikely they’re a fly-by-night operation.

If you choose to go this route, the top three affiliate networks that we recommend are:

1. Commission Junction
2. ClickXchange
3. LinkShare

3. Individual websites

Another way you can find affiliate marketing programs is simply to visit twebsites that offer products you’re interested in promoting. If the site you visit has an affiliate program, it will be promoted on the site itself.

The benefit of going this route is that the less popular affiliate programs will often offer better deals. As well, their products will usually not be as exposed.

… We hope that points you in the right direction! If you have any more questions about affiliate marketing programs, please share them with us in the comments.

The rules aim to protect consumers from:

• unrealistic expectations
• unverified results claims
• paid endorsements disguised as editorial content
• endorsements that don’t tell the truth

Here are the basics:

Testimonials

Testimonials turbocharge your marketing. If you can quote happy customers who have achieved great results, it’s almost as powerful as somebody recommending your product to a friend.

And of course you always want to quote the happiest customers who have achieved the greatest results.

Until now, all you had to do was add a disclaimer saying “Results not typical” and you were within the law. Now you need to:

• Verify that the person giving the testimonial has actually achieved the stated results
• Verify the typical results a consumer can expect to achieve, and state them (e.g., “Most consumers will save $20 – $35 per month using this product.”)
• Verify that the testimonial still stands if you make a change to the product being endorsed

That means it’s still okay to use testimonials that boast about spectacular results as long as you also make it clear what the average results are. Check the FTC’s official guide for examples demonstrating what is acceptable and what isn’t.

Endorsements

This one is a much bigger can of worms.

Endorsements are a highly effective way to get word out about your product or service. People in a buying frame of mind seek out good reviews and recommendations on other sites before they make their decision.

So smart online marketers offer free products for bloggers to try… or put their products in pay-per-post programs where bloggers get paid for reviewing them… or get their products mentioned on their affiliates’ websites.

That way, they get word of mouth PLUS links back to their site (which are invaluable for search engine optimization).

Now the FTC wants anyone endorsing a product on their own website to “disclose clearly and conspicuously” when they are being compensated for their services.

The spirit of these rules is to ensure that anything that appears as a spontaneous endorsement actually reflects the true opinions, experience, and beliefs of the person doing the endorsing.

If there’s a chance that that person’s opinions, etc. might have been swayed by money, free product, or other considerations, then they must disclose.

However, there are so many gray areas in here it’s almost impossible to figure out what “compensation” is. If a blogger gets a freebie and writes about it, is that compensation? Depends on the value of the item, how often this blogger is given free samples, and how the blogger got it for free in the first place.

How about affiliates? Looks like they’re covered by this:

“When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience), such connection must be fully disclosed.”

AdSense advertisers? Social media posters? We can think of lots of other cases that might lie in that gray area, and don’t appear to be covered in detail in the full-on 81-page document. Still, if you think you might be affected, better read it.

Who’ll be affected most? “Review” bloggers and affiliates, seeing they’re the ones who have the clearest and most consistent relationships with producers.

How will this change affect you? Let us know what you think about it.

He’ll tell you how to avoid the mistakes that so many new affiliate marketers make.

So how do you motivate them?

Well, it’s actually pretty simple! Give them the tools and information they need to share you with their visitors and subscribers, and then make sure they know you appreciate their time and effort.

Unfortunately, many folks who start affiliate programs think their job ends when they sign up a group of marketers… when really, they’re just getting started! It doesn’t take a lot of effort to provide your affiliates with great resources, but if you skip this “prep step”, you’ll find that no one will be too excited to spread the word.

So if you’ve got an affiliate program, or you’re thinking about starting one — OR you’re looking to assess how good an affiliate program is BEFORE you join it — here’s a quick list of the Top Seven Things Your Affiliates WISH You’d Give Them…

• Fair commissions: We put it first because it’s SO important — if you’re not giving your affiliates a significant portion of the business they refer to you, it’s simply not worth their while to promote you to their list and their visitors. After all — the credibility of their recommendation is on the line! We recommend you offer 20% to 50% commission on every sale. It might seem like a lot, but you wouldn’t have had that sale otherwise… OR any of the revenue you’ll generate when that customer buys again, straight from you!
• Salescopy: What’s so special about your product? Why can’t your customer do without it? You have the answers to these questions — so make sure your affiliates do, too! Give them plenty of benefit-rich copy to get your message across effectively to guarantee better conversions — which will make both you AND your affiliate happy!
• Graphics and photos: What good is it to have your product promoted on another website if the ad or image doesn’t do it justice? Provide quality images and graphics for your affiliates so they can put YOUR best foot forward! That includes any banner or sidebar ads you provide, or photos for reviews. The best way to provide both copy AND graphics is to set up an Affiliate Resource Center on your website where affiliates can sign in to get everything they need.
• Special deals or offers: Do your customers rush to take advantage of special offers and sales? Well, so will your affiliates! If you’re offering discounts or deals of any kind, make sure to let them know so they can use that angle to promote your products. Make sure to think up a few special deals for JUST your affiliates to offer, too!
• Product updates: If you change any of your products in any way, let your affiliates know right away. It could create serious hassles for them if they’re misrepresenting what you offer (in terms of product features, pricing, etc.)
• Timely payments: The BEST way to make your affiliates feel loved? Pay them commissions on time! Many people who run affiliate programs find this to be the biggest argument for using an affiliate management program or system — the payments are automatic and reliable. But f you can’t remember to pay people… don’t expect them to remember to talk about your product!
• Timely response: The second best way to make your affiliates feel loved is to provide great customer service. If they’re having trouble with some element of your program, make sure to follow up right away and get things sorted out. Not only will you ensure that your affiliates stay active, but you’ll also avoid the potential flip side of great affiliate marketing — a bad public review of your program!

We’d love to hear about your experiences with affiliate programs, and any tips or suggestions you’ve got on running a great affiliate program.

Give us a shout in the comments!