Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is selling on a commission basis through others, and has two advantages. It multiplies your selling outlets, and it predisposes visitors to buy your book because they see your work recommended elsewhere.

Principles

Affiliate marketing is much used on the Internet, and in fact the more popular products are marketed not by dozens but thousands or tens of thousands of sites. Some companies have their own affiliate marketing schemes — Amazon books is a well-known example — but the vast majority use a third party, an ASP (affiliate solution provider). Sites marketing a product want to see their live sales figures: number of visitors to a page, the clickthroughs on the advert, the number of clickthroughs converted into sales, and the commissions resulting. They also want their commission receipts sent promptly to their bank accounts, and to be able to see how those receipts vary as they change the sales copy or layout of the page. It's big business, and the larger affiliate solution providers handle $ millions every day.

Affiliate Marketing: Finding Your ASP

Now of course you can do everything yourself — buy your own software, install it, create banners or text links for your marketers to place on your sites, answer queries, calculate the commissions and send out the cheques every month. But the software is not cheap and the work is immense. Only the very large companies do this, or the small software developers who have inhouse expertise. Affiliate Marketing for the vast majority means using the appropriate affiliate solution provider.

They are not difficult to find — simply use an Internet search engine to look for "affiliate marketing" or "affiliate solution provider" — but how do you find the right one? Ideally, you would do your homework, noting in particular:

  • client list. Ask for testimonials, and permission to approach clients.

  • fees. Three sets of fees are usually imposed: a setup or initiation fee, a monthly maintenance charge, and a commission on sales. All three vary widely, from nil in some categories to charges in the thousands of dollars per month.

  • exclusivity. You are not generally tied to using the one affiliate solution provider, but check should you ever expect to complicate matters.

  • tiers of commission. Affiliates will want to know if they can introduce others to your product and earn a share of the extra commission.

  • specialisation. Is the provider likely to find you the right sort of affiliate? Check their client list.

  • setup details. Your affiliates will probably be given a few lines of code to simply paste into their websites, but again ask: anything complicated, involved programming expense, will not be popular.

  • terms and conditions. Ensure you understand the regulations and can live with them.

Once you're accepted, the ASP provides details of your book to its thousands of marketers, and no more work is required of you.

Books are sold this way, though not many poetry books, unfortunately, where sales are comparatively small. In fact, you'll probably have to look at it the other way, trying to convince the ASP that you're worth taking on. You visit ASP sites, find one that seems interested in your level of business, and then enter your details into its online form. In the following days the ASP will scrutinize your site and products, and assess your money-making capabilities.

Therefore make sure everything is looking professional, and works seamlessly. Your ranking in the search engines won't concern the ASP, but it will spot typos, broken links or copy that doesn't seem to saying anything.

Once you're accepted you can watch your sales figures online. If you're thriving, the ASP will keep you on. If not, it may ask you to go elsewhere.

Yes, it's a tough world, but affiliate marketing does bring good profits for those who get it right.

You'll find more information, and Internet references on poetrymagic.co.uk.

 

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