Question 1: How much commission should I offer in my affiliate program?

How much you offer will depend on the amount you can afford, taking into consideration the lifetime value of a customer, what your competition is doing and how attractive you can make your offer.

As a general statement, information products usually have a higher commission rate – often between 25-50% with the higher end being more common. Consumer products with smaller profit margins can be as low as 5%, but don’t often go above 20%.

But what you charge should be based on your own unique business. Here are some more things to help you come to a decision:

Sometimes it’s okay to pay a bit more for a first-time customer who will buy from you over and over again.

Always see what your competition is offering, but you don’t have to get into a commission war. Just make you can make your program very attractive through good conversion rates, unique and useful promotional tools and other attractive features.

Question 2: What kind of affiliate tools should I provide to my affiliates?

The simplest answer is: Give them what they want.

Talk to your affiliates and see what they need to serve their unique audience needs, and where possible, provide it to them.

For hard-hitting promotions, you can craft email copy, conduct live teleseminars with content and sales pitch, special reports, etc.

For the content-starved webmaster (and there are plenty out there), give them things like articles, free ebooks and other informational content.

The important thing is to listen to your affiliates and watch which tools convert best.

Question 3: Can I have an affiliate program with a service-based business?

Sure you can. If you have a profit margin or a lifetime customer value that allows you to pay commissions, certainly.

If you have services available that are at a set price, it’s easy to automate everything and run your program, just like a product-based one.

If you charge by the hour or have to give project estimates, it’s a little tougher to automate completely.

Here are a few options:

- Have a script that can track who referred your potential client to you. Ex. Affiliate recommends your service through a tracking link. Potential client clicks the link, checks out your website and fills out a form for more information. Your system tells you who referred the client and if they purchase your services, you can give the affiliate a commission.

- You could do it as a pay-per-lead opportunity where the affiliate is paid a smaller fee for every person that fills out the form for more information. This would be easy to automate in most affiliate systems that can handle pay-per-lead transactions.

- Don’t want to go with a full-blown affiliate program? You can institute a client referral program where you simply allow your clients to recommend your service, in return for credit for services. When a new client comes to you, you ask where they heard about you and you add a credit to your referring client’s account

An affiliate force is an incredibly powerful thing and when you consider you don’t have to pay affiliates anything until they produce results for you, it’s one of the best deals going in Internet marketing today. Plan your program well and you’ll soon have your own active force of affiliates bringing you new customers every day.

For more answers to your questions about starting and running your own profitable affiliate program that your affiliates will love, claim your copy of Alice Seba’s step-by-step Affiliate Manager Sweetie course.

I believe searching for the best product to promote is doing things completely backward. Yes, you can get recommendations from friends on products that sell well for them – but it all comes back to your target market and what they want.

The key to success in affiliate marketing is relevancy. If your target market is women over 65 interested in reducing wrinkles – you probably shouldn’t be bombarding them with satellite offers, even if your friend says satellites sell great!

If you want to make your projects work for the longterm, you need to start by finding a target market and deliver great information to them, establish your expertise and make sure you give them all kinds of irresistible offers. After all, it’s people who are going to buy your products – get to know them and exactly what they want before you try to sell to them.

Alice Seba is an online entrepreneur that has been earning a full-time income from affiliate programs since 2003. She thrives on helping people get ahead in their Internet businesses. If you’d like tips to help you increase your affiliate income, sign up for free here.

Good for you on trying to track things. Knowing exactly where your sales come from allows you to improve your offers to your website visitors and subscribers..and you can dramatically increase your profits by tracking.

CJ doesn’t specifically track where links are coming from, but you can definitely track with CJ. All you need to do is go into your account and click on “Account” in the top menu on the left

Then choose “Website Settings” and click “Add a New Website”. You can just put a descriptive name there that will help you track where your clicks and sales are coming from.

Alice Seba is an online entrepreneur that has been earning a full-time income from affiliate programs since 2003. She thrives on helping people get ahead in their Internet businesses. If you’d like tips to help you increase your affiliate income, sign up for free here.

As one of my favorite Internet marketing teachers, John Reese, says – People are going to buy from your commission no matter what you do. You may as well make some money doing it.

Having your own products often allows you a higher profit margin and you’ll be building your own list of customers that will buy from you over and over again. But sticking with your own products can be limiting.

Let’s say you’re writing an ecourse about getting a better night’s sleep and you have an ebook on the topic. Obviously, you’ll promote your ebook in the course, but there are other products you can recommend too. Perhaps some more comfortable pillows, eye masks or even a special herbal tea that encourages a more restful sleep. The possibilities are endless if you open your business up to promoting all the products your target market needs and desires.

Alice Seba is an online entrepreneur that has been earning a full-time income from affiliate programs since 2003. She thrives on helping people get ahead in their Internet businesses. If you’d like tips to help you increase your affiliate income, sign up for free here.

Yes, I definitely do and for a number of reasons. A lot of people do redirects to avoid people “stealing” commission. For example, if it is a ClickBank link, someone can see that and they can easily enter their own affiliate ID and collect the commission on their own purchase. I honestly don’t worry too much about this aspect. People who want to collect commissions for themselves will always find a way to do it…so let him. Besides, if you don’t sell to other Internet marketers, the chances of your referrals even knowing what affiliate programs are is pretty slim.

Here’s the reasons I redirect:

- Saves time – I make one easy-to-remember redirect link on my domain (ex. aliceseba.com/seobook.html) and I can use it over and over again. I don’t have to hunt down my link all the time. Of course, if I’m using special tracking, I may set up another link, but in most cases, this makes it a simpler process.

- Easy to change – If an affiliate link is no longer valid or the company goes out of business, it’s easy to change to an alternate product. If you use the link provided and you paste it all over your website, into ebooks and other places — those links won’t work anymore. If you redirect, you can simply change the link you are redirecting to on your server and there’s no need to update your pages or ebooks.

- Tracking – I like to see what my visitors and subscribers click on from. If the company doesn’t provide tracking, I can see my clickthrough stats this way.

- Shorter URLs – Many long affiliate links will break up in email and many of your subscribers won’t know why the link won’t work…and most probably won’t bother to ask. I also use this for ebooks in case people print them out. It’s easier to type in a short URL then a long cumbersome affiliate one.If you want to do a redirect, there are many ways to do it. I use a simple javascript redirect (but realize if your users don’t have javascript installed, the links won’t work).

Here’s how to do it:

Name the page whatever you’d like. For example: mydomain.com/bestsoftware.html

Then insert this html into the body of your html document (copy and paste into a text file first or you might get garbly goop):—————-<html><head><meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.linktolinkto”></head><body></body></html>—————-And voila! You’ve redirect your link and it’s easy to change and you can track clickthroughs anytime.

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Alice Seba is an online entrepreneur that has been earning a full-time income from affiliate programs since 2003. She thrives on helping people get ahead in their Internet businesses. If you’d like tips to help you increase your affiliate income, sign up for free here.