How To Simply Setup Affiliate Marketing Programs

Affiliate programs (also known as referral programs or partnership programs) provide a flood of traffic to your site for next to nothing. When you implement an affiliate program on your site, you establish a 'pay for performance' relationship with those who sign up as your affiliate. The affiliate runs his or her own separate marketing campaign in order to advertise his unique affiliate url which tracks the visitors he sends to your site. 

If a visitor makes a purchase, the affiliate is credited for the sale and receives a commission (a percentage of the sale).

You can see the power of this method immediately when you recognize that your affiliates essentially provide you with free advertising.

  You only pay when a sale is made. True, you do pay out a portion of your profits – but what you make back is far more than what you're spending.

Why? Because affiliates increase your site's visibility. Even long after you've moved on to another project, another site...all of those affiliate links pointing to your site are still 'out there', spread across the web in articles, emails, e-books and affiliate web pages. Broad exposure such as this brings you a steady stream of traffic and sales for months to come.

Think of it this way: you can sell 1,000 copies of a $20 product and keep the profits to yourself to the tune of $70,000 or you can enlist an army of affiliates who sell 3,000 copies of the same product for a 50% ($10.00) commission, and you net $30,000!

Setting up an affiliate program is not difficult. One of the easiest places to do it is at Amazon.

Amazon has an affiliate system built in and ready to go the moment your product is approved for sale. 

Also, an added benefit is the “marketplace directory” model employed on site.  Most products sold through Amazon appear in the marketplace organized by category. Active affiliate marketers know this and seek out new merchants in the marketplace on a regular basis.

If you're using a different payment processor, like Paypal for instance, you will need to purchase server-side scripts to run your own affiliate program and host it on your site.

Alternatively, you can try some of the newer solutions on the market such as Voguepay. The above services are “all in one” automation solutions for selling and delivering digital goods like e-books.