Affiliate Programme(2)

Affiliate Commission Types
There are basically three main types of affiliate commission – Pay Per Sale, Pay Per Lead/ Action and finally, Pay Per Click.

(1) Pay Per Sale
This is the most common form of affiliate payment. You will only pay your affiliates commission when they manage to make a sale for you. Affiliate commissions range from 5% to 75% per sale, depending on the product/ services that you are selling. For electronic products or EBooks, it is common to see merchants offering commissions of 50% to 75% of the sale due to the low cost.

(2) Pay Per Lead/ Action
You only pay your affiliates when they referred a lead (visitor) to your site and carry out an action (e.g. filling up an online form). As such, you will need to define specifically what qualifies as a lead and the specific action that the person has taken such that commissions will only be paid out after the completion of this action. This type of affiliate commission is very common and popular for insurance or property agencies where they pay affiliate marketers for every quality lead (where usually the visitor gives much of their personal particulars and contact numbers).

(3) Pay Per Click
This is the least common form of affiliate payment where you pay your affiliates for every click that visitors click on your advertisement. The payment is typically very low – usually between $0.01 to $0.30 per click.

How To Choose An Affiliate Program
There are two ways of creating an affiliate program. Each has its own benefits and limitations. You have to evaluate your own business to decide which one suits your business model. In general, if you are just starting out, it is best to start with the second type – the affiliate networks (agents).

(1) In-House Affiliate Program

Unlike affiliate networks, creating an in-house affiliate program will offer you the full affiliate management control as you are the one to set your own rules. In addition, you can control and decide on a flexible affiliate commission/ payout structure where you can offer 2 or even 3 tiers of affiliate commissions, which is attractive to marketers. You can also create any custom affiliate reports to suit any type of your business evaluation.

The limitation to any in-house affiliate program is that you have to manage the affiliate payouts by yourself. In addition, if you are just starting out and not established in the market yet, getting marketers to know your product is a problem. In addition, marketers may not trust you for fear of non-payment of their commission.


(2) Affiliate Networks (3rd Party)

The benefit of affiliate networks is thus the existing pool of affiliates ready to market your product. Affiliate marketers do not have to worry about non-payment of commission since these networks manages and pay the affiliates on behalf of the merchants. Although you are not able to create custom affiliate reports, you are still able to create consolidated sales and commission reporting from the various networks at affiliate network level. A list of popular affiliate networks are:

o http://www.clickbank.com
o http://www.paydotcom.com
o http://www.cj.com
o http://www.amazon.com
o http://www.linkshare.com
o http://www.performics.com

Affiliate Programme(1)

Introduction
Imagine you have a great product that sells well online. Say five out of 100 visitors you send to your website make a purchase. This will equate to a 5% conversion rate. However, the amount of sales generated will be limited by the amount of traffic you alone can drive to your website.

Now say you managed to recruit 100 affiliates to promote your product. Each affiliate has the potential to send hundreds of prospects to you. What’s more, each prospect would have been pre-sold on the benefits of your product. Can you imagine how many more sales and profits you would make?

This is the power of affiliate marketing!

Benefits Of An Affiliate Programme

If you become the affiliate of certain merchants and promote their products, you earn profits.Similarly, if you are the merchant now, selling a product or service, you can make use of this tool to help you increase in your sales.

The first and also one of the most attractive feature of creating an affiliate program is its low cost of setup. The main visible cost is the purchase of an affiliate program system to help you to keep track of your affiliates and the sales they bring in and also, to pay them. You can of course, keep track of your affiliates manually, but the key in internet marketing and your online business is Automation. You want to automate all the processes as far as possible.

Alternatively, you can also list your product with third party affiliate agents where they will manage the payment to your affiliates for you. If you are just starting out, this is a good choice as it takes one important function of your plate, reducing your workload for a start. Also, if you choose to have your product up in the third party affiliate agents, your website is thus listed in their database for affiliate marketers to market your products and when they do, they are indirectly helping you to drive more traffic to your site.

When you create an affiliate program for your product or services, there is literally little or no advertising cost. In addition, you only pay your affiliates when they make a sale for you, unlike your offline business where you have to hire marketers to market your products and still pay them a fixed salary (in most cases) even if they do not help you to make any sale.

As you should realize by now, creating affiliate programs have more benefits than you can imagine and it will help you to explode the sales of your products. Go ahead and create one for your own product or services today!

Online Networking using Twitter

If you are plan to start a business online, leads and reach more people, then you have come to the right place. You have likely heard about twitter and but you may not using its full potential.

Twitter is a great tool for thing like social networking and micro-blogging. To build an online business, we need to focus on relationship building aspect. Twitter is something similar to Facebook to make friends and figure out what is happening in their lives.
How to Increase Your Profits and Exposure Using Twitter
Do you know that as a businessman, you can really harness the power and the popularity of Twitter to promote your business and make it more profitable?

Anyway, you should be aware that sending too many tweets (Twitter text) can result in people on your list or those who are following you by not responding and it is sort of like a basic email list.

If you email someone too many times, they are going to get frustrated.

Normally people do not like to read a lot. Since Twitter only allows to send out a maximum number of characters of just 140, that means you need to clump all your audience into that 140 characters.

However, it will reach people quicker and with that said, people will be able to glance at your Twitter message which is less that 140 characters and they will get the idea right away because most people just do not think in complete sentences.

As a businessman , you can send text messages to your Twitter list, for example :

"60% discount for all digital products in the next 2 days ! "

So you give a discount plus and you use scarcity method which works wonders.

If you are a Facebook user, you can also integrate your Facebook with your Twitter, using Twables
Twables allows you to find your facebook friends who are using Twitter and if you tweet in Twitter, the same text will appear in your facebook wall, means you can reach out to both your Twitter and Facebook friends without having to tweet twice.