Entrepreneur Profit Ideas for Free Advertising Profitability

Since the birth of the internet one of the most powerful ways marketers have found to gain instant traffic is through the use of a free to join affiliate program.

What an affiliate program does is provide your visitors, customers and JV partners with a special tracking code (or cookie) that tracks their activity and referrals to you products. When someone buys through your affiliates link it tracks the sale and you pay them. You can pay them automatically or manually depending on the affiliate tracking software you use and how your management is set up.

We’ll get to that in a minute…

The benefits are…

• You only pay when someone makes a sale
• You get tons of inbound links
• You can turn your customers into sales people
• It doesn’t cost you anything to advertise. It’s free!
• You meet new people and can create Joint Venture’s

You have many choices to make when you are considering setting up and managing your affiliate program.

You can get in house programs like…

(*These affiliate scripts must be installed by you or your web manager)

• Launch Formula Marketing
• Butterfly Marketing
• JROX “Free” Affiliate Software
• 7 Dollar Script

or Third Party Programs like…

• Clickbank
• PayDotCom
• CJ - Commision Junction
• Linkshare

The choice is yours. When you choose to set up an in-house affiliate program one of the benefits is you brand your site by using your own domain name, although now many affiliate use encrypted or cloaked URL’s to promote products to avoid affiliate commission hijacking. The downside to an in-house script is you are responsible to manage it or outsource someone reliable to manage it.

If you choose a third party provider you can expect them to manage payroll and some of the setup and maintenance of your program but typically at a higher cost and it doesn’t brand you. You are also limited with how you customize your program to fit your sites theme.

Regardless of which method you use you should always provide your affiliates with plenty of great tools for promotion.

You can see a good example here: (just click on the affiliate link)
Get Google Ads Free Affiliate Page

This is one of the best affiliate pages I’ve ever seen. Currently better than any of mine. (I plan to change that soon!

You should always include a wide variety of “tools” for your affiliates and JV partners including banners, promo emails, sample blog posts, a keyword list and even a basic affiliate training course to get your affiliates going in the right (profitable) direction. The more options you give your affiliates the more likely they are to use one or more of your tools, make money themselves, and of course make you money.

Personally I use Launch Formula Marketing, Clickbank and the 7 dollar script for my sites.

The Seven Dollar Script is a good option if you are just getting started. The newest version has most of the bugs worked out and you can get expansion packs. All you need is a PayPal account, an email address, and the script takes care of the rest. It will automatically pay your referrals directly to their account so you don’t even need to manage payroll. If you are looking for a fast way to make some money this is probably the best solution as all sales go directly into your PayPal account. The only downside is you will need to install the script yourself or find someone to do it for you.

Clickbank is another good starter option. It costs you about $50 to get set up and they have a large network of affiliates to get you started. Their credit card processing fees are higher than most other options but if you want less paperwork and easy setup this option works great.

I am currently changing many of my sites to work with Launch Formula Marketing.

Besides having a very responsive support team the script can be configured to handle almost anything. They have several payment options including PayPal, accepting Credit Cards (authorize.net) and 2CO (2 Check Out). It will automatically add your new members to your autoresponder and integrates easily with phpBB forums (free and open source) so you can create an online community for your niche.

Choose your Affiliate program software based on your needs and remember that the key to expanding your affiliate network is providing as many useful tools as possible and making an ongoing effort to find new JV partners.

To Your Extreme Profits from Affiliates…

Jae Jans

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