Building a Small Army of Affiliates

The appeal of havingyour own affiliate program is undeniable

. The thought of immediately opening up your program to thousands of people who are ready, willing and able to start selling your product for you is deeply attractive to most people. Instead of investing a ton of money into advertising and marketing, you can outsource these tasks to a bunch of qualified people whom you don't have to pay a dime to unless they make a sale. Instead of using your own resources to spread the word on your excellent product or offer, you'll have a small army doing it for you. Here's how you canstart your own affiliate program.

The first thing that you need to know when you're about tostart your own affiliate program is the fact that there is a lot of hype around these programs. That doesn't mean that everything you hear about havingyour own affiliate program isn't true, but it does mean that you have to manage your expectations. For instance, there are thousands of people working in affiliate marketing right now, but you aren't going to attract all of them to your program and most of them are not going to exactly be superstars. Furthermore, affiliate marketing isn't exactly 100% hands off, as you're going to need to manage your network if you are going to see results.

Still, just because all the overblown hype doesn't stand up to scrutiny doesn't mean that startingyour own affiliate program is a bad idea. In fact, it's a great idea, and an effectively managed affiliate program can make you a lot more money than you would have made on your own. As long as you don't see it as a "magic bullet" than you should suffer no disappointment from your affiliate program.

There is one major decision you have to make when youstart your own affiliate program- whether you are going to host it yourself, or whether you are going to run it through a third-party website. Each has its own pros and cons.

If you want to run your affiliate program through a third party site like ClickBank or Commission Junction, then you are going to have a pretty easy time getting started. Sites like these are designed to make the whole process easier by hosting and managing a marketplace filled with affiliates and products that can easily connect with each other. Just about all you have to do is create a product and a sales page that pass their scrutiny and you will be added to this marketplace. You will have to conform to their standards with your product and literature, and you will have to do some work to attract affiliates, but overall this process is pretty simple.

Of course, these third party sites will generally take some of the money that passes through them as payment, which means you won't be maximizing your profit through each sale. Hostingyour own affiliate program solves this problem as you won't have to deal with any middlemen, and generally it just involves a one-time purchase of someaffiliate management software. The downside is the fact that you'll be losing the easy access to affiliates that a third party site offers.

Building a Small Army of Affiliates

By: Nicholas Black

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