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by: Pavel Lenshin
Every off- or online business has a target of growing its market
share. Under all other equal conditions the percent of the market,
occupied by a company, means certain level of recognition, brand,
exposure and, therefore, sales and income.
For small business owner a shift from 0.01% internet market share to
0.04% may result in tremendous four times income growth, the problem
is in the limits of resources this particular owner has access to.
Usually they are weak enough to allow such expansion at their own
cost.
Help may come from two massive marketing instruments: - viral
marketing; - business partnership based on outsourcing necessary
resources.
Today we are going to speak about latter instrument of gaining
exposure you deserve.
Business partnership is an agreement between two or more legal
entities to cooperate together in order to reach mutually beneficial
results. By extrapolating such statement into a framework of gaining
market exposure, we can narrow this meaning down by focusing on
uniting promotional efforts for reaching mutually beneficial
results.
In practice the owner of affiliate program with the aim of gaining
extensive market exposure attracts fellow marketers to promote the
owner's(s') product(s) for a reward usually in the form of
commission from retail price per sale. A commission for popular info
products may vary from 5% to 70%.
Promotional materials (like, endorsement letters, reviews and
articles) can greatly assist your partners in promoting your product
as highly effective pre-selling tools.
The dilemma of joining affiliate programs
The most common mistake beginners do is registering with all
possible and impossible affiliate programs they see in hope to
promote them all and collect all the money they were promised to get
on the page of respective affiliate program owners.
In dominating majority of cases they end up with wasted time and
money. The reason is simple, they don't have necessary resource - a
database of consumers, subscribers, business partners - people who
may be interested in such type of offers. Instead, those newcomers
decide to start their online businesses by promoting other people's
products, what is extremely hard, because you will build client
database and credibility for the company products of which you
promote, not for yourself. The only thing you can do is to grow the
subscription database, unfortunately, the most valuable asset -
loyal clients - won't be accessible in any case.
Some well-known internet millionaires, making fortunes
cross-promoting 3rd party products may truly support the idea of
"easy income with affiliate programs", but they tend to forget that
all their profits were possible due to huge subscriber databases,
thousand of affiliates and customers a newcomer does not have!
That is why start wise by creating your own product, grow your
credibility, circle of loyal customers and then join and promote as
much 3rd party products as you consider necessary.
Setting up partner program
Every partner program you will create or setup should have, at
least, basic must-have features:
Database driven registration of affiliates.
Tracking affiliate sales in order to count commission.
Admin control panel to support affiliates and track their sales.
There are 3 basic methods of having fully functional partner
programs application, not going far into science, they are "do it
yourself", "setup 3rd party application", "use 3rd party service".
The first method is for those, who are knowledgeable programmers and
fortunate enough to invest a lot of time in creating such a solution
for personal needs or those, who are lucky to have a lot of money
and hire those knowledgeable programmers. Responsibility for taking
under control all support and function-related issues would lie on
your shoulders.
Setting up 3rd party affiliate program solution requires much less
time or money, if any. The result will be the same as above - fully
functional partner program and inevitable support problems. The only
difference is that you won't be able to develop that partner
application the way you need and like.
The main advantage of 3rd party service is the ability to stay
unaware of how your partners sign up, track sales, receive checks
and so forth, because in this case servicing your partners or
affiliates will be the headache of independent company, not yours.
For such "reluctance" 3rd party affiliate program provider would
charge you on monthly or per sale basis, slightly decreasing your
net profit at each sale.
Having your own affiliate program in place enables you to expand
your market boundaries exponentially.
Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur, founder of
ASBONE.com, where you can find everything to make your business
prosper. Discounted Internet services,
FREE ebooks http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/
FREE reports http://ASBONE.com/reports/
info@asbone.com
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