30 Day Mompreneurs Challenge Day 26: Create an Affiliate Program One of the easiest, risk free forms of advertising is an affiliate program. An affiliate program is a program that pays people to spread the word about a particular business. When their promotion results in a sale, the referrer, also known as the affiliate, is monetarily compensated. The thing I love about affiliate programs is that you only pay for advertising when you receive an actual sale. You’ll be reaching customers that you wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, so it’s a completely risk free way to attract new business. Today’s task is to create an affiliate program for your business. It can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. First things first, you need to develop a compensation plan. The easiest thing to do is reward referrers with a percentage of the sales they bring in. Since we recommend small businesses create an advertising budget of 5% of their total revenues, it only makes sense that a great percentage to use for your affiliate program is 5%. You can be flexible, however, and develop the program in a way that best suits your business. As I mentioned, this can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. If you want to keep it simple, all you’ll need to do is announce your program to your customers, family and friends and tell them to let everyone who they share your business with to make sure they tell you they sent them when they make their purchase. You can then keep track of your referrals manually as customers tell you who sent them and make payouts on a manual basis upon each sale. Another easy way to track referrals is to allow the referrers to offer a coupon code to the people they promote your business to. You can create a special code for each affiliate. When the coupon codes are used, you’ll be able to track that sale back to the appropriate affiliate and manually process their payment. If you have your own website and would like more of an official affiliate program, there are many great services out there to help you do so. Check out the many wordpress options and ejunkie. Which brings us to payments. How do you do that? The easiest way is through PayPal, but you can cut physical checks if need be. Payouts are typically made once monthly for sales the previous month. Please keep tax laws in mind. The people you’re paying are essentially independent contractors, so you’ll need to get a W9 from them so you have their information for tax purposes if necessary. If you would like to receive the 30 Day Challenge directly via email, please sign up here: eepurl/Af0Jb
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 16:13:05 +0000
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