Get Others To Sell Your Stuff
You know how I told you that you could sell other people’s stuff in Chapter 8? Well this is the other way round. You get others to sell your stuff. This means becoming a merchant and finding affiliates to perform affiliate marketing of your product. Remember I told you about middlemen websites that let you browse merchants, sign up with the ones you like and pay out in one go? You can’t use these if you want to be a merchant.
The reasons why are: This is in breach of what I tell you to do all the way through this book. The reason for the disparity is because these middlemen want sites that are attractive to affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketers do not want to send visitors to a site, where the visitor can easily click away from the site, but the site gets paid by pay per click or affiliate links. Nor do they want the visitor to go direct to the contacts page and make a sale direct, thus cutting the affiliate out of the sale. Nor do they want it to be easy for the visitor to leave the site because they want you to stay on the site for as long as possible as you will be more likely to buy.
This is why the sites I recommend you create are affiliate unfriendly for these middlemen. However creating an affiliate program that cuts out the middlemen is attractive as you will get the smaller, less fussy websites marketing your site because it’s very relevant to theirs. Only once you get to a certain level (say turnover £5m) should you consider grooming your site for these middlemen sites or creating an ‘affiliate friendly’ site alongside your own site for the middlemen websites to market.
Setting Up An Affiliate Program
In the website creator I’ve told you to use there is a section called ‘e-commerce’. Click on that and then go to ‘your affiliates’, then ‘configuration’ and then ‘edit configuration now’.
You will be prompted for level 1 commission, level 2 commission and the affiliate home page. Let me tell you about these.
Level 1 Commission
This is the commission you pay someone if they make a direct sale from promoting your product. So if you sell something for £100 and you set level 1 commission at 80% then the affiliate will earn £80 for every sale you make that has been referred by them. I like to pay out highly on level 1 as it encourages affiliates to market your product. I mean think about it - would you prefer to market a product that returns you £80 per sale or £8? So try to tempt them in this way and this will get you more visitors to your site and possibly more subscribers to your newsletter.
Level 2 Commission
This is the commission you pay someone who has referred you someone who is going to sell your products. In other words you have referred a referrer! Then level 2 commission is the percentage of the referrer’s commission payable to you. I set this at 10%. So for example if Joe had a site with my affiliate link and I was paying 80% on level 1 and 10% on level 2, and Rob clicked through Joe’s link, signed up as an affiliate to my site and Rob made some sales resulting in £800 commission then Joe would be entitled to £80. This is because Joe is entitled to 10% of whatever Rob earns in commission.
The beauty of this is that you may recruit an affiliate who is good at recruiting affiliates only and is just happy to receive the level 2 commission rather than rely on level 1 commission. Then you can have affiliates recruiting armies of affiliates with these level 2 affiliates sitting back while their sub affiliates do all the hard work. This is another way some people have made serious money.