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Most successful internet marketers agree that having your own product and affiliates is the #1 way to make a large income. In fact, if you look at the top players in the internet marketing field you will find that most of their sales when they launch a new product come from their JV partners and affiliates. So how do you actually go about recruiting affiliates?

First, if you have a digital product like an ebook, software or membership site, I recommend you set it up through Clickbank and let them handle your affiliate program. This gives you exposure to over 100,000 affiliates signed up at clickbank, and it’s just easier. Your affiliates won’t have to sign up and they’ll promote you because they KNOW they’ll get paid. You can of course set up your affiliate program with your own in house script like JV manager if you want, it’s totally up to you. I personally only use clickbank to sell products.

Anyways, once you have an affiliate program set up, here’s what you can do to get affiliates to sell your product. I’ve tried each of these myself, and they should work fine in any market.

Getting The Ball Rolling For Affiliates To Promote Your Product - Use Forums:

The first thing I do to pick up affiliates is go to forums. Specifically, you can use the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forums. These are two very popular webmaster forums, with hundreds of thousands of members.

Digital Point has a separate affiliate forum where you can post a new thread advertising your affiliate program. If you sell a product through clickbank, for example, just go to their clickbank subforum and post a thread about your product and its affiliate program. This is GREAT free advertising. It only takes about ten minutes, and you’ll typically get hundreds of views. Just go through what commission you offer, your products price, and everything affiliates need to know. If you are an active member of digital point with lots of posts, you’ll get plenty of people promoting your product.

With the warrior forum, what you can do is post a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) for $20. This is WELL worth it for the price. As the name implies, this has to offer something “special” for members of the warrior forum. What you can do is make a WSO asking members to promote your product, and offer one-on-one support, as well as a free website to promote your product and other promotional material.

In addition to posting a thread on both digitalpoint and the warrior forum, you can advertise your affiliate program in your signature on these forums. This will come up at the bottom of every post you make.

After You Have Posted On Forums About Your Affiliate Program:

You want to pick up affiliates from:

• people already promoting products similar to yours as affiliates;
• product vendors that are selling a product similar to yours;
• your customers

To find affiliates that are promoting products similar to yours, I use Affiliate Elite (my affiliate link), which is a really neat piece of software that can give you a list of every website promoting a product. You can then get the WHOIS information for each site, and contact the owner asking them to promote your product too. You can find bloggers, website owners, and other marketers that already promote a product competing with yours - then just send a friendly JV request. Make sure you have a strong argument for why they should promote your product over your competitions.

You will also want to do JV’s and partnerships with product vendors selling a product similar to yours. I have to give Mike Filsaime credit for this one. Let’s say you have a generic weight loss product, and you find someone selling a product on how to build abs. These 2 products aren’t directly competing but they appeal to the same kind of person. So, you can make a deal with the person selling the product on building abs where they promote your weight loss product to their customers, and you promote their abs product to your customers. It’s beneficial for both sides.

In terms of recruiting affiliates from your actual customers, this is obviously much easier if you are selling an internet marketing or B2B product. I haven’t personally sold a make money product before so it’s harder, but you can still tell your customers that they can refer their friends to your product and make commissions. You’ll naturally get much more word of mouth exposure and customers becoming affiliates if you have a great product that actually works.

How To Make It Enticing For Affiliates To Promote You:

The main things affiliates look for in a product to promote is:

• The strength of your sales copy, and how well your website converts visitors into buyers;
• The commission % they get for each sale they send;
• The price your product is sold at;
• The quality of the product itself

Therefore, you want to invest in writing a compelling salesletter that converts, offer your product at a high price point, give affiliates high commission (you can give affiliates up to 75% in clickbank, which is what I recommend) and create a good quality product. To justify a higher price you will want to include additional bonuses and everything else that makes your product a good deal for the buyer.

Of course this post is just scratching the surface of some of the things you can do to build a successful affiliate program. I’ll touch on some more things later.

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