I really like Chris Garret’s honest comments in this article about his experiences with affiliate marketing. While he talks about it more from the standpoint of running ads for someone else’s product, rather than having an affiliate program for your own products, he gives encouraging advice that mirrors my own.
Pay special attention to his remarks about mistakes that he made while starting up: as a product owner with your own affiliate program, you can use quality documentation (good written instructions) to make it easier for your affiliates, build their trust, and help them to avoid potholes.

Read this fantastic blog post by Tim Ferriss; book marketing guru, world traveler, and Author of The 4-Hour Workweek. Please pay special attention to the part where he mentions, “First off, writing books is a terrible revenue model for authors.”

His summary of the opportunities in eBook marketing are very clearly pointing to using affiliate marketing as the way to make that huge hit really happen. This is the important component that I see missing from almost every single plan that every Author has put in front of me, like, ever. If you want to make money from eBooks, learn every little thing you can about affiliate marketing, and then do it for a couple of years before you decide to get serious about the details.

I love this guy.

This is the second of a three-part series of posts about affiliate marketing. For the first post, please click to: http://www.humanuspublishing.com/2008/10/24/affiliate-marketing-for-self-publishers-part-1.

In this second post, we’ll talk about my real-life tool for managing affiliates, a glossary, and walk you through startup costs of a working affiliate program.

You will need to understand some basic stuff before you begin. For starters, here’s the promised glossary…

Landing Page: This is a general term for the first page that consumers see when they first click on one of your ads, from anywhere on the internet. This may or may not be the page where they actually buy the product, and there’s a whole science around how to create the “ideal” landing page (if there is such a thing), and what makes people actually whip out their credit card. This page is crucial, so carefully constructing it with help from various experts is important. (See future posts – I will not go into detail here, but you can just do a quick search on Google and come up with a variety of sources.)

Campaign: this means essentially the same thing is does in the old-school advertising world, which is to create a series of ads, setup the landing page, and plan a time-limited series of ads with a clear and measurable objective.

Traffic Provider: this is the person that has the list of people that they send your ads out to (such as someone who publishes a digital newsletter, or a blog author) or the person who has the website where the ads are posted. The numbers of people who visit their sites or read their stuff are called “traffic”.

Payout: the amount that the affiliate earns for a single sale of your product. Can be quoted in actual dollars or a percentage of the retail sale price.

Conversions: this expression applies to the number of people that are converted from browsers to buyers of your product. Much can be done to improve conversions on landing pages and elsewhere. To commit to any sort of action can also be referred to as a conversion, such as how many people click on the actual banner vs. just look at it and do not click.

CPC, CPM, and CPS: when buying ads, be sure to ask how you are being charged* by the traffic provider, such as Cost-Per-Click (when people click on the ad you make a payout), or Cost-Per-Thousand, where “M” is short for thousand (in French, M stands for “mille” which means thousand) and in this case, the meaning is per one-thousand people that click or take the action on the ad, and Cost-Per-Sale (or CPA for Cost-Per-Acquisition), which means that you only pay the affiliate when the sale actually happens. (These days, CPS is the standard, because clicks are easily inflated and falsified.)

*In the case of managing your own affiliate system, which is the focus of this article, the relationship is more the case that you are paying out rather than being charged, but for the sake of clarity, it may be referred to this way when you’re negotiating with affiliates.

Costs:
When I first began using affiliate marketing as a tool with my clients, we decided to start small and build from there, which is a philosophy that I still recommend. Here’s what you’ll need to expect in terms of costs for startup;

1) Subscribe to a good service provider: I discovered 1ShoppingCart.com about a year ago, and haven’t looked back since. This is now my number one business tool. I’ve used other shopping carts, but this is the best. Seriously. They are an all-in-one package of not only shopping cart services, but also a really, really nice affiliate system, sales reporting, and merchant processing. Without them, my business would be dead in the water. Their system is quite deep, but you don’t need to leap in whole hog right away. I did not need to hire a designer to make the shopping cart work, and their customer support people are nothing short of amazing. I subscribe to their top-end $99 per month account, which handles not only online sales for all my businesses, but all of my affiliate relationships, with full accounting. They even automatically deliver downloadable ebooks to customers! The only help I have is my super-duper Girl Friday who does my books. It makes her job easy and saves me a fortune. Just do it. (In a future post, I’ll do a walk-through of the management panel of 1ShoppingCart.com so that you can see how to setup your starting information.)

2) Your website or blog: Don’t get me started here again about why your website should be a blog, and not a static website, but be sure that you have a page that is your designated landing page for all affiliate sales. The only thing this page needs to have in terms of technical stuff is the actual shopping cart buttons. Everything else is just designed as per your imagination, and what you think will convert well. The only reason I’m including this on the list of costs is just in case you don’t have a blog already.

3) Design some ads: Remember to think about more than banners – text ads may sell products well in email marketing. Crafting careful words can be very difficult for a product that you’re intimately familiar with, so this is one case where I totally advise getting some help. eLance.com, oDesk.com and others are a great resource for this sort of contractor. Even for banners, knowing which words to use, and which not to, can be very difficult. Hire some objectivity.

4) Buy some domain names: Using a variety of domain names for an affiliate marketing campaign serves two major purposes, and several minor ones. Buying about 20 domains and pointing them all to your main landing page allows you to market to multiple audiences and measure their effectiveness more easily. In addition, a domain name like “smootherlegs.com” will attract different users than “newrazorproduct.com”. It’s all about increasing your traffic. (See a future post about how to choose good domain names and avoid bad ones.)

In part three of this series, we’ll talk about avoiding pitfalls, how to get your first affiliate, maintenance, taking it to the next level, and the other really important business-building strategy that you can use affiliate marketing to achieve.

This is the first in a series of three posts about how self-publishing authors, and many other entrepreneurs, can use affiliate marketing to ramp up sales of their books and products on a direct-to-consumer basis.

Many self-publishing authors want to take advantage of the obvious benefits of a marketing method that is highly automated. But it can be a high-overhead method of doing business if it is not managed well.

What is affiliate marketing? This expression can be over-used, so for the purposes of our discussion, let us define it as a way by which consumers click on your advert or link hosted on a website somewhere (or in an email that someone sends out), and you pay the person hosting the ad a small fee for referring the sale.

Affiliate marketing is a just like any traditional sales referral relationship, except that the entire thing is tracked and driven by an automated system. The statistics of your affiliate’s progress are easy for all involved to see at any time, just by logging into the affiliate management system, which is web-based, and not something installed on a privately-managed computer somewhere. Most payments are made virtually, using PayPal or other transaction providers. (At least, until you’re making big enough money that you require a bank draft!) Transparency is the key to making your affiliates happy, and that means giving them easy access to information.

This powerful marketing method is not new, but certain industries are working it in better ways than others. It is tried and true, and there are a variety of tools – both free and paid – that will help you accomplish it. It’s not really that deep, but like many things in business, it’s easy to make it much more complicated than it needs to be.

By setting up an automated system to manage and attract new Affiliates (the people who have the websites where your banners are displayed), you are setting in motion a process that is more or less self-sustaining. After setup, the real work in affiliate marketing comes in the areas of creating new ads that keep consumers and potential new affiliates interested, and in the area of running weekly or monthly reports.

Your affiliates need;
- ads that will pay them well for each sale; not just a few cents, but good dollars
- ads that are really going to convert browsers into sellers (or else nobody makes any money)
_ ads that are professional and attractive, not cheezy or amateurish
- good follow-up and reporting, or preferably an easy way to self-access information
- ads for products that relate well to the audience they already have (gourmet food audiences don’t want to see used car ads, etc.)
- prompt payment

As an advertiser, you will need;
- a master control system to manage your ads, your affiliates and their payments
- to create quality text-based or graphic ads (most people farm this out)
- a finely-tuned shopping cart and website / page where people can buy your product (see the next post for my not-so-secret weapon in this area)
- to remain objective and flexible about what works and what doesn’t
- to be prepared for sales to take off, by having product stock and a good shipping system already in place
- to spend time on the phone talking to potential affiliates, managing relationships, etc., but this is typically minimal unless you’re really selling like crazy, in which case it’s worth it

In the following posts in this series, we’ll talk about the real tools that I use to manage my affiliates, a glossary of terms, avoiding pitfalls, and how to get started as cheaply as possible. Stay tuned!

Thanks to James Kendall, I’ve just finished uploading some new banners for my affiliate program. Now, anybody with an html presence (website, blog, html email newsletter, etc.) can run ads for my blog class, and get paid $25 per sign up.

To sign up for the affiliate program in general, just click RIGHT HERE.

To see the currently available banners for all programs, just login with the information that will be sent to you via email, and you’ll be able to cruise around and use any banners you wish.

Here’s a sample of what’s in the program…

(There are also a number of static banners in the size above, with a few variables such as colour, etc.)

(I love how the one above will dovetail neatly into almost any colour scheme – nothing worse than a clashing banner ad. Static ones also available.)

(There are a number of 125×125 banners in there. Such a small ad for such a big payout!)

For more info about any of the affiliate programs offered through Humanus, just drop me a line at affiliates@humanuspublishing.com. We offer affiliate programs for many of our clients, the 6-Hour Blog Class, and similar events and products.

For info on how we can help you market your books using our universal affiliate system, please call us at 1-866-907-4084.

What a weekend it has been for Humanus Publishing! A launch party for one of my authors, a new release from another of my authors, and the rollout of our new affiliate program, all in the last 4 days!

Sunday was the launch party for The Freshman FlyFisher, (ISBN 978-0-978-3292-1-1) by Rick Passek of Surrey, BC. Rick held his launch event at the Little Campbell Hatchery at the Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club on 184th in Surrey. What a huge success for all involved! Rick not only sold plenty of books, but made numerous contacts related to promoting family outdoor events in the Surrey area. We are grateful to the Rotary Club of Cloverdale BC, for their wonderful management of the food concession stand, and to the City of Surrey for their support. As always, Rick was a real star, and was cool as a cuke from Friday morning’s appearance on Breakfast Television on City TV, to his interview on CBC Radio’s BC Almanac Friday afternoon, right through Sunday’s festivities. My favourite moment was little 6-year old Gracie’s fishing lesson on Breakfast Television Friday morning. She picked up the fine art of casting in a matter of minutes, due at least in part to Rick’s careful tutelage. Good going, Rick!

Another one of my authors, the lovely Jeri-Lyn McCrea, is the author of Words in Action – A Journal to Inspire Change, (ISBN 978-0-9809325-0-8) which is scheduled for release on April 25th. I saw the first copies back from the printer’s on Saturday, and boy, do they look fantastic!! The matte-coated hardcover is sooooo soft in the hand, and the pages look truly inspiring. I’m really excited about this journal (I guess we should stop referring to it as a “book”), because it breaks entirely new ground in the area of motivation and self-improvement titles. Jeri is so right when she talks about people “figuring it out for themselves”, and not looking to others to “complete their lives or tell them what to do”. Her journal is a book you ultimately write for yourself, and get a little burst of energy and motivation every day. Setting goals and making up your mind to achieve them – that’s what Words in Action is all about. Watch this blog for more info about events coming soon to the Langley and Surrey areas.

The cherry on the cake of this weekend was our new Humanus Publishing Affiliate Program. I started this project a few weeks ago to solve the problems of one author’s quest to market their product online, and it has now snowballed into something that can be used by any self-publishing author who wants to sell their books direct to consumers over the internet. Authors want to be freed of the hassle and overhead of online sales in order to keep writing, and this system means that they do not need to put up any money up front to make that happen. It’s cheap, fast, and keeps writers doing what they should be doing – writing. I hope that this system will expand into something resembling a marketing co-op for self-publishing authors, while continuing to align itself with the values of Humanus Publishing. If you know of a publisher who wants to sell their products through our program, you can earn money by referring them. Simply email me and let’s find a way to make it happen.