Article in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing offers some incredible benefits to the Internet entrepreneur and allows you the opportunity to earn a nice income in a hands off sort of way. But what if you could switch that around because you have your own product and could get a team of affiliates working for you? You may have your own product you are trying to market that might have only produced minimal results through your efforts and are looking for a way to really expand your business. This is where having affiliates work for you, instead of you being the affiliate, can really pay off.

If you have an information product such as an ebook, software or any digitally downloadable commodity, one of the better solutions available to hook up with a team of affiliates is ClickBank.com. There are over 100,000 ClickBank affiliates that are eager for new products and are willing to sell just about anything. Not that you should sell just anything, but whatever kind of digital product you have or are thinking of, you would probably be able to have hundreds to thousands of people promoting it through ClickBank.

It’s very simple to set up your affiliate program through ClickBank and once your product is accepted, everything is taken care of for you. All tracking, payments to affiliates, affiliate stats and payments to ClickBank are done through their own web site. You do have to host your product pitch page on your own website as well as designate a product delivery page on your own site. Other than that everything else is handled for you.

Your product has to be approved by ClickBank before it will be allowed to be offered to their affiliates. This is just to protect them and affiliates from completely scammy, and illegal products. You also can’t sell things, such as templates, sweepstakes or participation in lotteries, phone services, email address lists, travel reservations and a few other things. Be sure and read their terms of service closely.

We can’t forget the important part of how much to pay your affiliates. Many merchants offer very generous commissions to their affiliates in the range of 50% to 75% of the retail price. Much of the time the seller is trying to acquire a customer with their initial product sale and will later try to market more of their products to them, so they can afford to offer a very high commission or what they would refer to as a “customer acquisition fee.”

Maybe you can’t afford to offer such a high rate to your affiliates, however you should price your product at a point where you can at least offer a $10 commission to them. Any less than this and affiliate marketers won’t take the trouble to bother with your product. If you are an affiliate already, you know there are costs associated with doing business and unless you have a very high volume, earning less than $10 for a sale isn’t much worth it.

You also have to price your product in consideration of the fees charged by ClickBank. You are charged 7.5% of the retail price of your product plus $1 by ClickBank every time a sale is made. Taking that into consideration and the commission you need to pay affiliates, let’s say you have a product you want to make at least $10 from every sale. You’d have to price your product around $23 to get close to your $10 profit from it. Once you pay your affiliate commission of $10 and take out 7.5% plus $1 you end up with $10.28.

The great thing about ClickBank is that while you may only have a few ideas on how to market your ebook or other digital product, once you have a team of affiliates working for you, there will be hundreds to thousands of people marketing your product with all of their creative powers combined possibly turning your $10 or more profit from each sale into a steady stream of income. What would that do for your income?

If you want to get a better return on the time investment you’ve made in a downloadable product, but don’t have a big enough reach to make the income you’d like to see, then consider hooking up with a team of affiliate through ClickBank. Chances are you will see some great results.