If you sell any type of products, services or memberships from your website, then you might want to consider using the power of affiliate marketing to get yourself a huge sales force that works only on commission. Imagine having tens or even hundreds of other websites actively advertising and sending customers to your website to buy your products, and it doesn’t cost you a cent unless you make a sale!
The concept of affiliate marketing is fairly simple: You’re offering a product for sale. Let’s pretend it’s an ebook priced at $10. Of course you’d like to have as many people as possible helping you sell it! That’s where setting up an affiliate program comes in. An affiliate is someone who signs up with you to help sell your product on a commission basis. You don’t pay them a cent until they refer a customer to you that actually buys something, then you pay them a percentage of the sale. If you give your affiliates 20 percent, then they get $2 for everyone they send to your site who actually purchases your ebook. No sale, no commission. This works out well for the affiliate too, because many people don’t have their own products to sell, or they don’t want to be bothered with setting up the infrastructure to make it work.
The two biggest problems with having your own affiliate network are:
- You need to pay a third party like Clickbank or Commission Junction to administer your program. This can take a pretty hefty chunk out of your profits.
- If you manage it yourself, how will you track the referrals, the commissions, the payouts, etc?
The answer to both of these problems, if you’re running WordPress on your site, is:
WordPress Affiliate Platform Plugin – Simple Affiliate Program for WordPress Blog/Site
It is a known fact that having an affiliate program is the most powerful way to market your products or services online. If you own a WordPress blog/site and your answer to the following questions are ‘yes’ then the ‘WordPress Affiliate Platform’ might just be what you need:
- Do you sell products or services online from your WordPress blog/site?
- Do you want to increase your sales and explode your profits by using an affiliate program?
- Do you want to have your own affiliate program so you can cut the middle man?
The ‘WordPress Affiliate Platform’ is an easy to use WordPress plugin for affiliate recruitment, management and tracking that can be used on any WordPress blog/site. This plugin lets you run your own affiliate campaign/program and allows you to reward(pay commission) your affiliates for referred sales. The admin can upload/configure banners/links which the affiliates can use on their blog/site to drive traffic to your site. All the clicks, leads, sales etc are tracked by this plugin. If you are running online ad campaigns for your products and services then you can use the affiliate platform plugin to measure the true conversion rate of each campaign to find out the profitable ones. This allows you to weed out the non-profitable campaigns and save money in the process. Click here for more information from the developer’s website. (And yes, that is my affiliate link).
I purchased this plugin myself, and I love it. It sells by itself for $39.95, however, the developer offers some great bundled pricing, and even installation services if you’re not comfortable setting up your own plugins! Speaking of bundled pricing, you can see more of them on my eCommerce Plugins page.
And if you’re interested in other ecommerce plugins (membership sites, e-stores, etc), as well as ones that will just make your life easier as an admin, I just finished a new 30 page report: 100+ WordPress Plugins. It’s got a few pages detailing the ecommerce plugins I use (and a few others), and 27 pages of other plugins with name, description, direct download links, and average user rating. I’m giving it away free to anyone who signs up for my newsletter this month.
You can subscribe in the upper-right corner of any page on this site (except my Amazon Store pages), or you can Subscribe to our newsletters here.
Please let me know if you find the list useful. Let me know if there’s a plugin that you absolutely love, and I’ll make sure to include it in my next list.
Thank you. Be well.
~John
P.S. I have lots of big things cooking for 2011. It’s going to be an incredible year for all of us. Stick around and see 
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