How to Create an Affiliate Program for your Small Business | Google and Beyond Webinar Archive

This Post: How to Create an Affiliate Program for your Small Business | Google and Beyond Webinar Archive

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the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode good afternoon my name is Tracy and I are and I’m with the Virginia SBDC I’ll be your facilitator for today’s webinar for those of you who are not familiar the Virginia SBDC is the largest and most effective provider of customized counseling and education for small businesses in Virginia most of our services are offered offered locally in 28 locations throughout the Commonwealth today’s webinar is one of our educational offerings and as part of our ongoing webinar series Google and Beyond marketing and managing on the web today’s topic is how to create an affiliate program for your small business all of our Google and Beyond webinars are presented by Ray Sydney Smith a web and mobile strategist author of solos most success social media local and web small business marketing strategy explained and president of w3 consulting if you have any questions during the presentation please type those questions into the question window and Ray will do his best to answer them without further ado here’s ray Sydney Smith Thank You Tracy and thank you to the Virginia SBDC for having me here on the beyond Google marketing and managing on the web series just a couple of housekeeping items if you have questions about this topic please feel free to put those into the question window and Tracy will go ahead and field those questions to me pass them along to me as necessary as we make our way through today if you have questions after the webinar you can always tweet at me at w3 consulting ashtag at beyond Google and I am a Twitter fiend so I’m always there I’ll also have my email address on the final slide so if you want to email me feel free to go ahead and do so as well and finally follow at Virginia SBDCs Twitter profile as well so that you can stay abreast of upcoming programs and other resources that they provide for Virginia businesses and so you can take advantage of those by getting that information there today’s agenda is is that we’re going to talk about some of the best practices for developing an online affiliate program for your small business and some of the requisites necessary for you to be able to do something like this then we’re going to talk about some of the techniques for managing your affiliates getting those affiliates onboarding them and really supporting affiliates so that they can be effective for your sales and then we’re gonna talk about some of the tools that are available for you to be able to set up your affiliate business from from you know marketplace based programs that have all of the features without you doing anything to doing anything but you know them doing the predominant amount of the work of finding and managing affiliates to other programs where you can self manage them including if you have a WordPress website and how that can actually work out I’ll leave a few moments at the end for Q&A but I’ll be happy to stay for as long as we need to in order to answer any questions and that’ll be today’s agenda that’s what we’re gonna cover so let’s start off with what an affiliate program really is in a small business and most people recognize the the old-fashioned customer loyalty programs you know you might have a card at a retail register where people stamp those or they have a hole-punch and you you know get enough of those and you go ahead and and get a free coffee after X number of purchases that’s not what an affiliate program is and it certainly is not how it works on the web so we want to kind of debunk some of these things who are all on the same page so an affiliate program is is incentive based meaning that you’re paying either in actual dollars or in free product or service to someone for campaigns on behalf of your business these are people outside of your company right and so it’s not a customer loyalty program although we’ll talk a little bit later about finding affiliates and sometimes customers can be really great affiliates but it’s not an if it’s not a customer loyalty or a referral program what it really is is a performance based sales team so what you could do in that same kind of offline capacity if you printed business cards or some kind of card and gave a hundred of them to each of these affiliates and every time that you know some came in the front door of your office or store and handed that card to you it had a unique code on it so that the the the clerk at the counter or you knows that that card came from that particular affiliate and now you could pay that affiliate either a percentage of the of the overall sale or some specific Commission amount that you decided upon for every single card that comes in the front door and makes a sale for you okay we’re basically translating that concept construct that that analogous offline method to the online world and what that means is that you’re not you’re not limited by a wide variety of different limitations right resources being printed materials and having to support people in all kinds of manner but also the the reality that you can you can open this up to anyone in the world who can sell your product and so you know you you can think about it from the perspective that you know you you can only sell so much if you have people who are in your retail space selling your products or service or in your office selling your products and services if you’re capable of selling on a website then you are capable of having an affiliate program and this is performance-based right so this is not something where you’re just paying someone to sit around and if they make a sale great if they don’t make a sale you’re still paying them this is only when they’re performing the actions that you want them to that are gonna provide a benefit to your company so this is a very very powerful construct there are some requisites of course right you have to have a website and you have to have a website that can in some way shape or form track the movement of people to your website you know from where they’re coming from and we’ll talk about the technological components of this later but really you have to have a website and you have to be selling something that you want to be able to show conversion so that you know you can see what is going on right in the background alright so why would you develop this so like I said you you have to have a website and but if you sell a product or service online or offline you know sometimes people think that affiliate programs can only be for products that are capable of being sold through website but as I just detailed before you know a printed card that walks in your front door can also verify a sale that happened through the web so there are some ways also what is what’s called pay per call and I’ll show you this later in the in the webinar where phone calls to a specific number for your business can also be tracked so that you can pay affiliates for the calls that they’re generating to your business so one you need to you need to figure out whether or not you have enough margin to support a commission right so many businesses you know you you or if you’re starting out you’re just new you’re bootstrapping you have to be very very conscious of the fact that you need to be able to pay a percentage or flat fee to an affiliate for bringing a sale to the business well what’s your current margin if you don’t know what your profit margin is then you need to go to an accountant and figure that out because if you don’t know what your margin is then you could potentially be giving away more money than you’ll ever make on the product and therefore be constantly losing revenues now there are a couple things downstream that are really important right so you may actually use an affiliate program too as a loss leader right because the initial sale on that product might be very you know the margin may be very low or even negative right you may lose money on that first sale but that customer may be valuable enough in the long tail right every purchase they make they’re after or you’re not paying a commission on it that it becomes worthwhile so you really have to crunch the numbers and figure out whether or not whether or not the margin on the on the life of the customer is good enough for you to want to be able to use an affiliate program ok so again if you sell products or services online or offline it has to have enough margin to support a commission and then of course there’s the reality that you may not be priced at effectively you know many times I see especially in service based businesses you know you tend to lowball your pricing right you know you don’t charge enough for for what you you believe you or maybe worth less you know on the market because you haven’t been out there long enough but the reality is is that your prices are too low in general so maybe you have to have to increase your prices and maybe that’s on your products and services um next up is that if you are developing an affiliate program you’re not hiring employees and therefore there’s no salary to pay you pay for only the performance of the sales that are being brought into the business and this is this is really important to kind of have settle in now this is not some fly-by-night scheme where you throw up an affiliate program and then all of a sudden you’re raking in the dough right you really have to put in the work you have to manage your affiliates as we’ll talk about shortly and and this does take some time cost resources to be able to make happen but you’re not hiring employees you don’t have any baseline expenses for employees and that means you know you’re not having to pay payroll taxes and benefits and those kinds of things so this can actually be a really effective mechanism for a lot of businesses and or a supplement to a current sales force that you have so figure out whether or not this makes sense for you based on those two things is there enough margin for Commission and if you’re paying for performance is this the right method for being able to sell you know on on your website for your business is is having a sales force better or is it better to actually have you know these affiliates who are basically 1099 contractors who are capable of being out there and being champions of your product or service all right so this takes us to really the construct of finding affiliates and I’m gonna talk about this a little bit in reverse order because I want to talk about the stuff we need to talk about on slides and then I’m gonna hop over to the some of the products and tools so I’m gonna talk about setting up last and we’re going to talk about some of the fundamentals of setting up the program first and one of the things that people frequently have a problem with is of course finding affiliates how do I find these people who are going to be selling for me and there are some really great ways to do this and I just want to cover some of them because I think they’re they’re gonna they’re gonna help you brainstorm other creative ways to find affiliates okay so the first and foremost way as I as I said earlier your affiliate program is not a customer loyalty program but many times your past and current customers colleagues and friends can be your best affiliates that’s because they know your product they know you they know your business already they’ve experienced the product and if they’re if they’re interested in becoming an affiliate when you offer that if you know ask them about their interest about that then they’re likely someone who had a great experience with your product or service in business and and and therefore would want to you know tell other people about the great you know product or service that that that you have so it’s kind of a mutual mutually beneficial thing because they get the recognition but they’re also capable of making you know money off of that many times you can actually look to the people in your community who are natural opportunities for to be affiliates right so you walk into the local Technology retail store right those people who are retail sales managers if you sell a product that’s complementary to that you know then that person who’s a sales manager on you know sales person on the floor of that retail store well they already have some some experience with sales and maybe they would be interested in becoming an affiliate so just meeting people who are out there in the community who were enrolled already that are pseudo sales or specifically sales can be potentially really great affiliates as well so look at your past and current customers look at colleagues look at people who you connect maybe even vendors who might be selling you source materials for that your that you then manufacture or source materials for running your business but if they’re there to support your business and at some point they’re able to actually also sell on their website or or through their email lists or otherwise then maybe they would be good to be them now the ultimate question always is you know I asked you hey you know Tracy Tracy do you want to be my affiliate and Tracy says no I’m not interested then your question is well who do you know that might want to be right so it’s not about necessarily Tracy choosing to be an affiliate all the time it could be that Tracy actually knows three or four people who would be potentially great affiliates for my business and so therefore she can now introduce me and refer me to those people who then can become affiliates all right so use your network for for that purpose next is finding and soliciting influencers on social networks blogs YouTube and podcasts now this is a could we could spend an entire hour on just talking about influencers I’m gonna try and boil this down to a couple of really important functions one is today we have many social networks but we pretty much have you know a top tier of them right we have Facebook Twitter Linkedin Instagram snapchat Pinterest and Google+ and then Twitter right and so we we have we have we have these social networks and there are people on those social networks who have influence over other people that is when they post stuff people read it comment on it engage with others in those those those posts and continue to to engage with that content and the end those people right because they consider them experts they consider them entertaining they they whatever the reason is right your goal is to find those people who who are speaking to your target audience and connecting with them so that they may want to become affiliates right because if if you share even just a small portion of the overlapping target audience right part of their community the people who follow them and engage with them and your target audience in your community overlap even if it’s a small portion of that that grouping that’s still worth it potentially for the affiliate to get those people to buy from you to make the affiliate money okay and then of course you’re obviously making money because the affiliates making money so you want to go out there and find that now most people think of influencers they think of celebrities you know you have to go after Beyonce or or you know somebody who’s a big celebrity name that’s actually not true you could have influencers who have just a couple hundred followers or a couple thousand followers and they could be the most lucrative affiliates for you because they’re not getting the attention of the big you know brands coming to them and asking them to to hock their products right there they’re looking to make money through their influencing but they are not necessarily getting all of the attention but if you share the target audience then you can approach them and they’ll be ecstatic to be able to do that which means that they’ll hustle for you you know what I mean they’ll they’ll they’ll have the the energy and the and the motivation to want to do what’s necessary to be successful as your affiliate and if they have again high engagement metrics right there they’re getting many people to engage with their posts and they have a high influence metric then then that’s it that’s a good thing because then they have very limited options right from from bigger people coming after them and and they’re more likely to listen to you so look for look for a good mix I mean I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you going out there and looking for big names as well you know you can go after big celebrity names if you want to but they’re going have agencies behind them who are gonna require you know certain dollar amounts whether or not they sell anything for you so that’s not going to be as effective for you as some of these you know mid tiered smaller influencers that are out there anyway my point though is you need to go across social media as a whole right so that’s going to include social networks blogs YouTube podcasts and so forth and you’re going to search for them you’re going to search them out and make contact with them as I make a note here on the screen the magic is in the direct messages right the reality is is that all of that stuff that is public posting and and the comments and everything else like that that’s all that’s all song-and-dance all right it’s it’s performance but the business of how you’re going to approach these people is gonna happen in the direct messages you’re gonna send either if you have their email address you send them an email this is all happening in private right this is not happening out there in the public world so you’re gonna you’re gonna send a direct message on Twitter or direct message and Instagram and you’re going to approach them with a direct offer of you know maybe you know read some of their blog posts read some of you know look at some other Instagram posts and see the engagement you know show recognition to them for the fact that they’re garnering a strong audience and then say to them you know I’m I’ve developed an affiliate program and I would be very interested in you joining us here goes to the details of the program be short and sweet and then give them a link to be able to sign up for it okay so you’re gonna go out there and find and solicit those influencers through all of them these these media you want to have a very diversified group of people you don’t want to just have bloggers you don’t want to just have a few instagramers you don’t want to have a few snapchatters you want to have podcasters and youtube folks and you want to have a wide variety of people who are capable of sending your message about your products and services out there to the internet as a whole and the world as a whole and and then to be able to drive that traffic back to your website for sales did we have a question okay I’m gonna move on so you can also use an affiliate program that has an affiliate pool and I’m actually going to talk about a few of those as we get to the latter part of our discussion today so there are affiliate pool marketplaces basically where or associate program marketplaces where they already have lots and lots of affiliates who are looking for products like yours and so all they’re doing is matching you up so there are these programs where you can do that so you can find affiliates through those affiliate pools and that does all of the matchmaking for you ok next up is some of the other creative ways in which you can find affiliates you can post on up work up work is a freelancing portal where you can post jobs and other kinds of things that you need people to do and in this particular case you’re not looking for a job per se but you could post you could post on up work and ask and other freelance type websites and see if there are any people on there who are in your industry who are or maybe not in your industry but maybe they’re their content writers but they show an interest in your industry or they are videographers or people who have you know the ability to get in front of people and see if they’re interested in becoming affiliates it depends on your your market in your your world but I certainly think you should at least look it up work and see if there isn’t a potential for you to get yourself in front of some affiliates there next up are especially for local businesses if you’re looking for local people you can post on Craigslist there’s next door which is a you know an online social network for the four neighborhoods very specific neighborhoods so if you you cover a very specific neighborhood you can go ahead and do that and also community lists you know there’s an email list for the various neighborhood homeowners associations a neighborhood watch group since then forums of that nature you can go ahead and connect with some of those people if you’re allowed to post an email you know to those lists or post a post to those forums you can go ahead and say hey listen you know we’re this local business and we’re looking for affiliates and if anyone’s interested go ahead and check out this this material I would always highly recommend that you create a page on your website I’m gonna show you some of the the big brands how they do it very shortly and so I highly recommend you create a wit page on your website that just talks about the program right it’s it’s literally just a sales landing page to tell people about the program and then publicize it via your social media on the regular so that people who are potential customers people who are past customers people who are in your community you know you never know sometimes who the people are that are regularly reesh airing your content or are highly you know highly value you as a business or you as a business owner and want to help you but they just don’t know how you know maybe they’re just not sociable in that way and so they don’t interact or engage with your social media content very much but maybe being an affiliate gives them that opportunity or it gives them a reason now right because before they weren’t really interested in sharing your content because it didn’t benefit them in some way shape or form but by becoming an affiliate now they get something out of it you know and even if it’s something nominal it still feels like they’re getting the type of remuneration that they’re looking for in order to be able to share your content so affiliates you know can then sometimes become your best content shares because they’re now getting the the you know the payment and and the benefits of being affiliate so something to check out another thing if you do is poach from your competitors that I don’t mean this in a bad way but I mean it in the sense that you can actually go out there and look for people who are ready who are already linking to your competitors websites and and I can just actually jump outta here really quickly and show you how this works so there are tools this one is happens to be one that I found on here but if you go to small SEO tools com forward slash backlink checker with a hyphen in it and here what you can do is you can in essence type in your business web name so I don’t know why it’s not letting me type in here but basically you would type you’re here where I’m circling you would enter your business name in here and then you would click on check backlinks and what you will see is all of the links from other websites back to your website well what you would do for finding affiliates is that you would actually go and type in your competitors websites and see who links back to it and so you can find blogs and podcasts and maybe some twitter users look at those people who are linking back to those two those competitors websites and you might find some affiliates and don’t don’t be shy about this and don’t think that an affiliate who links to your competitor will not be a good or great affiliate for you many times affiliates have review websites where they’re reviewing many different products and to show their impartiality and their authenticity they will they will be affiliates for many different businesses so don’t don’t limit yourself by saying oh well if they’re not going to be loyal to only me then then they can’t be an affiliate because that’s short-sighted you’re you’re gonna limit the number of people who will be great affiliates for you and send you good traffic if not great traffic and therefore great sales and revenue just because they they’re not exclusively loyal to you you really can’t have that in the affiliate world so something like this you can use the backlink checker and there are many of these tools online that will give you these links from you know from the various websites blogs podcasts other websites back to your competitors websites you can see who’s who’s doing that so that’s just one way that you can do it so you can kind of poach your poach from your competitors that way all right so let’s talk a little bit about onboarding affiliates and so you know once you’ve found some affiliates it’s not in this order but say you know for sake of argument we’ll go from finding affiliates to onboarding your your affiliates and the first thing you’re going to have to really think about is the signup process right and a lot of this has to do with the platform that you’re going to shoes I’m gonna talk about that in a bit but you’re gonna you’re gonna decide on how and what the affiliates need to do in order to get signed signed up and and on the platform right and this might include giving some level you know you want to make it as easy as possible for them sometimes but then sometimes you actually want to make it a little bit difficult if this person has no idea about your product and say your product requires quite a bit of facilitative sales maybe it requires some consultation and discussion before someone buys it you don’t want just any person being an affiliate right because then they’re gonna come to you to the to the to the affiliates website write blog podcast whatever they’re gonna ask them a question and that affiliates not gonna know the answer so maybe you want them to be at least aware of the industry the product and what-have-you and it’s one of the reasons why you look for influencers who share the same community who have a certain level of subject matter expertise in your so if it’s if you have a toy store you should probably find influencers who are huge toy fanatics right if you have a comic book shop you want to find somebody who is a comics fiend right you want to really find those people you know and so that way they have a level of expertise but experience in explaining these things in simple terms so that people can feel more comfortable with the purchase process so you may want to have a like a quick couple of questions that you ask them but you also might want to ask them what websites do you currently run and operate what what are your Twitter profiles and how many people follow you right you might want to ask a number of different questions so start to think about what the sign-up process really looks like for you and what information you need from the affiliate in order to be able to make them you know bring them on board very very quickly and easily and that might mean they have to spend 10 or 15 minutes filling out a form but then you have all of that information up front you don’t need to spend a lot of time going back and forth with them saying oh I’m sorry I really forgot this piece of information I need that make a list of all the things that you need up front all right next is how much is the commission scheduled that you’re going to be providing to each affiliate and this really comes down to whether you decide on a number of different things and how your actual business runs so if you have a product or service where it’s a one-time fee and people pay that that fee and they get their product or service great but what happens if you have a membership or a subscription fee where someone pays pays a fee on a regular basis whether that be monthly or yearly how are you going to pay the affiliate for that are you gonna pay them only for the initial sale and not for any of the future sales or are you gonna pay them every time into perpetuity that person stays on as a business and therefore is that affiliate gonna do some level of customer maintenance are they gonna do some customer support there because obviously if that if that customer is it has an issue and has a question who do they go to so you need to figure out who goes to whom for what and why would you pay that affiliate for that right and and there are lots of reasons for that you know maybe the affiliate has a complimentary business and they’re sending you business for one part of the product project or product and they’re providing the service so if as long as they continue doing the right customer service they can keep they can keep getting revenue from you as long as they’re sending as long as that that customer stays a customer of yours right so think about think about the the long tail the customer cycle you know 360 customer cycle as they say you want to think about all of the parts of the customers journey to getting that problem or desire satisfied and think about how the affiliates could be paid based on that right and we’ll talk about Commission schedules shortly in terms of percentages and and see what other major folks are doing and you can you can adjust accordingly okay next are some of the more mundane components but you have to figure out a payout schedule are you gonna pay weekly are you gonna pay semi weekly or semi-monthly that is are you gonna pay monthly that kind of thing and and then what happens when when people have chargebacks you know they pay something and then their credit card doesn’t work and they get a chargeback or they ask for a refund or any of those other things you have to kind of figure those things out and make a decision how that impacts your bottom line and so that you can you can make sure that you’re not losing money because your affiliate is sending you poor traffic or poor customers and those poor customers are then costing you money on the long end because you’re you’re gonna pay you know you’re gonna pay your affiliate well have you decided that if you get those refunds and charge backs are you gonna take that out of the affiliates future income right so you need to make all the decisions kind of upfront so that you can make sure that you stay aboveboard communicate that to the affiliate upfront and then make sure that you adhere to that so that plan going forward so you’re not losing money then there’s of course you know all kinds of tax reporting and other things I will disclaim I am NOT a tax advisor you should talk to a professional tax you know advisor about this situation but in general you’re going to have to report to tax authorities how much you’re paying these people typically through form 1099 reporting to the IRS and and as I understand it if you pay them through PayPal which a lot of these platforms allow you to do PayPal actually manages all the 1099 reporting so you actually don’t have to do any of it all you have to do is pay them through PayPal and then PayPal does the rest but again no guarantee I’m disclaiming you see your tax accountant or tax advisor for the appropriate mechanism for doing that but you got to figure that out and many of these platforms again they help you do that but I just want to make sure you’re you’re aware all right next is communicating with your affiliate now this is like so important in as good a valley girl way I can say it but you know your affiliate is is is being communicated with on many many levels and so that comes down to your website to start with so first and foremost when you make that initial communication with an affiliate or they land on your website you need to have a comput professional website that has the capability of converting sales if it does not already have that then you need to talk to your web developer web designer graphic artist whomever you work with in order to make sure your website is solid because if philly –it gets communicated the message that that website is not going to be able to convert sales when they send traffic to you to your website then they’re not going to become an affiliate right it just doesn’t make any sense to is that you’re your affiliate is going to either get some kind of benefit for for sending you you know sales and the important part for you is to figure out does that affiliate need to experience the product or service you know how they experience it do they need to experience it so you may decide if you have a a physical product you might send them a free sample of that product or you might ask them to come in and get a free service or provide that free service to them virtually however you do it so the affiliate can experience it and therefore be able to sell that product better because they’ve gone through it they’ve experienced that they’ve used it okay so it’s very important for you to be able to figure out those things as you’re communicating with your affiliate there’s nothing more important than being responsive to affiliates while they are not employees you must treat them almost like they are when it comes to communicating with them okay so this may this may mean when when they message you on Instagram or they message you on via email or however they’re communicating with you you have to you have to you have to be there for them especially if they have a client who’s you know potentially going to come to you and buy imminently they want to be able to get those answers answered those questions answered very quickly and and professionally so they can then you know just literally copy and paste your message and give it to that to that you know person so that they can then convert so you need to be very responsive also show gratitude so many times affiliates are kind of treated poorly but in essence if you’re if you’re running an effective affiliate program they are you know they’re your your ground troops right and you need to be able to treat them well because they’re bringing in the sales you know and so be thankful to them show gratitude you know thank them here and there for when they’re doing well and when they do nice things right one of the other things that you need to communicate with your affiliate is if you have any deals going on so say you have an upcoming 4th of July sale or if you’re planning a holiday season sale you need to make sure that you communicate with them with the visual assets we’ll talk about that shortly any creatives and discounts or promotions that are coming up so that they’re aware of it so that they can send them to specific pages on your website that talk about those promotions and also communicate with them whether or not you’re gonna be giving discounts away to your your customer base or to the public that are gonna compete with the affiliates discounts so for example in many of affiliate programs you will actually say to the affiliate here goes a discount code or a promotional code and and any people you send to my website with this link can use this code and they’ll get say 5 percent off of their their deal right because now that’s the incentive for someone to buy from the affiliate as opposed to directly from you and that means the affiliate has some immediate benefit to give to the potential buyers from them as opposed to from anyone else well if you put out a discount code for 10% off of your product for sale on your website well now the affiliate can’t beat that because as soon as someone goes to their website and instead of using the the affiliates promotional code your website has a big banner that says hey we have our upcoming 4th of July sale use this promotional code for 10% and now that negates the affiliates sale right because you’re not going to give 15% off of the product or you’re not going to give 10% off the product and then give the affiliate their affiliate Commission that wouldn’t make sense now the affiliate is is basically sending you traffic but not getting a benefit for it and that’s gonna compromise your relationship with them so communicate these things with them and figure out how much you know you might decide you know anytime I send an my email newsletter out to my audience we’re gonna offer this discount and you can tell the affiliate that right and just be up front and they’re gonna know that these are people who are already on your email list you’ve done the hard work of garnering them as a part of your email marketing list you’re allowed to do what you want with them there but you’re not gonna you’re gonna publish publicly that same discount on social media and on your website and other places because obviously that doesn’t benefit and doesn’t motivate your affiliate to bring in business ok so think about ways in which you’re you’re communicating with your affiliate to make sure that you’re having a good relationship okay so a little bit about affiliate commissions because this is really important this is very similar to the advertising space right so we talked about pay-per-click we talked about CPM or cost per thousand views we talked about CPA cost per action well in the affiliate world is actually very similar in the sense that the first type of commission that you would probably pay them is the is basically for a click and this is very similar to cost per click or PPC CPC advertising and what we do is we we you can pay your your your affiliate for anytime they that someone clicks on one of the links on their properties whether that be their Twitter profile or does that be on their website blog podcast or otherwise and that directs a click over to your website okay so that’s how much traffic are you able to send to my website and if your website has a a very high conversion rate that means that a lot of people most people when they come to your website buy something from you once they get there then pay per click or clicks is a is a potentially you know expensive way because you’re gonna pay less for pay-per-click than you are for the others for getting sales right so if you have a if you have a really high conversion rate then pay per clicks might work for you next up our paper leads and in the paper leads mechanism someone does something to show interest that allows you to be able to interact and engage with them and that means that the affiliate has has in the in the retail world you would they got them through the door right so they showed up in your retail space that’s a that’s a that’s a paper lead and so that means that they’ve actually completed some kind of form there’s not a sale but they’ve completed some kind of form they’ve done some kind of action and they get paid some amount for having gotten the lead to you okay and finally is a paper sale right and this is obviously the best way to set up affiliate commission but not the only way right because they’re the prior to are there but paper sales is someone clicked on a link they get taken to you to your website and they go through the e-commerce shopping cart program and it’s a sale right and that leads all back to the affiliate and the affiliate makes either a flat rate or a percentage based on the actual sale generated right so those are your options with regard to affiliate commissions and and there are tiered rewards basically you could say to a an affiliate if you if you make three sales this month you make one percent if you make six sales this month then you get thrown up to all of your commissions now go to six percent if you make nine sales this month then it goes up to three percent and will give you 3 percent on all of your sales for the month so you can actually tear these rewards to incentivize your affiliates to sell more right because the more productive those sales affiliates are or associates are then they’re going to produce more sales for you which is a good thing all around alright let’s talk a little bit about managing and supporting affiliates and then we’re gonna hop over to some of these two alright so the the best affiliate managers and that means you are affiliates themselves and what III say that because it’s usually important for you to be in the system as much as possible so that you can see how it’s working for the people who are selling for you so I would highly recommend that you either become an affiliate for another product or service that you already use and recommend to people right that would be one way to do it or sign up as an affiliate once you set up your own affiliate program so that you’re experiencing what others are doing and I usually recommend to people that they actually become an affiliate of their own program and go through that whole process of getting that first sale as their own affiliate to see what the experience is like because then if the experience is good for you you’re on solid ground if the experience was poor for you then you have some work to do right but the best affiliate managers are affiliates themselves so just take that to heart when you’re managing and supporting affiliates you need to be able to provide the affiliates with tools and these again are typically built into programs for example some programs have chromic you know web browser extensions that produce the links for the affiliates on the fly or they have them built into a dashboard so that affiliates can access those tools to be able to create links because they don’t want to just create links to your homepage of your website that doesn’t really convert people but if they could take them to a specific product on your on your page that’s really helpful and you want to be able to help them create that that that link so when I say tools I mean really link building tools so that you can create effective URLs for the affiliates quickly and easily next up our creative assets this is where a lot of the work actually comes into being an affiliate manager which is you’re going to need to have either a graphic designer or you can use a tool like canva canv a.com it’s a free graphic design tool and what it allows you to do is to create banner ads and other kinds of creative graphics you know you might want to create some Instagram host some Twitter images some Facebook images as well that are promoting your business and it has the affiliates information on it and then the affiliate will link to that with the links they’ve created from their link sharing tool right and that then they’ll post they’ve got their link and now people can click on that link or click on click on the image that’s linked to your website through their affiliate link and generate the the sale so the there there’s also discount codes if you’re producing discount codes on your website now you also have to recognize that you need to be monitoring discount codes through your system or through some other means and this this is really a factor because there there are websites like RetailMeNot and many others that actually go out on the web and they do nothing but look for discount codes and they collect them all together and you could lose a lot of money in e-commerce if you’re not effectively managing and shutting down expired discount codes or discount codes that can be doubled up in your system so that you know you can use multiple discount codes at once so just be aware that if you’re gonna you’re gonna have an effective affiliate program make sure that you’re managing those discount codes with your affiliates effectively as well there’s a course sales support you want to make sure that you’re handling the affiliates support as well as sales support well and you’ll have to determine whether or not you send an affiliate email newsletter okay so that’s just something you’ll have to decide upon and this is where you can communicate to them weekly deals monthly deals seasonal deals some promotional codes that might be going out links to their creatives and discount codes and so on and so forth and then you want to have an ability to report to your affiliates because there’s nothing more demotivating than for affiliates to be sending you traffic to your website and – it just goes into a black hole they have no idea whether or not they’re making sales they have no idea whether the traffic they’re using is converting you need to be monitoring this and providing a feedback mechanism and again the tools most often will do this for you but you need to make sure it exists so that they’re able to see oh you know what I sent you know 170 clicks over to the website not a single one of them became a sale this month what am I doing wrong how do I fix that and maybe you see that maybe you see an affiliate send you a thousand clicks in a given week and not a single sale well now you have to have a conversation without affiliate because they’re doing something right and your website’s not doing something right and they may not be doing something right which is maybe they’re telling the expectation is set wrong maybe the affiliate is telling them something that they can do on the website that it’s that they can’t do and maybe maybe the affiliate thinks that somebody can do something on your website to convert them and they can’t do it and that’s because you told them they could and when they get to the website something’s broken so you need to be in that conversation that communication with your affiliate to make sure you you know you’re having the right conversations that comes down to looking at the reports all right so we’re gonna hop out now and spend the rest of our time just looking at some examples and some tools that I think will be really helpful to you in developing this so most of these major websites that were on right now have a a an affiliate program in this particular case we’re actually on Walmart’s affiliate program and I don’t really care about which ones were on more so than I’m gonna give them to you so you can look at them yourselves so in this particular case we’re at affiliates walmart.com and this is the landing page this is the page that I told you that you should create for your own website now again if you use some of these platforms they will create these for you but if you don’t have one produced for you you’re gonna need to create one and and you can see this is a very very simple site right they have the Walmart affiliate logo so it’s gonna be your business logo up here they have home their tools creatives there’s ad management and reporting right and a login you won’t have an API I’m gonna worry about that they have this slider that goes through the various things that they have see they have a Chrome extension where people can install the Chrome extension who are affiliated and anytime they’re browsing the Walmart website they can click on the little extension they get a link and now they get to go out there and put the creatives in front of you know the visual assets in front of their audience with the link or put it on their website and when people click on it they now get they get the referral click through right um they have this very basic you know three-step process here right you can apply and they have an application form I’d highly recommend that you just go through the process so you can see what questions that Walmart asks because I’m presuming that Walmart’s gonna do it right because they have the resources to make that happen so using them as an example is one example you can go ahead and do that obviously they have an approval process right so you’re not affiliates they’re not just signing up and immediately becoming an affiliate affiliates and then the final process where they can generate their ads and start marketing campaigns right they have a Terms of Service and conditions and security and privacy policy fa Q’s benefits and a contact us page and I just wanted to show you a couple things here on it one here we’re at the benefits page and what’s really helpful is they actually publish their referral fee schedule so if you’re in the retail space you can actually go through here and look at what they’re paying in terms of baseline offers right and they actually have all of their you know kind of structuring Commission and everything kind of outlined for you so you could say okay well I sell music they pay one percent you know baseline Commission’s for music so that gives you at least an idea in your industry for what you’re selling for what you know Walmart is paying so it’s just a good piece of data point it’s a piece of datum that you can use in deciding how to do that also they’re frequently asked questions I wouldn’t say copy and paste it onto your website to your rural program but you can use these as templates to write your own right because these are the questions that people are using one thing that we realized when we come to Walmart is that they’re actually using link share and I’m gonna show you their website very shortly so they’re using the Rakuten link share platform for their entire affiliate program so that tells you a piece of information Walmart doesn’t even run it themselves because they’ve chosen to have someone else do it for them but by reading through their FA cues you can see what kinds of questions people ask and what kinds of answers Walmart gives for those things okay terms and conditions one of the things here is you’re gonna need a very healthy terms of conditions again you can go to an attorney you know local attorney who can help you with this you can find samples online like here on Walmart’s affiliate program but the thing I wanted to scroll down and show you was here note that Walmart has decided to publish a list of of examples of impermissible keywords what they call fat finger domains and variations of trademarks that can’t be bit Adhan so this comes down to the fact that if you are spending advertising dollars at any given time for particular things and they may be specific keywords for your products right so like if you sell baby toys you might be using baby toys as a keyword on Google AdWords or on Facebook or Instagram ads well you don’t want your you don’t want your affiliates to be also doing advertising campaigns for those same keywords you don’t want to be competing with them for those things so you can actually in your Terms of Service make it a violation of the of the agreement for them to be able to use those as well as using your name or variations of your brand name okay so I would very much recommend that you read through these I mean they talk about RSS feeds and other kinds of things that are you may not think about but are really important functions when it comes to this kind of technology that can be used and sometimes abused when it comes to affiliates so check out of Walmart’s Terms of Service Best Buy does the same thing this is just a good example of Best Buy and and their affiliate program if you go by the way if you just go to Walmart com bestbuy.com Target calm scroll down to the bottom of their pages and you will likely find their affiliate program link so you can see all of these things I just wanted to show you a few examples you had an idea but here goes a little the Best Buy website here goes the Best Buy affiliate program and again they give you a little bit of information how to join and frequently asked questions again notice here they use link share so they they kind of do that for you giving you an idea that LinkShare is the dominant player in the market and they give you some banner eggs banner examples so you can see if Best Buy is giving away these what looks like nine different banner ads well you might want to match that by creating those in canva so that your affiliates have those have access to those creatives as well on Best Buy’s website they actually give you this healthy FAQ which is super helpful and you should read them okay like including like when will I get paid Best Buy pays on a monthly basis they don’t pay on weekly write your initial payment will come sixty days after your first Best Buy sale like once you read through some of these things you got a pretty good idea about how to manage your own program and it’s super helpful so I really highly recommend that okay now we’re on targets affiliate website for some reason I couldn’t find it on their main page so I had to go to affiliate target comm to find theirs but either way I was told that it was there was a link at the bottom of the page but I couldn’t find it so just go to affiliate target com and again they give us some really good information right here on their homepage they have a FAQ they show you how the signup process works and I would recommend again just going through it so that you can see what others are experiencing going to these major providers of associate programs and and seeing what those affiliates experience and making sure that yours feels the same but if we go over to their affiliate FAQ again they have some really really fine detail here they explain to you what a cookie is you’re gonna need to know what a cookie is and what how long a cookie is gonna last and many other of these some kind of technical terms that I don’t have time today in the webinar to talk about so check out targets there we’re actually currently now on I believe Amazon’s website Associates Program yeah and if we go to Amazon’s again go to amazon.com scroll all the way to bottom and look for the Associates Program and here they again give us some Commission rates so if if Walmart’s referral fee schedule didn’t really give you enough information you can go ahead and check out that here and and see whether these percentages don’t fit your industry and if they’re helpful or not okay now I wanted to just very quickly go through in the remaining minutes and then I’ll take any questions is some of the platforms that you can use and and so there are really only a few that are out there in the market worth their their muster the first is a website called commission junction which was purchased by conversant or something like that a few years back but if you go to CJ comm Kat Joseph comm you’ll be taken here and they actually have the function I was talking about earlier which is called pay per call so if you’re looking if your business is really heavily phone sales based you can actually find affiliates who can generate phone calls to your business and then that tracks the sales okay so Commission Junction is gonna charge you at some kind of upfront fee then they’re gonna charge you of course a percentage of the sales and then they pay the affiliate directly from the fees that they charge you okay so they handle everything they have a huge publisher database basically affiliates who are looking for businesses like yours and so they kind of do it all for you they’re gonna be obviously pricey for that reason but look at look at what their you know their system looks like and if it makes sense for you it makes sense for you right next up is Rakuten so again we looked at Best Buy and Walmart both of them use this this company for their system so this is called link share and it’s brought to you by Rakuten which is a very large internet company out of Japan and so they’re again they’re the same they have a huge pool of affiliates they have all of the technology components to help you as a business and they they they put the two of you together and so they probably have a monthly or an initial fee and then an ongoing cost which will include the payouts to your affiliates okay so Rakuten you can find them by going to link share com next up are the next few ShareASale is definitely a good runner up they they handle all kind of affiliate programs but you could become a merchant on the program and that kind of thing so ShareASale again i think you know again they have an upfront fee and then you pay your affiliates out of pay them and the affiliates out of some monthly fee based on the sales that they bring Clickbank is also one of those major sites I don’t know very much about them I have not gotten a very good vibe from just browsing their website over the years it looks it looks just very multi-level marketing and weird to me but from reading the text it sounds like they’re fairly solid you know they do they do a competent job and they seem to have very good reviews so I don’t know but but clickbank.com you can check them out whoops just a few more and then we’ll be closing out so oh and Clickbank does have a really healthy resources section so I would definitely check that out next up are four sites that you’re you know you’re looking to run on WordPress or Shopify and affiliate Li spelled on screen AFF ili ATL Y affiliate Li calm they actually have a program for being able to help you connect and they integrate with shopify bigcommerce Magento WooCommerce which is the shopping you know the cart tool built in built for WordPress built by the same paid bills WordPress Squarespace so in essence if you have one of these you know website platforms you can integrate affiliate li and they in essence make it really easy for you they have basic pricing to help you get things going and they’re pretty affordable for small business so if you’re looking for just a very basic easy to use tool affiliate Li does the job and and I’ve run them through the paces and they seem to do a really good job with it they showed me several demos then if you are running a WordPress website specifically and you want to be able to run the entire de philia program inside your WordPress installation there are actually two different plugins once three and one is a fee-based one the first one is called WP affiliate manager and that’s actually its website WP affiliate manager comm and it’s it’s completely free solution you install it you do everything you need to do and then you manage the the payouts from the system you have to set it up all of that fun stuff so you can talk to your web developer if you’re not comfortable with the technology but you can go ahead and have them set it up and as you can see here you just you set it up and it runs all inside of your WordPress database okay and then this one’s called affiliate WP and this is looking if you want a well supported platform that is going to do some really kind of fancier things for example it does one-click PayPal payouts it helps you track lifetime commissions if you want to allow your affiliates to receive Commission’s on all future purchases by the customer tiered affiliate rates recurring referrals for subscription and membership fees and that kind of thing it has some really really sophisticated functionality that you’re not going to find in the other and the other plug-in this one does have an annual fee or you can pay a lifetime fee if you pay the lifetime fee over five years I think it’s like eight dollars and 33 cents a month so that makes it very affordable but you have to put up that front investment of about five hundred bucks or you can pay the two hundred and fifty dollars per year you know going forward but you do have to get the pro add-on if you’re gonna use affiliate WP and you can of course find that at affiliate WP calm and and so those are some of the tools I know I ran through them very quickly but the there as long as you caught the names you can go look at them and figure them out and we talked about all of that and so QA thanks write well right now the only question we have is about sending out the link when it’s ready and when we have the recording done we’ll definitely post it on the Virginia SBDC website so I’m gonna go ahead and close out the webinar if anybody else has questions please type them in the question window thanks everyone for participating today today’s webinar as I mentioned was recorded and it’ll be posted on the Virginia SBDC website under live webinars and recordings tomorrow you’ll be receiving a follow-up email with on the webinar and there’ll be an evaluation link in it if you please help us to continue to improve our training by taking the time to complete the evaluation we’d appreciate it if you want to fill out the evaluation now I put it into the chat window the link to it and our next webinar is on April 19th and it’s Instagram stories how to take advantage of storytelling with Instagram we do have one question and that is does this work for services the short answer is yes again as long as as long as someone can make a sale you know buy from you through your website the answer is yes so if you have any specific questions like I said go ahead and email me I’ll be happy to answer answer questions there great well we don’t have any other questions so we’ll go ahead and close this out Rae thank you very much