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In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how to set up and run a successful affiliate program for you online businesses digital products.
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey ya’ll! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today’s Q&A with S&J where we have a question today from Valerio. We’re not sure how to say that.
SHANE: V-A-L-E-R-I-O Valerio.
JOCELYN: I think people put crazy names in here just so we can –
SHANE: I think you guys are using fake names. Jocelyn is right; you guys are putting in fake names just to hear us stumble across them. So, Valerio.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s going to get worse now. Okay it says, “I know that Shane has a friend who also sells e-books for football coaches and they are both affiliates for each other’s products. How do you set up these affiliate programs? How do you generate the code, that then you would get to your affiliate person so that he/she can promote your product to his/her audience. Do you do it with E-junkie or ClickBank and are there other methods you recommend?”
SHANE: All right, this is a great question and this is another one we get all the time and basically what an affiliate program is, is if I have a friend who is in a similar niche to me, like my buddy sells football playbooks just like I do; well, he might not want to write the same playbook that I do. So I’ll just say, ‘Hey here’s my playbook, you sell it for a hundred dollars and I’ll give you forty percent of it.’ He’s my affiliate. So he’s gonna go out and find new people that might not be in my audience, they are going to buy the product, he get’s forty bucks, and I get sixty bucks but I make a sale. I don’t get the whole hundred dollars but I do get to make a sale that I might not have made if I was not using an affiliate program. You do do this with E-junkie or ClickBank and really all that happens is, you basically upload your digital product and the service that you use, whether it’s a shopping cart, E-junkie, ClickBank or something else, just gives you a link and you give that link to your affiliate partner. This can also be automated like you can put some code on your page and people can sign up for your affiliate program and it will automatically generate them a link that they can use to sell your product and all the link does is it sends them to a landing page and it tracks the customer from their website. So, if they buy, in your data and in your sales reports it’ll say, ‘Oh, by the way, these ten were sold by your friend as an affiliate so you owe them x percentage or whatever it is.’ So any shopping cart you use, anything online you are using like E-junkie, ClickBank, Gumroad probably does this; whatever you are using to take payments for your digital product is probably going to be able to set up an affiliate program where you can go out and find people to sell your products for you. ClickBank is a great one to use starting out no matter what you are using because you can go and set that up and there’s like a marketplace on ClickBank.com where people can look for affiliate products. So, if I am a football coach and I am like, I want to see if there’s any football playbooks out there, oh look, there’s five guys out there that have uploaded these playbooks, they fit my product line, I’ll just sell theirs as an affiliate too to kind of bulk up my catalogue of information. You can totally do that on ClickBank. But there’s actually a couple of easier ways to do that if you want to just set this up kind of on a DIY basis.
JOCELYN: Okay, one thing that I do, I don’t really use a whole lot of affiliates on my Elementary Librarian site but I do have a couple of products that –
SHANE: People have created and you give them money for them basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so I split a percentage with several products on my site and the way that I do that is I actually just create a new product for each of these affiliate sales so that way I know for sure that this was an affiliate product or this was a sharing product and I know that I need to give this persona a percentage of that product because it’s the only place that I sell it.
SHANE: So basically on E-junkie, you can upload product A and then Jocelyn could say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna duplicate that product but I’m only going to use this like for the sales page where my friend is sending these affiliate sales to’ and you can just track it on your own. If product A sells then you keep all the money but if product A-duplicate sells, then you know that that came from your affiliate and you are going to give them a percentage of that money.
JOCELYN: This is a very simple way to do it if you maybe only have one affiliate or one product where you pay someone else for it, something like that. That method would work for that. If you are using a lot of affiliates or it’s a situation where people can sign up to be affiliates, you definitely don’t want to do it that way. It’s going to be a lot of manual work and it’s going to take a really long time to do. So, we would recommend doing it the way that Shane was talking about earlier. There are probably plug-ins that do this, I’m sure there are things that even automatically pay people. If you know of one that you use, for the people out there listening, you can head on over to Flippedlifestyle.com/QA50 and you can let us know about it in the comments.
SHANE: And finally if you really want to set this up, maybe you’ve only got one person like my buddy, sometimes, I trust him, I just give him the files and he just puts them in his store and he just sends me part of the money. It just depends on the relationship you have with your affiliates; would not recommend that for strangers because they are probably not going to pay you but it’s really easy to just give someone a percentage of whatever you are selling. You can either use a tool to set up an affiliate program or you can just set up separate landing pages like Jocelyn said before. All right guys, that’s all the time we have for this Q&A; tune in next week, we will answer more of your questions. Until then, we will catch you all on the flip side.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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