Chapter 25
A Way to Leverage Marketing

Affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing is your effort to get oth­er web­sites to adver­tise your web­book. You pay them a fee for leads (click-throughs) or a com­mis­sion for sales.

What do you have to do to be an affil­i­ate mar­keter? That is, what do you have to do to get oth­er web­sites to send you cus­tomers for your webbook?

First, you have to decide what your deal is going to be. The affil­i­ate adver­tis­ers have to have an incen­tive to send their cus­tomers to you. It seems to me that a nor­mal retail incen­tive might make sense. That is, you might offer a 50% com­mis­sion on all sales for cus­tomers direct­ed by an affil­i­ate to your web­site. To be clear, we’re not talk­ing about a click-through lead. We’re talk­ing about a sale.

You have to have the soft­ware to han­dle the account­ing for affil­i­ates. The soft­ware must reg­is­ter each sale and cred­it affil­i­ate accounts with the prop­er com­mis­sion. Based on such account­ings you will need to send checks, prob­a­bly on a month­ly basis. Off-the-shelf soft­ware is available.

On the oth­er hand, if you don’t sell your web­book but instead pro­vide free access, you will need to pay affil­i­ate web­sites a fee for click-throughs (affil­i­ate web­site users click­ing on your ad-link on the affil­i­ate web­site). This is a per-click-through cost, not a commission.

Sec­ond, you have to find affil­i­ates. The eas­i­est way to do it is to join an affil­i­ate net­work group where your offer goes into the group’s data­base (cat­a­log) mak­ing your ad imme­di­ate­ly avail­able to many inter­net busi­ness peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions that may choose to run your ad. (Note that an affil­i­ate net­work typ­i­cal­ly han­dles the account­ing for you.) That works, if you can find an affil­i­ate group that will accept your ad offer.

Anoth­er way to do it is to just go out and recruit affil­i­ates. A thor­ough search on the Inter­net will give you a list of poten­tial web­sites that might be inter­est­ed in sell­ing your pub­lish­ing prod­ucts. Then con­tact the web­mas­ters in each of those web­sites and make your offer to them. Some will accept and some won’t. The broad­er the appeal of your pub­lish­ing prod­ucts, the more poten­tial affil­i­ates you will have to con­tact. This is labor-inten­sive work.

Third, set up guide­lines and cri­te­ria for peo­ple who will fea­ture your ads on their web­sites to pro­mote your book. You don’t want to have a lot of restric­tions. Nonethe­less, some restric­tions might make sense. For instance, you may not want to have your ads pub­lished on somebody’s porn-site.

Final­ly, you want make it as easy as pos­si­ble for your affil­i­ates to run your ad. That means giv­ing them prop­er HTML code, adver­tis­ing copy, and graphics.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly pub­lish­ers have made a busi­ness out of man­u­fac­tur­ing books and sell­ing them whole­sale to retail book­stores. The dif­fer­ence on the web is that any­one can become a retail bookstore.

For exam­ple, it makes sense for some­body who has a web­site spe­cial­iz­ing in giraffes to also have a lit­tle online store for giraffe acces­sories. Such acces­sories might include T‑shirts, mugs base­ball caps, and books. But even if such a web­site does­n’t have a store with acces­sories, it might have links to resources (e.g., a Resources page), which can include a link to your web­book about giraffes. What’s nice for the retail­er is that they don’t have to do any­thing except place the code for your affil­i­ate link into their web­page; and they col­lect a com­mis­sion (that you pay) if a sale results or a click-through fee if there is no commission.

After all is said and done, your best bet for suc­cess­ful affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing is like­ly to be join­ing affil­i­ate net­works. It’s an easy and effi­cient way to mar­ket, and the net­works do all the account­ing for you. That an affil­i­ate group has the cred­i­bil­i­ty to do the account­ing hon­est­ly is also a ben­e­fit to poten­tial affil­i­ates there­by encour­ag­ing greater effec­tive­ness for your affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing program.

Confusion Undone

Don’t con­fuse affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing with affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing. In an affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing pro­gram, you seek to entice oth­er web­sites to run your ads. Such ads have links that take users at oth­er web­sites to your web­site (e.g., web­book) to buy or view what you have to offer.

In an affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing pro­gram, you run the ads of those who want to adver­tise on your web­site. The adver­tis­ers pay you to run their ads. Read Chap­ter 26.

Summary

If you estab­lish an affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing pro­gram, where’s the ben­e­fit to you? The ben­e­fit is in what you sell or in the num­ber of poten­tial users you can get to your web­book. There may also be side ben­e­fits. For instance, you can make upsales in the traf­fic gen­er­at­ed by your affil­i­ate marketing.

The real ben­e­fit of an affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing pro­gram is get­ting oth­ers to sell your your pub­lish­ing prod­ucts, in effect.