There are more ways to increase your sales than to just try to entice more and more customers to purchase your product by increasing your advertising budget.
Have you ever considered establishing an affiliate sales program? Such an effort may seem overwhelming or too complex for a small solo business. But the truth is, with the tools currently available online, there is no reason why the solo owner can't leverage his own effort quite inexpensively.
Creating an affiliate sales program is much like recruiting a large group of independent contract salesmen. These folks go out on their own and sell your products or service for a sales commission or portion of the profit on each and every sale they make.
You don't pay these salesmen as employees. They sell your products for you because they are paid "a one time commission" to expend effort just like any other consignment salesman might operate.
The benefit to you is that you don't have all the employer-employee strings and attachments that encumber a paid company sales force. In fact, once the affiliate system is in place, you don't have to spend any money until a sale is actually made. Then your responsibility is simply to track and pay the referring parties.
But here's the big advantage to this selling system: you are able to cover a lot more ground, or put your products and service in front of a lot more people than you could do otherwise. Your affiliates will bear the expense and effort of selling.
Many top affiliates have large mailing lists and ready access to the targeted customers you can't approach on your own. Some of them will even endorse or recommend your product at the time it is pitched. Such endorsements usually lead to a great percentage of customers buying a product over just a non-personal attempt to "cold call" a list.
You can recruit affiliate sellers to your program passively or actively. The passive approach means you advertise your affiliate program on your web site and ask for prospects to sign up today or apply to become an affiliate.
The active approach requires that you advertise away from your site or maybe approach potential affiliate web site owners about the advantages of your products and the profitability of selling them in conjunction with their own business. The best affiliates generally have a complementary product rather than a competing one in the same market.
You will also have to consider whether you want to use an outside affiliate program (like Commission Junction or Click Bank) which is really a third-party provider, or a self installed software solution that you manage and operate on your own.
Typically, the third-party solution is more costly in terms of the amount of profit from each sale you'll have to forego, but it also frees you up from installing, operating, and managing a sometimes time-intensive program that is detail oriented and open to tracking and payment headaches.
Here is one way to look at the trade-off: if you have a large business and the expertise to set up and manage your own system, then that may be the best alternative for you personally. You will remain in control and you'll be able to oversee every aspect of your sales force.
On the other hand, if your business is small, you don't have technical expertise in setting up and running software programs, or your business is not well known yet online (you don't get much traffic), it may be worth the extra amount you'll have to pay (usually on a monthly subscription basis or as a greater percentage of your sales income) to hire a third-party to handle all the details for you.
Whichever way you decide to go, you can always make a change later if you aren't satisfied with the result of your first decision. If you do make a change, there is a good chance you'll lose some affiliates, but in the long run you will probably make more money than before as you employ a system that better fits your capabilities and business needs.
The greatest advantage to using a large third-party provider may be the fact that they are already established and have a growing network of current affiliate sellers that they can offer your product to. You would likely pay a lot to have that kind of affiliate recruitment power in a small obscure web site circumstance.
 |
Post#153 |
