Build An Army With Affiliate Programs

Joining with other like-minded people is always a win-win situation.

An affiliate program is a program that allows other people to sell your products or services for you, generally for a fee. The only time you pay them is when they make a sale. They make you money, and then you pay them a commission. It's called zero cost sales and marketing.

The great thing about affiliates is that they help you spread your reach far beyond what you could ever do on your own. For example, say you had your own list of 10,000 subscribers and no affiliates. Basically, you would only have 10,000 potential customers that you could market to. Now if you had just one affiliate who also had a list of 10,000 subscribers, you would immediately double your reach.

To use affiliates to build your list, any and all traffic that you send to your site should be sent to your squeeze page, the page that captures your visitor's name and email information. That means your affiliates are sending the traffic they generate to your squeeze page.

You will soon find that as your army of affiliates grows, your traffic will grow so much so that you gain an unstoppable flow of traffic-traffic that you are not paying for. Your affiliates are working for you for free. They are promoting your products through email, on their websites or on their blogs.

Many affiliates will purchase Pay per Click search engine traffic and forward that traffic through their affiliate link to your site, making you and the affiliate money. Most Internet marketers and sales people will tell you that the majority of their income comes via their affiliates.

You can create your own affiliate program in three basic ways.

First, you can use a third party affiliate program. All you need to do is visit one of the major search engines, such as Google and type in 'affiliate programs.' A list of various services that offer affiliate programs will pop up. Typically, they will charge you a small monthly fee.

The second option is to purchase affiliate software and again, you can do a search on the major search engines to find your own server-side software. Having your own server-side software does give you more flexibility and it is only a one-time payment.

The third option is what I call 'in house software,' or software that you have specifically designed and programmed to suit your needs. If you don't know programming, you would need to hire a programmer. They are also easy to find on Elance.com or Rentacoder.com.

As your affiliate army grows and these affiliates paste their unique affiliate links on their websites and blogs, they will, in effect, be advertising for you for free and creating one-way, inbound links pointing directly at your domain. It's like having billboards on the super information highway.