I'm trying to start an affiliate program for my Real Estate Coaching program. I'm sick of dealing with trying to generate my own traffic and I'm looking to outsource it. What I'm curious about is what an affiliate wants/ needs out of a program. Here's what I'm offering right now. 25% commission Next Business Day Affiliate pay through paypal. Program managed through PayDotCom. What I'm curious about is if I'm missing anything an experienced affiliate might want /need. I'm looking to make this as attractive as I can without raising the commission. I spent an average of 7-10 hours working each student/ customer and I'm not willing to do that work for less money.
I think you are off to a good start here. Next day payments are a great addition! That may become a pain unless you automate the process, not familiar with where you are housing your program. I would suggest as you grow to go to more networks -- also there are a lot of very active affiliate forums out there, make sure you get on there and spread the word a little. Looks pretty good though -- how much does 25% commission work out too? People like/need clear breakdowns of their money and how they earn it.
Thats a pretty large CPA -- I would list it as $350 CPA if that is a firm number, more attractive then 25% what sort of % of leads do you close usually?
It's a firm number. I'm not offering upsells or downsells at the moment. If I do later they'll be at 25%. Based on my PPC Campaign I'm converting at just under 8%. 307 out of 3839 visitors.
8% is pretty huge -- To be honest I think you will do pretty great with this set-up. I would just recommenced you advertise it as a $350 pay per sale and you avg 8% conversion in your description text for the program and you should be set to go.
Yeah one of my main worries wasn't my conversion rates (real estate wholesale is just a specialized marketing job) This campaign isconverting better than anything I've ever run. I just wasn't sure if I had enough visitors to boldly call it 8%. I wasn't sure how many was standard for running the numbers.
Its as true as the data you have, which is all that counts. Its going to fluctuate and it wont be that way for your affiliates (someone coming from a home and gardening blog to buy real-estate will probably not ever get close to converting 8% of the traffic they send), but it is true for your business model as is -- ethically its sound
I think that 307 out of 3839 visitors is definitely good numbers to state a percentage. Of course, it really depends on the keywords affiliates are bidding on, of if they are using bum marketing, how well their efforts are to target the right people that will buy your product. However, at $350 per CPA and someone paying $0.25 a click, they have to do worse than 1/1400 to not make any money. If an affiliate can't convert in 1 in 1000 or 1 in 500, then they are quite possibly targeting the wrong people. One concern I have about next business day payouts is that if you get a lot of affiliates, you may find this quite a hassle. To automate it, I would look into PayPal Mass Pay as that allows you to upload a text or csv file with email addresses and payment amounts, and PayPal will send out all those payments for you - provided you have funds in your account of course! So if you have 1,000 affiliates, this will make sending out payments a snap! Either yourself (or outsource it) create a simple script that pulls the data from where ever the information is stored. If that is not possible, then you might want to think about weekly payouts - which at $350 per CPA, that would be a nice payout per week if someone can convert even just 2 or 3 people in that week. The only other concern is about refunds. You need a way to protect yourself from those. If you've already paid out an affiliate, and there is a refund - you now have to find a way to get that money back from the affiliate or deduct it from future earnings. Even if your product says "absolutely no refunds", if someone does a charge back on their credit card saying the purchase was not authorized, a customer can possibly get their refund that way.
Awesome, thanks for all the input. Thinking on what you said (It never occurred to me I'd get 1000 affiliates) I'll post my advertisements as "first 25 affiliates lock in next business pay commissions for life!" Then I get to throw in a pretty appealing call to action and leave the rest with a solid weekly commission. My refund policy is pretty clear, and a strong selling point. If you follow the system, do the work, and listen to the feedback I give you, and you haven't done at least 1 deal after 120 days I give 100% money back +$500 for wasting your time. I'll put in that affiliates are not responsible for refunds, put I will withhold funds from future commissions to make up for any commissions paid on chargebacks/reported credit card fraud I have one last question. My website is a ridiculously over the top hard sell. I mean it is as many power sales words as I could shove on a page. By itself it only converts just over 2% (loosing buyers who's BS detector is tripped). The 8% conversion rate came when I started running the PPC traffic through a very self effacing, very soft sale landing page. i.e. This guy dresses like an idiot, and isn't near as funny as he thinks he is, but he knows Real Estate. Is this something I should include in my posting for affiliates. Obviously I want them to hae the best conversion rate possible (since we both win) but I don't want t turn off affiliates by telling them how to run their campaigns.
Affiliates LOVE information. I wouldn't out and out tell an affiliate what to do but give them as many tools as possible to help them out. Things like banners and graphics, sample PPC ads, sample articles one could spin and post on article sites, sample email templates one could spin for an emailing, etc. The more *quality* tools you provide, the more your affiliates will know you are there to help them because when they make money - you make money! The more affiliates you have, the more you can concentrate on improving your product or creating a new one rather than spending that time trying to drive traffic to your site. I know it didn't occur to you that you'd get 1,000 affiliates but word of mouth travels fast and if you've got 100 affiliates all converting at even 1%, that 1 / 100 visitors = $350. There should be no way in hell an affiliate can lose money on this program and when people catch on to that, you'll get tons of affiliates! If you have two landing pages - one hard sell and one soft sell - put them both up there and let affiliates choose what page to send visitors to. This way, you don't have to choose. Plus, if you get a decent amount of affiliates on both pages, you can see which one truly converts better. For the one that converts the least, spend time tweaking the page until it converts better.
Real time statistics. Preferably by the hour. If I don't know whether or not my traffic is converting, how can I improve my leads? When this program becomes available, please post here as I want to join!
Sounds like you have some great ideas to get started with. A few things that come to my mind is, Make sure you have good creatives. Banners etc, A good banner will convert better then a cheap plain banner any day. make sure you give your affiliates the size banners they need. Here is what I would be looking for: Use as many different Affiliate Networks as your budget allows. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game and it helps to have the numbers stacked in your favor. I would consider having a 2 tier affiliate program. This type of program will speed the affiliate signups coming in. Also make sure you use all types of media in your offering. Banner ads, text ads, html ads, email ads, co-reg, popup and popunders can still bring in some numbers. Also, stay in contact with your affiliates, Sometimes a little push now and then will keep your offer in front of the others.
The final score on my test run (8,000 visitors) is up. Program converted at 4%, apparently weekend shoppers are mostly just looking and have less motivation to buy. The affiliate program is up (sort of). I've set up the affiliate program through PayDotCom BUT, I'm still trying to figure out how make there system let my page look all pretty, and get their text off of it. It loves not my basic knowledge of HTML. AND I don't have any creatives finished yet (they're on the way but it will be a week or two). So here's my bribe. Anyone who get's there first sale before the creatives are done locks in next business day commissions for life. Everyone else get's weekly. I'd love to post the link, but I'm a few posts shy of being able to embed links in posts