Affiliate Marketing for RTOs
So how does affiliate marketing work?
For all of your products, you determine a percentage commission that you would be willing to pay for a complete and paid enrolment. You have an online store as part of your website that markets your products as usual and processes purchases. This way you are in full control of the enrolment process and thus maintaining your compliance.
Your affiliate system generates unique links and banner ads for your Affiliates. Your affiliates then use these unique links to send traffic to your website, and the system will automatically track purchases and provide you with live reporting to commissions owing. Your affiliates can login to the affiliate centre on your website and see how many clicks and sales have been made from their affiliate links.
Affiliate marketing is a much smarter way of doing business than hiring sales representatives because of its simplicity. Essentially anyone can become an affiliate in under 2 minutes simply by registering on your site, which is much quicker than the general rigmarole of going through a recruitment process. It also allows for quick and easy Joint Ventures with partners, here is an example.
Let’s say you have struck a deal with an industry organisation with perhaps 4000 members. To get them really motivated about marketing your training products to their members, you offer them a 10% commission on sales (which is less than you would need to allocate to a sales representative!). You or they set up an affiliate account through your website which automatically generates a unique link and ad specifically for them. They then send an email to all of their members, with a link to your website; when their members follow this link and make a purchase through your website, a commission is allocated to the affiliate.
You can set a timeframe on the visitor tracking of perhaps 2 months, so that if the user returns to your website (even without using the affiliate link), your affiliate is still rewarded.
It is your affiliate’s responsibility to get potential customers to your website and promote your products and services. Some affiliates do this through Google advertising, some email their existing network, some use social media, some use banner ads on their website.
Here are some tips on running a successful affiliate program.
1) Promote your affiliate programme on your website. Simply add a link on your homepage called Affiliate Programme which could link to a page describing affiliate commission payments.
2) Arm your affiliates with all the details. Make sure your affiliates are kept up to date with any changes to your products, services and prices. Consider emailing them regularly, not only will this help them promote your products better, but it could help build a profitable relationship between you and your affiliates.
3) Market yourself regularly to your affiliates. You need to make sure your affiliates are motivated to promote your business. You could run a special promotion for your affiliates, for instance the best selling affiliate wins an iPad.
4) Be Competitive. Always make sure you know what your competitors are paying affiliates to promote their business. Try matching their commission payments or better still beating them. There is no loyalty with affiliates; they will promote whoever pays best.
5) Pay on time. The worst thing you can do for your affiliate programme is to delay payments. Make sure your affiliates are paid on time, and they will happily continue to promote your business.
Off The Chain Marketing's latest eCommerce 3.0 website design comes complete with full affiliate marketing management plus much more, and comes in at a neat $1,497 (not bad at all for a self-hosted, state-of-the-art, fully branded, feature-packed CMS eCommerce website!). It even includes a multi-level affiliate platform, where you can have affiliates referring affiliates and managing up lines and down lines. Click here for more info.
Earn cash as an affiliate
As well as promoting your products and services through affiliate marketing, why not become an affiliate yourself and create a secondary revenue stram? You can promote products and services that your customers may find useful and earn a fantastic commission for your business or yourself. Your customers will be pleased you’re providing them with useful links to what they require, and you get a well deserved reward for it.
Off The Chain Marketing has a huge range of popular marketing products and services that you can promote to your network.
Earn 20% commission for all sales.
Click here for details.
