Why You Should Start an Affiliate Program – Ep #44
…and Recruit Your Own Affiliates to Promote Your Products & Services
Welcome to episode #44 of the SubscribeMe show from SubscribeMe.fm.
I’m your host Ravi Jayagopal. SubscribeMe.fm is the podcast to listen to, to learn about creating membership sites & online courses, making, marketing and monetizing digital content, WordPress, eCommerce, digital marketing, and tools, techniques and tips that you can use to create a long term, profitable online business.
I am the co-founder & co-developer of DigitalAccessPass.com, arguably the best membership plugin in the industry, fondly known as DAP.
Affiliates are the unsung heroes of any online business. Which is why an affiliate program needs to be baked right into your online business
Just in case you are not familiar with this term, this is where, a seller – take my own business for example, at DigitalAccessPass.com. You can sign up to become an affiliate. Then you get a special link that you can promote on social media, to your email list, on your blog, even on your podcast.
And if someone visits your special affiliate link, they are redirected to our web site, and a special browser cookie – a small piece of code that all web sites use – is set on that person’s browser, tagging them as having been referred by you. And then, if they later go on to purchase any products from DigitalAccessPass.com, then you become that buyer’s affiliate, and you can earn up to 33% in affiliate commissions. So if they went on to buy something for a 100 dollars, then if the commission for that product is 33%, then you get 33 dollars credited to your account.
And then, once a month, we pay out commissions for all past purchases that happened before the last 60 days. Now, we pay only after 60 days, because payment processors like Paypal give a buyer up to 60 days to ask for a refund. So once the buyer is past the refund period, we pay out any commissions due to you.
Don’t worry if this affiliate program sounds a bit complicated, especially if you’ve never had your own affiliates before, but just know that DAP – or DigitalAccessPass.com – automates the whole process for your affiliates, for the buyer and for you, as the site owner.
Affiliate marketing is nothing new. Amazon.com built their entire business in the early years from allowing affiliates to promote their products on their web sites, and giving them the ability to earn commissions on any sales that are generated through their referral.
At DigitalAccessPass.com (DAP), we have built our entire business without any kind of Google-gaming.
Not that we don’t care about Google. Of course, we do. We even used to have a few ads running on AdWords – we no longer do – we stopped running them about a year ago. No paid ads, no SEO gaming, no fake blogs or link farms. On rare occasions, we do some link building, but it’s all totally white-hat and Google-approved stuff.
Most of our customers find out about DAP through a review article online, someone recommending it via email , or a post in an online online. So we have never had to worry about Penguin, Panda or any other cute animals :-).
So how did we do it?
(listen to the show for the rest)
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Thanks again for listening. I’ll talk to you soon.
Cheers!
– Ravi Jayagopal
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