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With the 6th message ready to go, and the free report loaded to give to subscribers, I’m ready to tackle a powerful step in rebuilding my list: connecting an affiliate program.

With an affiliate program, I’ll be able to have other people around the world helping me drive traffic to my homepage. I only have to pay for that traffic when sales are made.

The steps I’ll take are:

• Set up my product inside PayDotCom
• Put a PDC button on my buy page
• Edit the affiliate signup page
• Create a couple of affiliate tools
• Promote the affiliate program

It sounds complicated, but it’s a lot easier than most people think. Let me show you the steps now…

Set Up PayDotCom Affiliate Product

Note: remember, videos for this day’s steps are inside DiscoverAutoresponders.com.

Usually, I run my affiliate programs with Butterfly Marketing software. But that software is used for individual websites. Since I’m using my central blog, which is on Blogi360, I need to use something “external” to my site like Clickbank or PayDotCom. (In the future, we’re supposed to be getting Amember for Blogi360, but it’s not there yet).

I’m not going to use Clickbank because I want to show you PDC (it’s free for one product), and I don’t have to go through any approval process. I also don’t want to pay their higher fees. However, you may want to use Clickbank because their accounting process is smoother on your side (hence the higher fees).

In any case, inside PayDotCom I set up a product. Since I already had a product connected to my blog, I’ll be using the same one. This is so I can avoid the issue of having my existing affiliates’ links all go dead.

TIP: If you’re starting from scratch, create your free account (you pay a 1-time $29 for unlimited products, but the first one’s free), and consider the offer for pre-paying for your transaction fees in advance.

The title I give the product is what will show up on the Paypal receipt of the customer, but the description is what’s going to show up in the marketplace to attract affiliates. With that in mind, I create the title and description.

The most important part of the first section of your product is the sales page and the Thank You URL. The sales page is actually the page you want your visitors to come to after they click the affiliate link. So in my case, the sales page is really the opt-in page. After signing up, they’ll then see the page that has the buy button.

The thank you URL is the page your customers go to after they purchase. This can be either a product registration page, or directly to the download page.

The other fields to complete in the product creation wizard are simple enough: include your Paypal email address (PayDotCom works exclusively with Paypal), the price of the product, the affiliate payout, and categories for your offer.

You can pay your affiliates any percentage you wish, or even a flat fee. I’m paying 75% on this program because it’s important for me to get as much traffic as possible.

Other major options to make sure you have correct are to check the “send directly to Paypal” option. This results in higher conversions than the old way, which includes an intermediate PDC page. By checking this option, you do not need to worry about the custom order page.

There are a few other options you may want to look into (trial payments, subscriptions, etc.), but keeping it simple is the way to go for your first product.

Put The Payment Button On Your Website

After you’ve created the product, you need to get your payment button that’s connected to it. You’ll want to get the http:// graphics instead of those at the top of the page. You can upload your own graphic if you want to.

Next, take the supplied code and replace your existing payment button we put up originally with it. Save your new sales page, and test the button to make sure it goes over to Paypal correctly, and the price is what you want it to be.

If you want to make a text link go to the order page, you can use the link given for that purpose as well.

TIP: The code given to you is a straight up image and link. You can paste this code on any site where you have raw HTML access, including Squidoo pages.

Customize Your Affiliate Signup Page

When you create a product with PayDotCom, it automically generates an affiliate signup page. This page is good enough as a default that you don’t need to do anything to it. However, you can customize it by adding your own header and information at the bottom. Or you can change the whole thing.

Here’s my affiliate signup page

This is the page you’ll send people to in order for them to join your affiliate program.

Create Affiliate Tools

In my course, Create Your Own Affiliate Program, I teach about all the different types of tools that affiliates want to see (as well as how to run your affiliate program more successfully). You have many of these options set as a default in PDC.

You’ll want to create at least a tell-a-friend, short and long emails, and shorter text ads that would appear in ezines, etc. Make sure you use the {aff_id} code, which will automatically give your affiliates their unique link.

When you have time, get banners together too. Many of my banners I get at TheBannersMall.com. They do an awesome job with internet marketing style banners, with subtle and not so subtle flairs. Here are a couple of the banners they’ve done for me:

And they have also been behind many of the other products you see promoted on blogs, like Hostgator:

Check them out, and take a look at the Banners Mall portfolio. You may even find a few more of my banners in the 90-115 pages. :)

Promote Your Affiliate Program

With the tools in place (which you can always add to later), it’s time to spread the word about your affiliate program.

I’m going to create a redirect link for my PDC affiliate signup page so it’s easier to remember. It’ll be much easier for me to share

• http://askbobtheteacher.com/affiliate-signup.php than
• https://paydotcom.com/a.page.php?id=44965&u=shylar

You’ll want to link to this page from the download page of your free and paid gifts, and include it on your blog. I’m going to also add mine to the signature of my new list. It’s important that your affiliate program be accessible to your existing subscribers and customers – they’ll make great affiliates for you if you train them correctly!

With the affiliate program in place, I have now delegated traffic to people all over the world. It will take time for the effect of this to be seen. But it’s an important step towards the goal of growing my new list more rapidly.

Bob Jenkins
DiscoverAutoresponders.com

p.s. Today just scratched the surface of developing an affiliate program. Eventually, you’ll want more in-depth lessons on this. In addition to my own course, Create Your Own Affiliate Program, you might also enjoy learning from one of the internet’s best affiliate manager trainers, Nicole Dean. Her Sales Army Secrets is a great week-to-week course.

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