Learn Internet Marketing Strategies For Your Business

Yesterday I made the case for why you need an affiliate program, which boiled down to:

You need an affiliate program if you want to leverage the help of other people to bring you new customers instead of doing it all yourself.

For sake of today’s affiliate program lesson, I am going to assume that you have an information-based product or service which would be sold as either a 1-time fee, or a subscription. E-commerce store/sites should definitely use affiliate programs, but that’s an area I will not be focusing on for now.

So let me compare the two general types of affiliate programs you can use to promote your products and services. I’ll call them “hosted” or “self-hosted”.

Now, a hosted affiliate program means that some third party service is going to maintain your affiliate program for you. It’s hosted on their website and basically when people send you traffic, they’re really sending traffic through that other third party site.

A self-hosted affiliate program is usually some form of affiliate management script that you would install on your own website and you have complete control over what goes on with that affiliate management script. This gives you a lot more control, but also a lot more responsibility.

My personal preference is to use a self-hosted program (namely, Butterfly Marketing).

However, there are pros and cons of each one in regards to costs, visibility, and control. Today, we’ll deal with the costs.

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Most of the time, you hear about affiliate marketing in regards to selling other people’s stuff. But this week, I want to teach you why you need your own affiliate program.

First, let me share the results of the poll I gave out the other day.

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