How to Create Your Own Affiliate Program Cheap And Easily

One of the best ways to take a product you own, and make money with it is to create your own affiliate program and let those affiliates do all the selling and marketing for you.

Places like Amazon, Clickbank and so many other large companies got their start thanks to making their own affiliate programs and where they are today is in part due to that. This is something you can experience as well, so let me show you how it can be done.

However, if you plan to do this on your own, here are the kinds of obstacles you have to overcome:

• Hiring people to create the affiliate program for you so it works properly.
• Creating an automatic payment system for those affiliates.
• Getting affiliate links out so your promoters can use them.
• Monitoring who is owed what.
• Making sure this system actually works 24-7.
• Actually getting the affiliates to notice your offer and promote it.

What I’m going to show you today is a very simple way to handle pretty much ALL of these problems in a cheap (yet quality way) as well set it up fairly easily and here is how it works:

If you want to set up your own affiliate program, use Clickbank. Here’s why:

• Clickbank welcomes vendors and product owners of all kinds to host on their platform.
• They provide all the tools and easy set up process to create your own affiliate program.
• They take only about 7% and $1 for each sale you make.
• The affiliate functions, links, programming and so on are set up for you.
• This option allows you to set everything up very quickly and easily, and you also get access to tons of existing affiliates on the Clickbank network to start the promotional process for you and grow your online business.

How the affiliate program set up works with Clickbank:

1. First you have to sign up with Clickbank, as a vendor.
2. Then you have to complete an application and basically tell Clickbank about your product.
3. If you are approved, you will set up the payment process as in how much you’ll charge and pay affiliates.
4. You will get special links from Clickbank to input on your website that’ll allow all of this to be done for you.
5. Once this is set up, your affiliate program through Clickbank will be automated and you will make money from every sale you make as a vendor and every sale your affiliates make for you.

I know about this because I did this. Let me share my story:

Many years ago, I helped a business set up their affiliate program on Clickbank.

It was a program that sold DVDs to a hot niche market. This niche market was geared towards women and kettlebell training and I honestly didn’t even think such a popular topic existed until I did some research, but because the vendor had the product and there was a niche perfectly suited for it, we had an incredible opportunity.

And because none of us had enough time to spend on making an individual affiliate program, I suggested we use Clickbank, because I had so much experience with it and because affiliate marketing is my trade.

Here’s how it all went down:

The decision to use Clickbank was agreed upon and it solved the vendor’s problem. The set up was done in a matter of days and the business was up and running on Clickbank by then and slowly amassing affiliates to do the job of selling the DVDs for us.

With the site completed from the website designer, all we had to do was input the link codes given to us by Clickbank and we were all set up with an affiliate program of our own, saving us $10,000+ initially and many more dollars in the future, although we were giving up a very small percentage to Clickbank as well as dividing profits with each referrer who would make sales. 

Had we relied on basic, none Clickbank methods, the vendor’s costs to set this all up would be substantial:

I then began the process of finding people who would be interested in promoting the product for us (the affiliates).

Here is how much the vendor made from running this affiliate program on Clickbank:

• The whole project ran for a little over a year.
• About $14,000 in revenue was made.
• $7,000 of that was to affiliates.
• And the remaining $7,000 which the vendor got was broken down into the fees Clickbank charged with production costs.
• The profit was over $5,000+. I received 10% of that.

This may not seem like much, but here are other important things that need to be explained separately:

• The vendor wasn’t really giving a high percentage to affiliates so I suggested they bump it up. This worked.
• Over the year that had gone by, throughout it, the number of affiliates and sales were growing slowly, so the trend was up.
• The vendor eventually decided for some personal reasons to scrap the project and focus on doing the marketing themselves. I decided to leave the project because I didn’t want to be involved anymore.

But I share this stuff with you to explain how my experiences can help you with making your own affiliate program.

Should you make your own affiliate program or get started the way we did?

If you have a product, be it digital or physical, but lack the upfront costs to open up a physical business or make one online with an affiliate program. definitely do it through Clickbank (Amazon and eBay may also have similar opportunities). You are not just paying less, but you’re also protecting yourself if you end up losing money because you won’t have to pay a lot to try this.

And if you don’t have much capital to invest into your own affiliate program, which I did break down above in regards to what it takes to get started, then Clickbank is strongly recommended. It has 100,000’s of affiliate marketers who are always on the lookout for a new promotion to promote and you can really take advantage of that.

I would suggest that if you go this route that you pay affiliates well, and I’m talking 50% of the cost of the product if not more. I know it seems counterintuitive, but believe me, the highest grossing product sales come from vendors on Clickbank who reward affiliates. Give them incentive to promote your product by paying more and they will work very hard to do it.

You may make less per sale as a result, but the gross amount of sales you’ll make and the affiliates you’ll attract will earn you more than if you were doing the opposite.