SUB-Ingredient:

Affiliate Programs and JVs

Training Documents (PDF) - Requires Adobe Reader JV List Building 35 JV Resources	Products to Download JV Manager
	Training Video - Requires Adobe Flash Player How to set up and effective Affiliate Program for Free

Just for those that aren’t familiar with the terms, a Joint Venture is a situation where two or more marketers help each other sell each other’s product. In fact, the most simple interpretation of a joint venture partnership is a link swap, although most would agree that such an insignificant ‘partnership’ need be labeled a joint venture. The most simple and common types of joint ventures these days is where two marketers, each with their own membership list, runs an advertisement on the others’ list. A simple ad swap. 

Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually only run by self-product salesmen who have a website from which they sell an expensive piece of software, and want to recruit an army of affiliates to sell it for them. It usually takes a complicated software program to run the affiliate area of such websites in order to keep up with all of the hits, sales, and payments for each affiliate.

So why do I list them together in one category like this?

Joint Ventures and Affiliate Programs are primarily the same thing, when you get right down to it. They are both extensions of your sales force that you give incentives to in exchange for money, traffic, or sales. The only real difference is that you should think of a Joint Venture partner as much more customizable & exclusive, such as a salesperson with whom you can talk to on a first-name basis.  

Running an Affiliate program, meanwhile, is for building massive amounts of people to do your selling for you. There are simply too many of these people (you hope) to talk to on a first name basis, but just like with Joint Venture partners, you should give them as much help as possible in order to sell your product.

In both cases, your success depends on exactly two things:

1. Are you offering your JV or Affiliate a big enough incentive?
2. Are you offering your JV or Affiliate enough help?

In a simple ad-swap situation, JV partners see the size of your incentive as the number of people on your list. It might not be worthwhile for a list owner with 25,000 subscribers to JV ad swap with a guy who only has 5,000 on his list. In those cases, additional incentives must be thrown in to ‘sweeten the pot.’ It could be money, a percentage of sales, or something more creative like multiple ads or branding rights.

JVs can get much more complicated, however. One partner might have a membership site and as a sign up bonus offers the other partner’s products in the package. So what does the other guy get? It could be anything… Whatever the two agree on.

Affiliate programs however, are always about cash. An affiliate program offering a 50% commission split for all referred sales will recruit far more affiliates than one who only offers a 30% commission. Naturally, there are other variables to consider like the price of the product and the effectiveness of the sales page as well. To take an advanced look at affiliate programs and how they stack-up to each other, simply visit the Clickbank Marketplace and browse around a bit.

One great, well-guarded secret (I guess until now) about affiliate programs is that they are exceptional link-building tools as well. Even if you never sell a single product, having an attractive affiliate program is a sure way to get tons of incoming links to your site. This is because all the affiliates out there who sign up and promote for you will do so by placing a link to some part of your site from their ads. Those affiliate links build up and Google sees them just like it does a normal link… As a “Vote” for your website’s ranking.  

As for helping your Affiliates and JV partners, the best thing you can do is write your promotional materials for them. The more work you leave for them to do, the less you’ll witness being done. All the most successful partnerships and especially affiliate programs offer pre-written sales copy for all of the affiliates or partners to simply slap their names on and deliver to their lists.

Back to Main Ingredient