How To Setup An Affiliate Program

If you want to sell a product over the internet or maybe you are already selling a product over the internet, the best thing you can possibly do to boost your sales is to set up an affiliate program.

In this article, I’m going to show you why you should set up an affiliate program and how you can easily do that.

Why should you set up an affiliate program?

If you want to sell your product online you need a sales funnel. With the right kind of software that can be very easy (learn more here). After building a sales funnel you need traffic. Without traffic, no business can survive.

There are many different traffic sources and they all vary in their quality, price, and effectiveness. For example, there is SEO, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and many more.

And they can all be great selling a product. If you already have a blog with good traffic you can use that (SEO). Or maybe you set up a Google Adwords campaign for your product.

However, if you are selling your own product there is one traffic source that outmatches all other traffic sources and that is affiliate marketing. If you don’t know what affiliate marketing is, check out this post.

Why is affiliate marketing so effective?

Let’s say you have a product in the personal development niche. There are already tons of people with a huge email list interested in personal development, there are many blogs with a huge audience in the personal development niche, there are podcasts about personal development with millions of listeners.

Can you see where I’m going with that?

If you can convince the owner of a huge email list that your product can be very helpful for his leads and he accepts that and promotes your product you have access to the size of his email list!

And he can even earn a lot of money too! That’s the perfect win-win situation.

You don’t have to invest any money and you can have thousands of sales! Of course, you have to pay commission for your sales, but hey, you don’t have to set up any marketing campaign or put any effort into marketing.

How to setup your affiliate program

Now that you know why you should set up an affiliate program, we need to have a look at the technical details. I believe that using the right tools can save you a lot of time and effort when it comes to setting up the technical details.

I’m sure there are many tools that can help you set up an affiliate program but I always recommend ClickFunnels (see here my review). With ClickFunnels it is very easy to build high-converting sales funnels and to set up an affiliate program.

In the following, I’ll show you how you can set up an affiliate program with the help of ClickFunnels.

Setting up an affiliate program with ClickFunnels

If you create a sales funnel with ClickFunnels you’ll be able to easily create an affiliate program with Backpack. If you never heard anything about Backpack you can watch this short video:

You only get access to Backpack with the Full ClickFunnels Suite (Sign in here for your free 14 days trial)

Now, I’ll show you the three simple steps you need to do to set up an affiliate program:

Step 1: Add an affiliate program to your funnel

At first, we have to create the affiliate program for your funnel. That means we have to create two more steps in your funnel. We need an affiliate access page and an affiliate program page.

On the access page, new affiliates can register and give you all the information you need, like their name, their email, their PayPal, etc. Your funnel should now look something like this:

The affiliate program page will give your affiliates all the tools they need to successfully promote your product. That includes banners, swipes, etc. The better the material you offer is, the more successful your affiliates will be and the more money you’ll make!

So here it can be really lucrative to invest some time.

Step 2: Set up a commission plan

In this step, you have to decide how much % your affiliates will make by selling your product. Setting up a commission can be a little tricky. The lower the commission will be the more money you’ll make. However, if you set the affiliate percentage too low nobody will be your affiliate.

I would suggest using a percentage of 30-70% for digital products. The higher the commission will be the more affiliates want to promote your products so take some time to come up with a good percentage.

To set up your commission plan go to Backpack and commission plan. Here you need to click on “Add Commission Plan”.

You can now enter a name for your commission plan. The name is not that important, however, you should remember this.

If you know go back to your funnel settings, scroll down to backpack, and enable affiliates you can choose now this commission plan you just have created:

Step 3: Create affiliates types

Now you can go back to Backpack and your commission plan. Here you can now add different types of affiliates. Why should you set up different types?

Well maybe you have a joint venture or ‘VIP affiliates’ (the people with a huge audience) and you want to give them a better commission than the ‘normal’ affiliate.

At the beginning, I think that one type of affiliate is more than enough.

You can also set up different tiers if you want that. For example, if you have a product with a monthly subscription setting up 2 tiers can be very good because that motivates your affiliates to find more affiliates because they can earn more money.

Now your affiliate program is ready and you can start earning commission!

As you can see it is very easy to set up an affiliate program with ClickFunnels. I will show you one extra feature of Backpack that can really help you boost your sales.

Run affiliate contests

You should always try to please your affiliates and find ways to motivate them so they keep promoting your product. A very good way to do that is organizing affiliate contests. The bigger the prices are, the more motivated your affiliates will be.

Russell Brunson once ran an affiliate contest with a brand new Ferrari as the #1 price. Think about how much people started promoting his product! However, it doesn’t always have to be a Ferrari 😀

It can be a cash bonus of $1,000, a nice watch or something like that. Here you can get creative.

Conclusion

There are many good ideas for products out there but many of them fail because of the technical details. However, the technical details aren’t very hard if you use the right tool.

As you can see with ClickFunnels it is very easy to build sales funnels with affiliate programs. Here you can start your 14 days free trial with ClickFunnels.

Have you already set up your affiliate program? Have you used ClickFunnels or some different tool? Let me know by leaving a comment below!