Welcome to Affiliate Marketing as a Business

 Well, these days everyone wants to make money online/offline whichever they prefer. Many get involved in promoting products/services and earning a commission from sales. You have probably heard about making money with Affiliate Marketing and wondering what it is all about and how you can tap into the opportunity. I guess your mind is working in the direction many marketers are now earning a decent living.

Now, what exactly is Affiliate Marketing? It means many things to many people depending on how involved they are in the business. It is nothing new or completely novel. Affiliate marketing in its simplest terms means referring people to buy a product or service in return for a commission from the product seller or service provider. 


 

“Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products or services online or offline in return for a certain percentage as commission for each successful sale from the merchant.”


That is rather simple and straightforward. It can be used for any business. That is exactly why many and varied businesses like Financial services companies such as insurance companies, banks, and asset managers have been using a variant of it for decades to build their businesses. Even though some of these businesses like to call their affiliate marketers such fanciful names as independent marketers, and call the commissions they pay out, performance bonuses, but the bottomline is, it is still affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing may have been around for decades, but its popularity ballooned when the internet happened. With the internet and proliferation of web technologies, affiliate marketing became simpler, attracting more interest from diverse people.

With the internet, Affiliate marketers no longer had to go knocking door to door to make a sale. They can simply unleash the power of web technologies to promote the products or services of their clients. That is one real advantage over traditional door-to-door salesman marketing methods. The internet also ensures that you are no longer restricted to your region to make a sale. That makes it possible to expanding your reach widely and increasing your potential sales volume as a consequence. If you have access to the internet, you can simply sit in your own little corner of the world and successfully sell products to people all over the world.  Same way, you also get paid and receive your commissions as well through same web technologies. All these combine to make Affiliate Marketing a really very exciting type of business.

How to Train Your Affiliates Offline

While deciding on this issue, the first thought that came to my mind is the degree of feasibility of training your PSAs offline. I believe you can only do so successfully if all or a very large number of your PSAs are living within your locality. With the nature of SFI and its affiliates programs, I hardly see how feasible that is. 

 
If as your question indicates you believe you can easily assemble very many of your affiliates to a training seminar under one roof, all well and good. In that case, your seminar will take the form of any other regular seminars where you will have to invite and assemble all the affiliates you want to train in one place. In that case, I will advise you to do the following:

1. Find out first from your PSAs who and how many of them will be interested in your offline seminar.
2. If you receive good responses, you can then decide on a date and venue for the seminar.
3. Send out invitations to the PSAs who have indicated interest by way of communicating same to them well in advance.
4. Advertise to the affiliates well in advance what the topics of your seminar will cover.
5. Secure a suitable venue for the seminar preferably in a hotel or events club.
6. On the day of the seminar, be there to personally welcome the PSAs with very warm handshakes.
7. At the seminar proper, make it interactive and be sure the topics are interesting, informative and entertaining.
8. Request feedbacks from participants to aid preparations for future seminars.
9. Open follow-up communications with the participants on the subject matters.
10. Encourage the PSAs to open up communications with themselves as well.

I believe any offline seminar you are able to organize with these tips in mind will achieve the desired results.

Good luck!!!

 

Why Affiliates Should Have Their Own ECA Stores

 It is very good for affiliates to have their own ECA stores at TripleClicks if they want to take full advantage of the good business model that SFI represents. SFI itself envisaged it and therefore encourages affiliates to have their own stores by providing easy access and facilities to do so. As an affiliate, having your own store gives you the following benefits.

1. You can earn sales VP from what you sell in your store.

2. You can make tangible income from the profits in your store.

3. You can promote your own store easily on and offline.

4. You can offer sales promos and even discounts in your own stores to attract buyers.

5. You can offer competitive prices even at reduced rates as you wish in your own store.

6. You can earn extra commissions from promoting the products in your own store.

7. You can sell any products of your choice approved by SFI.

8. You become an accomplished business owner in SFI by owning your own store.

9. SFI helps you to announce and promote any new products in your store.

10. You get an additional communication channel from your ECA store to affiliates.