Affiliate Expectations: Choosing a Program

Not so long ago, we sat down to ask ourselves some questions about setting up an affiliate program to sell our upcoming ebook for beginning freelance writers.

I think it’s important to ask questions if you’re going to market a product. There are many tricks and strategies to make money on the Internet these days, many of them scams, some of them legit. We needed to know where we stood and what we wanted.

1. We didn’t want to buy into the get-rich-overnight game. Success comes from hard work, effort, and a good dose of ambition, if you ask me. Our ebook wouldn’t make us millionaires.
2. We didn’t want to push our ebook sales. We feel that our ebook is good enough to sell, and it’s good enough to recommend. That’s good enough for us. We’re not into pushing anything onto people that they don’t want.
3. We write our ebooks, our reports and our blogs to share info. We want to give back to people and help others. We thought an affiliate program is a great way to achieve that goal.

Here are a few more questions that went around the virtual-reality table:

• What were our expectations of an affiliate program? (Actually, not much. If it worked, great.)
• Why did we want an affiliate program in the first place? (To promote our ebook, market a little better and share with others.)
• Would this type of marketing help our book sell more? (Seems to work.)
• What was in it for us to choose one option over another? (Less work, more play?)
• Did we need or want to handle the affiliate contact info? What would we do with those emails? (Hm.)
• Were we into creating loud, splashy selling pages? (Resounding no, here)
• How much time and money would we need to invest? (What’s a little more work, eh?)
• Were we willing to push sales? (No. Never.)

We made a choice based on all the answers we collected. Hopefully, it’ll go well, and we’ll do better than break even with the ebook. We’ll spread a little joy to those who help us out, and everyone wins. Sounds like a good deal to me!