While you are reading this, many people are making money online by selling digital products as such as premium WordPress themes, hosting or ebooks.
If you have something to sell on your blog or website, you should definitely set up an affiliate program and let other bloggers promote your products for you. It’s definitely easier than you think.
My personal story as an affiliate marketer
At the end of 2008, I was amazed by all theses websites which make money selling an ebook and told myself that I should give a try and see how much money I can earn with that kind of site.Some time later, I finally bought BlogAndMakeCash.com, a website that sell an ebook of the same name. The ebook is 80 pages long and give tips and tricks to be a successful, money making blogger.
When I bought BlogAndMakeCash.com, I wanted to be able to have people promoting my product, but my problem was my tight budget. In fact, after buying the site I was pretty broke and I was unable to buy reviews and sponsored posts on blogs.
What I wanted was pretty simple : Don’t pay for advertising, unless it was sure that the advert generated a (or more) sale(s). And affiliate marketing totally fit my needs. I just had to set up an affiliate program and let people join.
I wrote a post on Cats Who Code to promote the ebook, but most sales were made by my affiliates, who worked for me for free. I only paid a commission to them when they sold a copy of the ebook.
The commission for the Blog and make cash ebook is almost $10 (50%. of $19,99). Setting up a quite high affiliate share was a good thing because many people joined the program. And I had nothing to loose due to the fact that I was selling copies of a digital product, not a physical good with production costs.
In one year, with no other advertising than my affiliate program and one post on Cats Who Code, I have sold 74 copies of the Blog and make cash.com ebook, for a total of approximately $1300. Not bad, isn’t it?
Creating an affiliate program with ejunkie
There’s a lot of softwares to create affiliate programs. I chose ejunkie, because it was used by many popular online stores as such as WooThemes. Joining ejunkie cost $5 a month and for that sum it’ll let you upload up to 10 products. This is definitely a great deal, because ejunkie allow you to create affiliate programs, manage sales and also host your files on their secured servers, so there’s no need to worry about unauthorized downloading.
How to join ejunkie and create your first affiliate program
Joining ejunkie is very simple. Just follow the steps below to get started:
- Click here to go to ejunkie website
- Click on the Start selling for just $5/month link, located in the middle of the page.
- Ejunkie are offering one free week of trial to every new customer, to make sure that you really like their service. Click on the “Signup for free 1 week trial” button.
- Fill the “Register for free trial” form with your email and password.
- Check your email and get the activation code sent by ejunkie. Paste it in the text field, and you’re done!
How to cancel your subscription
As I said before, ejunkie service cost $5/month, based on subscription. This mean that until you cancel your subscription, $5 will be debited from your Paypal account by ejunkie each month. This is cool because you’ll only pay for the time you use the service, but you have to know how to unsubscribe for when you’ll not need it anymore.
Follow the simple steps below to unsubscribe from ejunkie:
- Go to ejunkie website and login.
- On your dashboard, click on the Cancel your account link, under the “Manage your seller account” menu.
- That’s all, you’re now unsubscribed from the service.
Other tools to create affiliate programs
My personal choice for affiliate programs is definitely ejunkie, but there’s lots of interesting software that left you create and manage affiliate programs:
IDevAffiliate
IDevAffiliate are selling both a hosted service and a software. The hosted service works like those provided by ejunkie but IDevAffiliate monthly cost is $20 per month, which is expensive comparated to Ejunkie.
IDevAffiliate affiliate software have to be installed on your own server. It allow you to create unlimited programs, sells unlimited products, and manage everything yourself. It will cost you a one-time payment of $99, without any monthly fees to pay. A good choice if you’re selling lots of different products or want to get the full control on your products and affiliate programs.
» Visit IDevAffiliate
WordPress + the WP Affiliate Platform plugin
If you are, like me, a die-hard WordPress fanatic, you’ll be happy to learn that you can run create and manage affiliate programs directly in WordPress, using the WP Affiliate Platform plugin.
The plugin isn’t free, but $35 for this plugin is a good investment if you want to sell products on your blog.
» Get the WP Affiliate Platform plugin
Clickbank
Created in 1998, Clickbank is one of the best known affiliate program companies, with more than 100,000 registered affiliates. The bad points of Clickbank are in my opinion, the quite high fee ($49,95 per product) nd the fact that they only pay by check. While this is not a problem for American people, it may turn European, African or Asian affiliates off because of the enormous commission banks will take to accept a check in US dollars.
But on the other hand, Paypal don’t allow people from some countries as such as Ukraine to receive payments, so Clickbank can still be a good choice. It really depends of targeted customers and affiliates.
» Visit Clickbank
Good luck with your first affiliate program! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave me a comment below.
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Like myself Jean, I don’t participate in most affiliate programs since they pay using PayPal and being based in South Africa, I can only send money through PayPal…so I say thank you for alerting me that ClickBank pays affiliates by cheque…I’ll now checkout their offerings and join…
@Muzi Mohale : Clickbank have a very huge choice of products, so if you’re looking for products to promote there’s no doubt that you’ll like their service.
I’ll be launching an ebook soon (or maybe a couple of months from now) with my partners. I think e-junkie will work out best. Great price and robust features. It’s a recommended affiliate program manager for me
@Liane : Definitely. Ejunkie is the best (in my opinion) if you have 1/5 products to sell. If you have more, IDevAffiliate can be a good choice, but Ejunkie is still good.
I already participated in some affiliate program but do not make a selling yet. I am still looking how to optimize it.
My limitation has always been and still is the unavailability of using PayPal. I’m from Serbia, a little country in Europe.
But PayPal announced that they will start supporting Serbia from 2010. Let’s see how that turns out.
Thanks for the article, why don’t you write one for the other side, the ones that earn from affiliate. Tell us what you’ve tried, how it worked out… I tried the envato marketplace, have a 260px X 120px banner in the sidebar, they give you 30% of the first deposit the user you referred made. Minimum deposit is $20 so that’s $6 for you.
@Slobodan Kustrimovic : Good luck with Themeforest! I have made money with them Though, please do not insert affiliate links in comments
@SK – A colleague of mine is Serbia and it’s been an absolute nightmare for us to collaborate. Impossible in fact. Maybe 2010 will see an improvement.
Moneybookers is the only solution…
@Dave Doolin & @SK : The artist who designed my cat mascot is from Ukraine, and it wasn’t easy to pay her, I had to go throught Western Union.
It is really sad that Paypal doesn’t allow several countries to use their services. I was recently told that people from ALL African countries cannot use Paypal to receive money. Can you believe that? It is really unfair that all those people can’t do online business properly due to those restrictions. Let’s hope it will end soon.
You could have done it through moneybookers. Or if you can’t use moneybookers then through GetAFreelancer. You deposit via PayPal and she withdraws to moneybookers and from there to here bank account, it would be cheaper then Wester Union i think . That’s how i work.
But the fact stays that it’s not easy at all for us who can’t use paypal. Hopefully that will change soon.
Thanks jean,though its not that useful for me right now.
It so sad that people from Serbia and Africa cant use the PayPal service. Thank god, its supporting in India.
It’s fun to see these affiliate marketing posts on Cats Who Code, I remember reading tons of development tutorials on here but broadening your range is very useful.
@Blogger Den : This blog is named “Cats Who Blog” and is a sister-site to Cats Who Code
@Vinayak : We are a stable country now, but when we waren’t stable at all (wars and stuff) we ware able to use it, because the bank accounts waren’t Serbia specific they ware Switzerland or something, but now when we’re stable we have Serbia specific accounts and we can’t use it. Go figure
Let’s hope better days will come 
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