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On SmashWordsSince I started my latest series of articles on marketing for comic book publishers I’ve received emails asking me about affiliate programs and what they are. The best way to describe what an affiliate is to someone is as a freelance commissioned sales person. An affiliate will go out and using whatever methods they specialize in will go out, market your product and refer sales back to you. These methods might be blogging, articles, PPC, coupons, classifieds or one of about a thousand other techniques.
It doesn’t matter how they do it, what matters is they bring sales to you in exchange for a commission that can be anywhere from 5% up to 50% or more. The percentage in any given case is determined by the company recruiting the affiliates and is based on what margins the company can give up and still make a decent profit. A lot of affiliate programs pay in the 8-12% range. As a comic publisher I’d probably offer around 25% of a sale to my affiliates. But that’s me. If you go too low, you won’t get anyone to sign up…too high and you won’t make any money.
As for getting your program started, there are a number of options. I mentioned idevaffiliate.com before, which is one of the do-it-yourself options. They give you the software to track cookies and register sales to your affiliates and all that fun stuff. You have to do more work than with some of the affiliate networks but it is a great option for those of us on a budget. Another great low cost option is BlueDogAffiliate.com which costs $15 a month.
Other options are FusionQuest which has about a $300 set up fee and costs about $25 a month. ShareAsale.com has a $350 setup cost and charges a fee equal to a percentage of your affiliate commissions. There are a number of other options such as Commission Junction, but they tend to be quite a bit more expensive, costing in the thousands of dollars to get started and maintain.
Yes, I know I’m speaking blasphemy by actually suggestion you, a comic book publisher, should spend money on something. Just do it. Getting an affiliate program started for your company can give you a great boost in sales…but the programs do need to be maintained and take a bit of work to keep going. But if you can get some of the bigger affiliates attracted to your progam you will see some very nice returns from their work.
Oh, and the affiliate programs tend to work better for higher price point product such as graphic novels or trade paperbacks. It’s tough to interest an affiliate with even 25% of $3.50. My advice is to wait until you have a trade paperback or multiple trades in print. You could probably make an affiliate program work with the lower cost of comic book singles, it’ll just take a lot more work and a lot more sales to break even.
A great alternative-thinking use of affiliate links would be to make sure to let any reviewers know they can post affiliate links for your books in any reviews they write on them. It’ll let them make a little extra cabbage for their hard work and may result in some nice sales for you.
-Mat N.
http://www.niftycomics.com
The part about giving reviewers affiliate links is brutally awesome. The affiliate program is a fantastic idea in my opinion and I think once I start selling something, I’m going to get hooked up with this.
Albone:
I’m glad you liked the article. I really am surprised more comic book publishers haven’t gotten in to running an affiliate program for their books — especially now that graphic novels and trade paperbacks are so widespread. An affiliate program would even work well for print on demand (POD) publishers because it would give them a sales/marketing force while still leaving them a good chunk of the remaining profits. No longer would they wind up losing money when trying to get their book distributed.
Feel free to drop by for more tips…oh, and my other site, New Affiliate Help, might have some additional information you’d be interested in. Check it out at http://www.NewAffiliateHelp.com.
-Mat N.