And, like many of us, you’ve probably dreamed of how great it could be to have your own, successful affiliate marketing program.

The trouble is most people don’t have a clue as to how you would go about developing their own affiliate program.  Let me clue you in.

The following 5 steps will give you enough information to begin developing your own affiliate marketing program.

1.Select a niche market – Be sure to research carefully before choosing a niche market.

You’ll want to not only select a niche that you are interested in and know something about, but also make sure that it’s a market that is less-served than others.  This will prevent the problems of being involved in a saturated market later on.

2.Find affiliate partners – Once you’ve selected a niche it’s time to do your research to find marketers and site owners within your niche that could potentially be your partners.

You’ll want to look for established sites with good traffic that would benefit from being your affiliate.

3.Make your offer – Once you’ve found your potential partners it’s time to make your offer.  You’ll want to be sure that your offer is a win-win offer, so take your time to create a careful presentation that will represent your program as beneficial to both of you.

4.Develop promotional materials – Once you have your partners you’ll need to develop promotional materials that will make their job of
marketing your products or services as easy and effective as possible.

You may want to enlist the help of someone with experience in this area to get you off the ground.

5.Never stop looking for new partners – As your success grows you may be tempted to stop looking for new partners.  Don’t!  You’ll want to always have someone waiting in the wings in the event that one of your partners must leave the program.

As you can see, developing an affiliate program is not all that complicated.  While it will surely take some time and effort, the benefits of running a successful affiliate program make it well worth the time and effort required.

Let’s go over a few that I feel are most important.

The first difference is the content requirement for products versus services.  For products you can have less content on your site and still make the sales as long as your product offering is adequate.

With services, however, your customers will want to feel confident that you’re knowledgeable in your field, so offering plenty of quality content is essential, since this projects a certain level of expertise.

The next difference I’d like to mention is upsell offers.  While upsell offers work remarkably well on products, they can be seen as tacky when selling services.

An example of an acceptable upsell for a product would be:  you have a necklace for sale at $39.95 and for today only you can get the matching earrings (whose regular price is $29.95) for only $19.95.

While everyone likes a little something extra you need to be very tactful when trying to upsell services.

You may want to consider an alternative to upsells for your services.  An example would be offering a percentage off or a coupon in a mailing.  This wouldn’t be viewed as being tacky.

While there are surely many more differences between marketing/selling products and services I think you have an understanding of how they can differ.

Before offering an upsell on a service you would be very wise to do some research on how others offer promotions on their services to see what works well and what doesn’t.

You wouldn’t want to inadvertently offend or put off your customers by making an offer that they feel is simply unacceptable.