If your strong suit lies in product creation and not marketing and networking you may want to recruit affiliate marketers to sell your products so you will have more time to create more products to sell. If you’re willing to let go of part of the profits, though, you may just end up having more profits to hold on to. You can go about recruiting affiliate marketers in a variety of ways.
Is Your Product Digital?
If you have a digital product you can either recruit affiliates yourself or you might want to join an affiliate network like ClickBank. This would make it easy for thousands of affiliates to find your product easily and instead of doing all of the promoting yourself, you have the potential of having your product promoted by countless other Internet marketers. You’ll pay a part of the profits in fees and commissions but you also stand the chance to increase your profit by having so many affiliates selling it for you.
Recruit Affiliates to Sell Your Physical Products
You can also recruit affiliates to sell your physical products. There are affiliate networks for physical products as well or once again, you have the option of remaining on your own and recruiting affiliates yourself. By recruiting affiliate marketers yourself, you’ll save the fees of joining an affiliate network but you’ll also spend more time looking for affiliates to promote your products.
Create Your Own Affiliate Program
Even when affiliate marketers sell your products, you’ll still be responsible for shipping them, if required, and for customer service so do take this into consideration as you decide whether this type of marketing is right for you. While you’ll save a lot of time marketing, you will still be responsible for dealing with the customers. Still, promoting your products can take a lot of time so it may be worth it to you to share your profits with affiliate marketers.
This may also be a good time to decide whether you want to market physical or digital products. Of course, there is nothing that says that you can’t market both as well but realize that they both entail a vastly different business scheme. You’ll have customer service issues either way, of course, but if you market only digital products then you won’t have to worry about shipping or inventory.
Your Price and Affiliates
Before you recruit affiliate marketers to help sell your products, make sure that you can indeed afford to pay the commission out of each sale. Of course, if the affiliate marketers bring in a large volume of business, then you will have more profit to share but it is still important to make sure you can afford to lose a certain percentage of each sale before you make this commitment. You’ll have less to worry about if your investment is mainly time but if you have a good amount of money invested in your product, make sure you can afford to share the wealth before you recruit affiliates.
When you buy or sell software, much of the time you are dealing with a software license in one form or another. These licenses offer different levels of benefit to the end user such as how many computers the software can be installed on, how long the license is good for, and various other benefits. If you are marketing software, you have several options from which to choose as to how you price the software. We’ll discuss a few of them here.
Subscription
Some Internet marketers license software by the month and subscribers pay a monthly fee in order to continue using the software with the option to cancel at any time. Upon cancellation, either the software no longer works at all or no new content can be created using the software. Some marketers offer a yearly option and often discount the price when an entire year is paid for up front.
Outright Purchase
Much of the software sold over the Internet and in brick and mortar stores is sold as an outright purchase. The customer simply buys the software and is free to use it from the point of purchase on. You may decide to sell your software this way as well. Look at software that is similar to yours to see how others are selling theirs. Much of the software sold this way involves simple programs that are designed to do one thing. This isn’t true of all software though. Many complicated programs as well are sold as outright purchases.
Training, Support, and Upgrades
Sometimes, software designers make more money from add-ons like training, support, and upgrades than they do from actually selling the software. You’ll want to carefully consider this option though, because most consumers expect support to be included in the price of the software, at least for a certain period of time. Also, upgrades are often included at no extra charge, although that is not always the case. Training is often provided on a one on one basis or through special group events for a specified fee.
Versions
Software is often sold by the version. That is, there may be different versions of the same software that is sold at different prices. Microsoft sells some of its software this way. You’ll find home and business versions and also student versions of some of its most famous software. Of course, the price is different for each version, with the most expensive version having the most features. You’ll see the same kind of versioning offered by Internet marketers who have designed their own software as well.
As you can see, you have quite a few options when it comes to pricing and marketing your software. It will take careful consideration and market research to decide which option is the best one for you.