When we think about affiliates we usually consider them as webmasters or newsletter owners who put affiliate “Buy Now” links on their websites or plug them into e-mail newsletters.

The on-line affiliates can reach only a fraction of potential users of your software products. There are many prospects who cannot be reached by on-line marketers because they spend just a little time on the Web or don’t trust on-line sales copies.

In the same time, there are many people who could recommend your products offline: on conferences, presentations, user group meetings, etc.
But long affiliate links with personal code are useless in this case because they are hard to remember. The prospects will hardly follow the affiliate link. They will likely go to main product URL and will order from there. Thus the affiliate won’t receive the commission for that lead. This is bad.

If you use Plimus.com for managing your affiliate program then there is a way to help your affiliates to sell offline.

Setup a discount coupon and assign it to an affiliate. The affiliate may give that special coupon code to prospects and they will apply it on your website when ordering the product.

There are two obvious benefits:

• The prospects will be able to purchase product with discount. So, this coupon will make the affiliate’s recommendation more valuable.
• The affiliate won’t have to share an affiliate link. He\she can simply refer prospects to the product website and give them the discount coupon code. Every order with that coupon will be counted as affiliate’s lead and s\he will honestly receive the commission for that order.

Also, on Plimus you can setup the coupon to completely absorb the discount value and it won’t be deducted from affiliate commission. This will also inspire your affiliates.

I hope this idea will help you make you affiliate network more profitable.

If you’d like to sell our help authoring tool Dr.Explain offline by using this approach and to get paid then join our affiliate program and request for your personal coupon.

Posted in Marketing
No Comments Yet Posted by Dennis Crane