How to Set Up an Affiliate Contract With a Business

When starting a business, you need all the help you can get to quickly get out of the red and start seeing a profit. Even then, you want that profit percentage to increase rapidly. It will be tough to do unless you can drive traffic to your website. One way to increase your traffic or capitalize off someone else's traffic is to set up an affiliate contract.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Internet access

Affiliate Profits

1. Make a list of the products or services you offer.
2. On that same page, jot down the keywords you chose to have on your website to drive traffic to it. If you don't know, write down the key words you want people to type in and be able to to pull up your business.
3. Type these key words into a search engine and make a list of all the similar or complimenting businesses that come up. (For instance, maybe you rent cranes, and they sell cranes). This is a perfect place to start.
4. Take as much time as necessary to research their site and services. Once you know about them, find the proper person to contact, either through their contact us page, or by contacting the support team and asking.
5. Send a professional email or letter explaining who you are, how you think the two of you can be successful together, and asking if they would be interested in setting up affiliate links on their site.
6. Set up a time to meet in person, if they are local, or have a conference call, where you can go over in more detail the idea, the percentages, etc. Go into this meeting with an idea already of what you expect, but especially with an idea of what you are willing to offer. This will be a case of you treat us well and we will you treat you well in return.
7. Set up a trial period, maybe 30 days where you monitor how well they or you are able to reap the rewards of having a link on each others site. If it looks good, set up another contract and negotiate percentages (10-40% are average).
8. Put your link on their site and build their website name into your key words on your site. Ask them to do the same. Your IT employee or web designer should do this.
9. Monitor weekly, then monthly to see how profitable it is.
10. Do this with as many companies as possible. Some may fall through, but some will work out.

Tips & Warnings

• If you sell products, try setting up an affiliate link with Amazon or eBay, advertising similar products. Once someone crosses that web threshold, they are your customer for up to 30 days, and anything they buy, you get a percentage of the fees.
• Do not overload your site with too many links, unless you have a designated links page, or if your site is designed to be informative.