Marketing Your Services Using Affiliate Programs

October 9, 2008

I just launched a hosted microblogging platform (aka twitter clone) at www.yonklyapp.com and right now I am looking into different ways to market it.

One approach to my marketing strategy is to use an affiliate program. We have all seen affiliate programs for everything from selling t-shirts to selling domains. The question I struggled with is "how much do I pay my affiliates?" I want it to be fair, competitive and also motivational enough to encourage the affiliates to market it.

I found out that 37 Signals pays 5% to their affiliates that sounds way too low. What would be a good percentage? 15%? 25%? The plan I came up with is a tiered approach which gradually increases your percentage from 10% to 50% - you can read more about it at http://www.yonklyapp.com/affiliates.aspx and maybe even signup to be an affiliate. The best part is that it is recurring.

So if you bring in a 100 customers, you will earn:

$200/month on the first 20
$400/month on the next 20
$600/month on the next 20
$800/month on the next 20
$1000/month on the last 20

That’s a total of $3000 EVERY MONTH. Isn’t that pretty damn good? Or not? I would love to hear your opinions.

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Posted in Startup, yonkly
Tags: affiliates, marketing, Startup, yonklyapp

Viewing 3 Comments

sdasd 1 month ago 1 point
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The problem with this is your product will or is competting with others that are FREE.

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eibrahim 1 month ago 1 point
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It's not really competing with anyone. This is a hosted platform that lets
you create your own network for your niche market or community, for example
www.isweat.com is a client and is specific to the fitness community. The
owner was able to get the site up and running in a couple of days without
having to install anything, maintain anything, worry about backup, upgrades,
licenses or anything. He just wanted a site and he got one.

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1 /people/eibrahim/ /people/eibrahim/following/ http://www.emadibrahim.com in/eibrahim eibrahim eibrahim

Norbert 1 month ago 1 point
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I think it's a good idea. I was thinking of the same for my startup that I'm about to launch. The difference between $200 and $1000 seems too much to me but otherwise I totally believe this is a viable model.

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http://norbert.mocsnik.com