Affiliate Prodinst – Consulting Referrals As Another Source of Revenue

(Part 3 of 3) This article first appeared for ETP Network

Affiliate marketing is a means by which an affiliate can earn money through a product sale or referral for services. Prodinst requires that this service provide value and enhance productivity.

Most affiliate programs involve the selling of products to people brought to that target website. Relatively few affiliate programs involve the providing of referrals for consulting services. The general reason for this is that once you have your affiliate structure – usually a website – in place, theoretically, it can generate globs and globs of money and recurring revenue while consulting services referrals are usually only good for a short-term basis.

So, what is the problem? The problem is the 80-20 rule. 20% of the affiliate marketers are responsible for 80% of the revenues generated. In fact, what seems – and what is often promised – as globs and globs of money to be made, usually doesn’t materialize.

How you can evaluate your prodinst

Make sure that the products and services that you represent provide fair compensation for your efforts. Something is wrong if you are working just as hard for a $5 fee as for a $100 fee for the same quantity of sales. Your prodinst for this is low. Similarly, if you are expending large amounts of time and resources to achieve only – at best - modest success, something is also wrong.

Assign a value to the amount of time (this has value!) and effort you have expended and add this to whatever setup, maintenance and promotion costs you have incurred. Compare this to the amount of income generated on a weekly basis across a few months. If you do not see an increased progression of income or if the cost to income ratio does not significantly decrease over time, you have a low prodinst – and a problem.

One simple way of improving your prodinst

There are many companies that seek affiliates to help promote their services. Often, this merely requires that they provide referrals to those companies. Sometimes, this can initially be established by providing information on a networking tree. They can usually also utilize a click-thru on their website and/or some type of simple advertising to attract attention.

The advantage of this type of affiliate marketing is that its prodinst can be quite high where the cost to income ration is quite low. Obviously, this depends on the affiliate program and rewards offered to the affiliate marketer so they must carefully evaluate each potential program before proceeding.

A second advantage of this approach is that it can complement the products and services that the affiliate is already promoting. For example, if you are already selling accounting software, why not also promote accounting services? Or, if you promote handbags, also promote marketing or even sales training services?

The key point here is to first evaluate your prodinst and then devise ways of significantly improving it.

Bruce Newman is a long-term ETP Network member and Vice President at The Productivity Institute, LLC which provides a free matching service between rated outstanding consultants and the specific software products and services needs of almost any company, thereby providing excellent prodinst and value. It also offers an extensive and well-supported affiliate program that can manually or automatically track referrals. Additional product and service information is available at: http://www.prodinst.com/