Unfortunately, Affiliate Advertising isn’t necessarily cheap, easy, or free to start and is best utilized by experienced, profitable businesses with proven sales systems and extremely effective advertising promotions.

Here are a few questions to review to find out if affiliate advertising might work for your business:

Does your product or service produce a large gross profit?

Affiliate advertising may offer a guaranteed ROI but you still need to offer a competitive commission to attract advertising partners. On top of the affiliate commissions, you will need to cover the costs of creative development and affiliate network fees. To create a profitable and scalable affiliate advertising system, you will need to either have a high profit margin, high sales volume, or a high repeat purchase and customer retention rate.

Does your website convert leads and sales efficiently?

It doesn’t matter how much you offer to pay affiliates for sales if your website doesn’t convert. Affiliate partners monitor their ROI just as closely as you do and if your website can’t close sales efficiently, you’ll have a hard time finding anyone willing to feature your advertisements. Improving your website conversion rate is the most effective way to improve your affiliate advertising program profits. Affiliate partners are more willing to run a campaign that offers a lower commission rate if the conversion rates are higher. As long as the affiliate partner generates a higher gross income, it’s a win-win on both sides.

Do you have excellent brand reputation and customer service?

No affiliate partner likes to see order cancellations and refunds negatively impacting their commissions. And large volume of affiliate advertising is driven by reviews and recommendations by the affiliate partners. Affiliates are less likely to risk their business reputation on brands with unusually high customer complaints.

Do you have the ability to efficiently and accurately track affiliate partner sales?

Are you able to provide online tracking for all affiliate sales activity? If you have a retail store or call center, are you able to accurately track phone and walk-in sales? It doesn’t matter how good your promotion and commission offer is if you can’t accurately give credit to your affiliate partners.

If you are unsure of any of these questions, we can work with you hand-in-hand to evaluate your business model, establish some small scale advertising tests, and put together a plan to build a successful affiliate advertising program.

So why would you ever pay for design services?

There’s usually a pretty big catch to these special deals. The designer, printer, or advertising company owns your company’s creative materials. This usually isn’t a problem as long as you continue doing business with the same company who designed your presentation materials. But if you ever need to hire a new designer, shop around for another printer, or run your ad with a different publisher, you’ll need to start all over from scratch.

Before taking advantage of a free design offer, double check to find out what your creative rights are.

• Will the company provide you with the original creative materials upon completion of the project?
• Are you allowed to modify and alter the original artwork however you see fit?
• Are you allowed to re-use the creative in other advertisements or marketing materials?

If not, consider whether or not you have any need to re-use the same creative presentation again.

And don’t forget to do your homework and shop around for the best total design, production, and advertising rate.

Paying extra to contract your own design work may seem more expensive up front. But you probably aren’t getting the best advertising rate or printing price with the free design package. Also consider the long term value of owning your creative materials which you can use indefinitely versus re-designing your materials every time you change your production and marketing contracts.

Before you can set up a new website design, you’ll need to register a domain name and set up a hosting account.

Registering a domain name is cheap and easy. There are several registrars that you can purchase domain names from online but I highly recommend GoDaddy.com . They are inexpensive and their domain management system is very easy to use.

Go to www.GoDaddy.comand search for an available domain name in the search box in the middle of the screen.

• Make sure that your domain name is easy to remember and easy to spell. Your domain name doesn’t need to be the exact name of your business – any name will work.
• Always register a .COM name. If you register a .NET, .INFO, .US, or other domain name when the same .COM name is taken, you will only end up competing with the existing site for search traffic and your customers and prospects will be more likely to visit the wrong site when they try to look up your business online. You can register your domain name with several alternate extensions if you want to prevent competitors from taking them or if you might want to set up different websites for your business but this is entirely optional.
• Always register your domain directly through GoDaddy.com or another registrar. You might find offers online for a free domain name with an inexpensive or free website package. But in most cases, the service provider maintains ownership of your domain and you can only use the address for as long as you use their service. When you own your own domain name, you have the ability to choose any web hosting or design service that you like.
• Avoid the extra offers from GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy is able to offer inexpensive domain registrations by relentlessly upselling additional products and services that you don’t really need. You can safely ignore any of these offers and just purchase the standard domain registration. The only extra feature that may be of use is the private registration. This is essentially like having an unlisted phone number and address and will prevent anyone online from finding your contact information associated with your domain. For most businesses who publish their address and contact information online, this isn’t necessary. But if you operate a business from a home office and prefer not to make your address public, I would recommend opting for the private registration.

Once you have a domain name, you’ll need to setup a web hosting account.

Make sure that you choose a Linux hosting service with PHP version 4.3 or greater and MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater. My best recommendation for a reliable hosting provider is Liquid Web. Their standard web hosting plan is a little more expensive than others that you might find at $14.95 per month. But their service and reliability is well worth the few extra dollars. With a cheaper web hosting service, you will usually experience more frequent site outages and slower connection times. But aside from network and server performance, Liquid Web‘s tech support is the best I’ve ever worked with. They answer the phone 24/7 and hold times are extremely minimal – if there is any wait at all. And their tech support reps actually know how to solve problems and aren’t just a team outsourced customer service reps who will recite the online help instructions that you just read yourself.

If you need any help choosing and registering a domain or setting up a web hosting service, please feel free to contact us.

These are some of the initial samples I sent over based on my first impressions of what was wanted.

This is actually the 3rd proof I provided after some brief modifications, before I completely switched gears. (For those who don’t know Alpenglow can be seen around sunset and provides those beautiful reds, pinks and blues on the mountains.)

I did this sample just intending to play around for fun. After it was done, I decided to send it over to the client to see what they thought. As it turns out, they liked it and I started working on a new sketch based on some suggestions that came back.

The newest revision incorporates thicker lines, deeper colors and more depth. Overall, I'm fairly happy with how this came out. It's not quite as simple or as clean as the original concepts but maybe it will provide some use.

The two above renderings are based on this photo of Mt. Sopris just outside of Carbondale, Colorado. The importance of this is that the business is located in the Roaring Fork Valley and Mt Sopris is the most noteable landmark in that area.

The logo took a turn in a similar but different direction. Moving from tight precise lines to a more loose style as seen in this Picasso’s Don Quixote print.

I made several slight tweaks to reach a final version.

 

There are only slight changes each time. The addition of a new color, more layers, etc. Each one gives the piece a different feel.

Here’s the final version that can be seen in use on the Alpenglow Lighting Design website and business cards.

I’ve really enjoyed this project quite a bit. It’s challenged me not only as a design but also as an artist. I had to step outside of my comfort zone and explore a new style, and try new things in order to achieve the look that I wanted.