Many product owners wonder whether they should pay an affiliate to promote their product.  While I think the answer is generally yes, there are exceptions to when you want to pay an affiliate.

You can only get so many people to come to your website on your own.  Your pay per click resources are limited and you can only write so many articles and create so many back links before your time is exhausted.  If you have an army of affiliates promoting your product, you simply will be able to make more sales.  If your affiliates aren’t poaching off of the sales you would make yourself, paying affiliates to market your product is a no brainer.

If you were selling chocolate chip cookies, each additional dozen cookies would cost you money to produce.  But digital products are different.  It costs you almost the same amount of money to produce one product as it does to produce a million.  Therefore, why wouldn’t you want to pick up low hanging fruit by paying affiliates to promote your product?

Affiliate marketers are very good at their area of specialization or they wash out quickly.Some are experts at PPC marketing and can deliver quality traffic to your website that converts.  Others put in the time to write articles that pre-sell customers on your product before they ever land on your page.  Video marketing, forum marketing, and classified ads are other specialities of affiliate marketers.

So, are there times where it does not really make sense to pay affiliates?  Yes, there are.

If you are only going to sell 100 of an item and you have 1,000 responsive people on your personal email list, you will probably not want to pay affiliates.  When you can sell out the subscription yourself, there is no need to split the proceeds.

A different time when you may consider not to use affliates is when you want to control how your product is marketed.Sometimes when you open your product to the affiliate marketers, you lose some control of the advertising process.  Marketers could spam safe lists or classified sites and give your product a bad name.

Most product owners, however, find that the benefits outweigh the down sides of paying affiliates.

Clickbank is the most popular way to set up an affiliate program for digital products.  PayDotCom tried to give Clickbank a run for its money, but hasn’t taken off as well as the promoters hoped.  You can also set up a script to run an affiliate program.  The $7 script and Rapid Action Profits are two scripts which let you pay affiliates. For more affiliate marketing tips ,visit Affiliate Marketing Domination.