HELP WANTED: Affiliate Marketing Collaboration

As noted in last week’s article, affiliate marketing is?about third-parties promoting a book and receiving a percentage of the sales as a result.

Before addressing potential collaborative opportunities, let’s consider why my current book, is a suitable product for affiliate marketing.

A Self-Study Guide

In planning the book, I wanted it to serve more as a self-study guide than just another information dump.

In practice, this led to my organizing each chapter into three types of content:

Specific Topics: These topics, ranging from mindset factors to marketing actions, comprise the approximately 200 sections and subsections contained in the 29 chapters.? (For the complete table of contents, click here.)

In effect, these topics represent the bulk of what you need to know in order to succeed in your professional service business.

Life lessons: Following each chapter’s collection of sections and subsections, there is a life lesson that illustrates how a professional applied one or more key concepts.

Reflection & Applications Questions: The final element of each chapter contains a group of questions designed to help you apply key concepts to your unique situation.?

The More The Merrier

Although intended for self-study on an individual basis, the format is not limited to that application.

If once you start working your way through the book, why not find and share your experience with a like-minded professional--as study partners?

But why stop there? Echoing the old adage, in for a penny in for a pound, why not expand the process into a study group of several like-minded people? The content is sufficiently flexible that you can customize the learning process, prioritizing the sequence to whatever works best for you and you study partners or group.

For example, if you want to jump right into marketing, you could start at Chapter 15, working your way through to Chapter 22, adding or deleting whatever content you choose.

It is this ability to scale the size and number of learning opportunities that opens the door to affiliate marketing.

Small Business/Self-Employment Support Resources

Given the overall importance of small business, there is virtually no limit to the number, size and nature of support resources.?

Some of these resources are government funded, located anywhere from major urban cities to rural and more remote parts of our world.

There is no reason whatsoever that these resources couldn’t sponsor study groups based on the content of the book.? And if they are sponsoring study groups, they could also register as an affiliate of a book seller … and receive a share of the revenue from books sold to its members.

Lacking government funded small business resources, local chambers of commerce and boards of trade can and often do serve the same function.? In this scenario these organizations could also sponsor study groups and receive a share of the revenue from books sold to its members. Or they could just promote the book to their members and generate affiliate revenue.

Moving beyond local and government funded resources as potential book promotion affiliates, a wide range of business and professional associations could promote the book to their members.? Many of these organizations have hundreds or thousands of members; other serve hundreds of thousands individuals.

With effective packaging and promotion, my new book could become a welcome and valuable members’ benefit dozens, if not hundreds of professional associations and organizations.? And to help get you started, I’d be more than happy to share my list of some 200 such associations and organizations.

Two Collaborative Opportunities

All things considered, I see two collaborative opportunities, related to affiliate marketing.

Study Guide: ?I hadn’t even considered a study guide for the book until I prepared this article.? As appealing as the idea is, I have too much on my plate to undertake the project myself.?

But if you would like to create such a guide, let’s talk.

Affiliate Manager: Once again, I am not in a position to undertake this project myself.? But if you would like to build and manage such a program, let me know.

Now that you have finished this article, did any other mutually beneficial collaborative opportunities come to mind?