a hands-off approach to sales?

Is there really such a thing?

Another interesting thought that my friend and I had, while we were discussing the means of promoting out new startup business, and driving sales, is the idea of allowing affiliates to sell our product for us.

In some cases, affiliate marketers can drive tons of interest (and conversions) and advertise your product for you. If your goal is to have an automated business that is providing more-or-less passive income, when does it become the obvious choice to let the affiliates take the wheel and do your selling for you almost exclusively? I imagine that there are sites out there that already do this, and probably do quite well with it.

In the past, it would have been difficult to try and take this approach as the costs of affiliate management software and conversion tracking would have been very high. However, today, we have companies like AIMpromote that offer these same tracking functions in a nicely bundled software suite for as low as $33/user. With their current CRM software offering, everyday small business owners (like you and me) now have access to advanced tracking features like lead tracking, lead reselling, campaign performance, marketing automation, affiliate management, and of course detailed ROI metrics. While some may argue that the large PPC programs offered by search engines offer some of these same capabilities, do you really want to give the wolf the key to he hen-house? I personally would prefer for Google not to see what kind of conversion rates I am getting, as I don't need them using my statistics to lure my competitors into the same fields of affiliate marketing.

Best of all, by investing in some thorough software, such as that being offered by AIMpromote, you get to spend less time running the business, and more time reaping the profits.