Tips on Starting an Affiliate Program

If you’ve been thinking about starting an affiliate program to help promote your business you’ve got several options to consider. You can contract a third party network to do the work, buy stand-alone software to do it yourself or hire in-house staff, or pay a monthly fee and use a web-based system.

Outsourcing to a Third Party Network

You can start your affiliate program by choosing to contract with one of the many affiliate networks. They will do the tracking, work with affiliates, and handle payments for you. Companies such as Linkshare, Performics, Commission Junction, ShareaSale and hundreds of others take a lot of the headache out of managing these programs. Using a large network can increase your website traffic and boost sales but the fees you’ll pay are quite hefty.

Before starting an affiliate program at an industry leader, it’s a good idea to look at many of the smaller networks which have specialized niches -- and the set-up and maintenance fees are much more reasonable.

Even though these third parties do much of the heavy work for you in terms of admin and technical solutions, you still must promote your own program yourself. You’ll need to send emails to your affiliates announcing new creatives and promotions, promote your product datafeeds, and encourage partners to contact you with questions. You have the option of automatic approval, i.e., allowing all affiliate marketers who apply to start promoting your products, or you can approve partners manually.

Do it Yourself or Hire a Third Party Tracking Solution

To start an affiliate program, a large or medium sized company would need to hire a programmer, a manager and support staff to handle potentially thousands of affiliates. A small company could install a CGI script on its own server and also do the work in-house. Or, the final option would be to pay a monthly fee and use a third party tracking solution to run an automated program.

Let’s take a look at just a handful of the options available:

AffiliateShop software is easy to set up and offers an array of features, everything you need to start an in-house affiliate program. It works with most third party shopping cart systems, includes anti-fraud protection against click fraud, exports datafeeds, and tracks real time stats even for 2-tier programs. It also works with TroySystems equipment for processing bulk check runs to pay an unlimited number of affiliates. You don’t have to install it on your server as it is hosted at AffiliateShop so you’ll be set up and starting an affiliate program the same day. The initial fee is $395 and the monthly fee is $45.

QuickPayPro would be a good choice for many affiliate program managers. It’s not only a well-coded shopping cart system that’s integrated with PayPal, it already comes with the affiliate tracking programming built in. QuickPayPro is fully automated so there’s very little tweaking that needs to be done to get started and the detailed reports give you conversion and click through rates, IP addresses and more. The cost is about $37 per month.

Another web-based system to get started is the My Affiliate Program which is popular with thousands of merchants and includes quick set-up, reports, tracking and verification, email function, export for datafeeds, multi-tier commission structure and more.

Two more tools for starting an affiliate program are Leadhound, another great PayPal interface with its easy “mass pay” feature; and CyberTrakker which is another fully integrated shopping cart, affiliate tracker, and eCommerce site admin all in one package. These two are much less expensive than other third party tracking solutions and are designed for small to medium sized businesses.

For individuals, the easiest way to test your ideas for starting an affiliate program would be to use ClickBank. It handles affiliate payments and it’s the most low-cost advertising strategy you can find. If you want a lot more ideas, get a copy of Ken Evoy’s Make Your Site Sell. It’s free and packs a wealth of information in its 224 pages.

Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for Publishers

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