Start Your Own Affiliate Progra

Holly Janion If you have a web site selling products or services, why not start your
very own affiliate program. It's not that difficult or expensive and
the benefits are huge. Use the money you save from promoting your site
yourself to pay your affiliates!

What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program is way of allowing others to sell or promote your
products and services for commission.

Benefits

1. Because your banners and links are placed on other sites this makes
you more visible with not much effort.
2. You have other people marketing your product and services, it's not
all down to you.
3. Your sales will increase dramatically.
4. You will certainly appear "bigger" than what you are and your
credibility will be higher.

Gone are the days when only the "big" sites could set up and run affiliate
programs. Today its easy and there are a couple of ways of doing this.
You could get someone to install the required scripts on your own server
and run it yourself. This is the way I like to do it as you have full
control but in order to do this you need to be able to accept credit
cards on-line via your own merchant account.

It's not that expensive or complicated, sometimes it's a matter of who
you know. My hosting company actually provided and installed the script
on my latest site absolutely free and offer an excellent service. Take
a look at http://www.rambit.com to find out more about this option.
You need to decide what your objectives of your affiliate program are
before you decide which route to go down. You can either have your whole
site replicated or you can have a script installed that will simply track
your affiliate sales. You will need to look at various options depending
on what you hope to achieve.

Ask yourself the following questions before you begin.

1. Do you want to replicate your entire site giving each affiliate their
very own www.yoursite.com?
2. Do you simply want to track sales giving each affiliate their own unique
ID?
3. Do you want to pay affiliates for actual sales, clicks or leads only?
4. Do you sell products, services or electronic products? Do you want your
affiliates to market all your services and products or only some?
5. Do you want to pay only the actual affiliate who makes the sale or
do you want to build a two-tier program, compensating the affiliate
for sales his referrals make too.
6. Do you want international affiliates or affiliates from your own
country only?
7. Do you want to pay a percentage of sales or a flat rate?

For example on the WWW Treasure Hunt site at http://www.wwwtreasurehunt.com
I have two affiliate programs. I needed one affiliate program to compensate
for Treasure Hunter sign-ups and one to reward affiliates for advertisers.
For the first option, I used a script which I obtained from Superscripts at
http://www.superscripts.com/agentspro/cgibin/agents.cgi?salad which my hosting
company installed and configured for me for free. This script allows
treasure hunters to sign-up from an affiliate site without actually leaving it.
For the second option, I chose to have the whole site replicated but had it
configured specifically to track advertiser sign-ups only.

If you don't have your own merchant account, you could use a service like
Clickbank. They provide a payment facility and will track your affiliate
sales. You can find out more by visiting http://hop.clickbank.net/?hollyj55

If you have your own merchant account but want an outside company to
handle and track your affiliate program, you could use a service like
either http://www.linkshare.com or http://www.cj.com/ who make it easy
and handle everything for a fee.

When deciding on which service to use to set-up your affiliate program, think
of things from the affiliate's point of view and what's important to
them. A key factor to running a successful affiliate program is having
happy affiliates. Make things easy for them. Offer different banner sizes,
text links, real-time stats and e-mail notification when sales are made.

Once your affiliate program has been set-up, you'll need to promote it.
As a starting point, list your site at http://www.revenews.com,
http://www.associateprograms.com/ and http://www.affiliatebroadcast.com.
These sites also provide information on marketing your own affiliate program.

The point is there are lots of options for you to choose from. Depending
upon your circumstances, financial situation and whether you sell products
or services, but which every method you choose, you could soon be on your way
to becoming the next Amazon.com!

About the Author

Holly Janion is the webmaster for Wade's World Ltd, an Internet
solutions company at http://www.wadesworld-usa.com. Her latest
creations can be seen at http://www.wwwtreasurehunt.com and
http://www.view-home.com. Holly can be contacted at mailto:
webmaster@wadesworld.co.uk