Starting your own affiliate program

[Mook25]

What is an Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program is way of allowing others to sell or promote your products and services for commission.

Benefits

• Because your banners and links are placed on other sites this makes you more visible with not much effort.
• You have other people marketing your product and services, it's not all down to you.
• Your sales will increase dramatically.
• 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. VodaHost actually provides the affiliate script and offers an excellent service. 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 *******ted 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.

• Do you want to *******te your entire site giving each affiliate their very own www.yoursite.com?
• Do you simply want to track sales giving each affiliate their own unique ID?
• Do you want to pay affiliates for actual sales, clicks or leads only?
• Do you sell products, services or electronic products? Do you want your affiliates to market all your services and products or only some?
• 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.
• Do you want international affiliates or affiliates from your own country only?
• Do you want to pay a percentage of sales or a flat rate?

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/ 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!