Starting Your Own Affiliate Program, Part One
We will start the first of a two part series on starting your own affiliate program. Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. But just as you can join someone else’s affiliate program, so you can set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up.
So…what would that bring you? The same as you’re bringing
your affiliate partners: deals. Every time someone sends you
a user who gives you money, you give a portion of that
money to your affiliate. It’s an easy way to generate traffic
and earn cash.
And you don’t need to be a programming genius to set up an
affiliate program. There are a whole bunch of companies out
there that offer entire affiliate kits right off the shelf.
Ultimate Affiliate lets you run a fully featured affiliate
program from your website. It integrates with virtually every
payment method, awards down-line commissions, and can
handle high-traffic websites. You can edit the sign-up form to
match the “look and feel” of your site as well as delete some
of the optional fields. The administration area allows you to
edit affiliates and commissions, create printable reports of
money due, export the data to a text file, view the traffic
through your affiliate program, and much more. Your
affiliates can log in at any time and see their traffic and
commission statistics as well as change their information and
get links and banner code.
Once the program is set up you’ll only need to log in once a
month to print out a list of the affiliates, their addresses, and
the money owed. You can do this quarterly if you wish. You
can export the payments owed to a text file in PayPal’s “mass
pay” format and then just upload it to your PayPal account to
pay everyone automatically. Or, you can simply write your
own checks. If you have to pay a lot of commissions, there is
a check printing service called qchex.com. Upload the file
and they’ll print and mail your checks for a fee of about 80
cents each.
Alternatively, Locked Area Pro is an advanced member’s
area management system offering very good security that’s
easy to maintain. The system provides a huge list of useful
features including automated sign-up, user account
validation, optional random password generation and an
administration approve/decline account feature. It also comes
with an extremely powerful control panel with an online
administration of users, backup, and full customization
facilities from the browser. A statistics system is also in built in. What more could you want?
Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on
other signups to generate profits, you will eventually have a
problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get
it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.
When this happens you need to be ready to take action
otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet Company can boot
you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. Not
good for business. If you get an email from someone
claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as
an early warning. I am not advising you to immediately
terminate the affiliate’s account, but be sure to contact them
to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you
received a complaint and advise them to remove this person
from their list.
If you only get one or two complaints, it’s probably not
spamthe complainants might simply have signed up for an
email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one
of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get
anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all
regarding the same URL. The best thing to do in this case is
to immediately terminate or disable the account of the
affiliate URL that was spammed.
This concludes the first instalment of my two part series on
starting your own affiliate program. Stay tuned for more.
Clive Harman is a professional trainer with 38 years
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