Starting Your Own Affiliate Program
Affiliate Marketing
Starting an affiliate marketing program probably is only of the smartest business decision you will do as an online merchant. Affiliate marketing is a cost effective way of marketing your product as it is performance based remuneration. Imagine the cost you will incur if you employ hundreds of sales associate trying to sell your product. The cost is staggering and you would have to pay salary even for non-performing sales associates! Affiliate marketing negates this manpower cost by remunerating publishers only as they perform. The action required of the publishers or affiliates maybe in various criteria depending on your business mode. Some pay as referred clients get to accomplish registration form. Some get paid based percentage of sales. Others get paid a fixed value for every transaction or sales referred. But the best part is that you only pay your affiliates when a sale is actually made!
Inasmuch as it a no-brainer to run an affiliate marketing campaign, there is still the need to attract affiliates who would be willing to promote your program. This is probably one of areas of affiliate marketing where the most the work would be entail after you have your program set-up. Where will you be able to recruit affiliates to refer web traffic to your business?Where will you get the platform to launch your affiliate program?
Affiliate Networks
The best bet I can think of is by joining an affiliate network. Affiliate networks have membership of thousands of affiliates or publishers who might be interested to partner with your campaign. An affiliate network will also help you set up an affiliate program and prepare the fundamentals to have your campaign running in no time. Leading affiliate networks are Commission Junction, Linkshare, Shareasale, Google Affiliate Network and AffiliateBOT. You'll have to fill out an application describing the nature of your business and your Web site. You'll also have to agree to the terms of the affiliate network, pay a set-up fee and make a deposit to cover the cost of future affiliate commissions. Some affiliate networks also charge a yearly fee or monthly fee for their services. Estimated cost of joining an affiliate network would be between $1,000 and $5,000. You will also pay the affiliate network a percentage of every payout to an affiliate which is around 20-30% of affiliate commission. In return, the affiliate network will help you set everything up, keep track of all the activity in your affiliate program, issue your affiliates checks and distribute your links to appropriate affiliates. They will give you the option of reviewing prospective affiliates, or you can choose to accept all interested affiliates automatically.
Affiliate Management Software
Setting up your own in-house affiliate program is another option. But as I have said, doing so would be a burden on terms of finding affiliates to promote your program. The alternative to acquiring affiliates, maintaining an affiliate program yourself, is significantly more complicated. Among other things, you would have to screen and recruit all affiliates yourself, purchase and acquire a tracking software, assist your affiliates on how to set up links to your site, set up an accounting system for paying all of your affiliates and set up a help line to assist all your affiliates. There are a number of traffic-tracking software applications that will probably cost between $100 and $500, significantly less than joining an affiliate network. AffiliateWiz and DirectTrack are two of the tracking software that I am aware of. Another affiliate management option is the "Point and Click" web based interface which is managed by 1Automationwiz.. Another option is to sign on to a company that keeps track of the traffic involved in your affiliate program by running it through their site on the way to yours. Using one of these companies cost about the same as tracking software, and they also only assist you in tracking.
I guess this information would have given you the quick summary of what your options are for starting an affiliate program. I will discuss in later blogs the affiliate management’s responsibilities and roles. Maintaining the business end of an affiliate program is more than we can explore in this article. Feel free to contact me if you would need assistance in setting up your affiliate program.
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