Affiliate Programs
To help drive quality traffic to your new website, consider setting up an affiliate program — sometimes called referral, associate, or partnership programs. No matter what term is used, these programs are attractive to many small websites that want to offset their costs by leasing space for a percentage of the sales made by sending traffic to other online businesses.
Affiliate programs are established by web-based businesses to drive quality traffic to their website. In exchange for a host site sending a customer to your website, you pay the host site a commission based on the sales you generate from the referred customer.
These commissions are all over the place and can range from 1 to 30 percent and upwards.
If you decide to establish an affiliate program you should create a system that can do online tracking, so your host sites can count the sales they have generated plus their commissions.
The higher you can make the commission, the more likely your host site will actually promote your website in some way so it can send paying customers your way and earn additional income.
It also can work in reverse. With an affiliate program you can make your website more valuable to your customers by offering them goods and services that are likely to interest them. You can earn additional revenue from your site through partnerships with websites that will compensate you for the traffic, leads, and sales you send them.
You can either develop your own affiliate program or contact a service that manages affiliate programs by giving websites access to their own network of affiliate sites and measuring the sales each affiliate generates.
For those that want to go the managed affiliate program path, here is a small sampling of the services you might find when you use your favorite search engine and the keywords “affiliate management”: Commission Junction (www.cj.com), FloppyBank.com, MyReferrer.com, Performics.com, and AffiliateNetwork.com.
Some readers will want to run their own affiliate program “in-house” so they can have total control over the way the program is ran, and avoid escrow fees, per-transaction fees and the like. There are two ways to go about this. Both methods enable you to avoid handing over your affiliate program to a third party.
The first method requires that you have the necessary skills to create your own affiliate program, e.g. craft the CGI script, and then place everything on your web server.
The second method to use a program such as the Ultimate Affiliate (www.groundbreak.com), which is a CGI script written in the Perl programming language that allows you to set up a fully featured affiliate program on your own web server.
Ultimate Affiliate’s CGI scripts are easy to install and intuitive to use for the average web developer. The resulting program lets you run a “pay-per-sale” or “pay-per-lead” program where you recruit affiliates to promote your website, then pay them a percentage (or a flat fee) for every sale or lead generated by their referrals.
The Ultimate Affiliate program tracks referrals by both cookie and optional IP tracking - making it virtually foolproof for an affiliate to lose a commission. And for the hard-core developers, the script will also create replicated websites for your affiliates to ensure 100% guaranteed referral sales.
To help drive quality traffic to your new website, consider setting up an affiliate program — sometimes called referral, associate, or partnership programs. No matter what term is used, these programs are attractive to many small websites that want to offset their costs by leasing space for a percentage of the sales made by sending traffic to other online businesses.
Affiliate programs are established by web-based businesses to drive quality traffic to their website. In exchange for a host site sending a customer to your website, you pay the host site a commission based on the sales you generate from the referred customer.
These commissions are all over the place and can range from 1 to 30 percent and upwards.
If you decide to establish an affiliate program you should create a system that can do online tracking, so your host sites can count the sales they have generated plus their commissions.
The higher you can make the commission, the more likely your host site will actually promote your website in some way so it can send paying customers your way and earn additional income.
It also can work in reverse. With an affiliate program you can make your website more valuable to your customers by offering them goods and services that are likely to interest them. You can earn additional revenue from your site through partnerships with websites that will compensate you for the traffic, leads, and sales you send them.
You can either develop your own affiliate program or contact a service that manages affiliate programs by giving websites access to their own network of affiliate sites and measuring the sales each affiliate generates.
For those that want to go the managed affiliate program path, here is a small sampling of the services you might find when you use your favorite search engine and the keywords “affiliate management”: Commission Junction (www.cj.com), FloppyBank.com, MyReferrer.com, Performics.com, and AffiliateNetwork.com.
Some readers will want to run their own affiliate program “in-house” so they can have total control over the way the program is ran, and avoid escrow fees, per-transaction fees and the like. There are two ways to go about this. Both methods enable you to avoid handing over your affiliate program to a third party.
The first method requires that you have the necessary skills to create your own affiliate program, e.g. craft the CGI script, and then place everything on your web server.
The second method to use a program such as the Ultimate Affiliate (www.groundbreak.com), which is a CGI script written in the Perl programming language that allows you to set up a fully featured affiliate program on your own web server.
Ultimate Affiliate’s CGI scripts are easy to install and intuitive to use for the average web developer. The resulting program lets you run a “pay-per-sale” or “pay-per-lead” program where you recruit affiliates to promote your website, then pay them a percentage (or a flat fee) for every sale or lead generated by their referrals.
The Ultimate Affiliate program tracks referrals by both cookie and optional IP tracking - making it virtually foolproof for an affiliate to lose a commission. And for the hard-core developers, the script will also create replicated websites for your affiliates to ensure 100% guaranteed referral sales.