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Setting up Your Own Affiliate Program (part one)
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This week 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?
5.3 Cooking off the Spam
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
spam—the 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 installment of my two part series
on starting your own affiliate program. Stay tuned for
more.
Warmly,
erwin
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