The main reasons to start an affiliate marketing program is to increase the visibility of your website, brand name and offered products, as well as increasing your online sales. As most affiliates will work hard to send you well converting traffic, many of the visitors received from affiliate banners will be likely to buy your products.
There are a few common ways for advertisers looking to start an affiliate program:
Joining an affiliate network
The number one reason for joining an affiliate network as an advertiser, would be the simplicity of it. Most, if not all networks have more or less intuitive interfaces, making it easy to set things up.
The prices are varied, as are the services and add-ons they offer. Some promise to promote your affiliate program, others do only list you in their directory. Do not pay to much for their promotional efforts unless you know them to be worth the price. Many of them only submit your affiliate program to a few affiliate program directories which is a 20 minute job if you know where to submit them to.
Another important thing to look at is the affiliate code generated by the network. Will it point to your website directly or will it point to the affiliate network’s domain? If you get the affiliate links to point to your domain directly you gain in link popularity, if the links point to the affiliate network, they rise in link popularity. Prices, as mentioned, vary widely. Be sure to see what they charge for setting it up, and remember to look out for fixed costs. If you pay only a percentage on your affiliates sales, you know you will make money. If there are many fixed costs, you might end up loosing money.
For a good list of affiliate networks visit http://www.affiliateranker.com/directory/Affiliate Network.do
Buying affiliate software
Using bought affiliate software eliminates much of the costs of affiliate networks, but you – or your company – needs to maintain it yourself. While this might sound time consuming, it’s actually very easy. Make sure you look at the demo of any affiliate software you are thinking of buying, as well as reading up on forums or similar to see what others think about the affiliate program and software. With a standalone affiliate program, you are the one in charge of both running it and promoting it.
Affiliates of today are often experienced, and are looking at websites in a much more critical manner than your average visitor, so make certain your affiliate program pages are of a very good standard, otherwise you might scare potential affiliates to competing affiliate programs. Be sure to see what your competitors are offering their affiliates, and try to offer a few more percentages. This will often make your affiliate program more appealing and will, and in some affiliate program directories, make your program rank higher.
Inhouse affiliate program
Building your own affiliate program is very hard work, but if you have a large website and are hoping to attract many affiliates, this might be the way to do it.
The major upside of having your own affiliate software made is the total control, the professional feel of a truly unique affiliate program and the low cost of maintaining it. This is often done by large websites or corporations, or by programmers running a website on the side. You need to know very much about both programming and affiliate marketing to know how to make the affiliate software work smoothly and make sure people don’t have any easy ways of cheating the software or you.
Often it is possible to find open source projects one could use to build an affiliate program, but it’s still very important to know exactly what you are doing. If you are uncertain, why not buy affiliate software?
