Your own affiliate program for maximum marketing leverage

You pay only for efforts that turn into sales

The math is simple. Having an affiliate program with an army of hard-working affiliates will maximize your leverage. And your profits will soar if you have a proven product and high-converting sales process.

It's an extremely cost effective method for advertising your products or services. You pay only for efforts that turn into sales.

But doing it right takes careful planning and execution.

Setting up your own affiliate system can be fairly straightforward or overwhelming. It depends on several factors such as the number of affiliates you want to have in your system, your product and market size, your payment processes and policies, and whether you use a stand alone system or a network service.

You have two options for your affiliate system. You can outsource the entire system or operate it through your own web host. Each has its good and less appealing points.

If you have a small number of affiliates, it would probably be much easier to use your own affiliate software. There are several applications available that will do a fine job of managing your affiliates. For a large number of affiliates, you may find outsourcing your affiliate management will help prevent some headaches. It’ll just be easier to deal with a higher volume of tasks such as sign-ups, payment tracking, monitoring and tracking clicks, etc.


Various affiliate models

There are various affiliate models available to you. The pay per sale model is probably the most popular. This can be unattractive unless your product has a high demand and your payout is good. One trend that has been around for some years is the two-tier affiliate model.

The two-tiered structure allows for your affiliates to recruit sign-ups, for your program, and the older affiliate receives a small percentage of revenue from the newer affiliate. This can be extremely powerful if your product is a proven winner. And for that reason this model is very attractive.

The pay per lead affiliate model is used when you pay only for leads generated from traffic. This particular method is extremely attractive to affiliates with experience in pay per click marketing, or those with established high traffic websites. But you’ll need to be very sure your marketing and conversion process is well optimized. The downside to this method occurs due to poor conversions to sales.

You’ll need to answer the question of approving your affiliates manually or automatically. The latter runs the risk of blindly allowing anyone to market your products. You’ll have no idea about the affiliate and whether or not your products will be ethically marketed.

Depending on your resources, you could waste them on potentially huge numbers of non-performing affiliates. Manual approval will require more time on either your part, or your hired help, but it could turn out to be profitable time spent.

When pay per click marketing is involved, one issue concerns the quality of your traffic. Hopefully they’ll be targeted but you really do not have any control if the traffic is generated from your affiliates. And this can be troublesome for your metrics and tracking analysis. Manually reviewing allows you to judge a potential affiliate’s website and overall ability. Then you can better determine what’s in the best interest of your company.