Developing a successful affiliate program can help you sell your products like crazy. The reason is that you can sign up hundreds or even thousands of affiliates, and they will promote your products. You only reward them if they can make sales. Compared to banner advertising and ezine advertising, it is far more effective and cost-justified. At least, You get a team of powerful "pay-for-performance only" sales force. More probably, they will sell your products on their websites by using personal endorsement, writing article, adding a banner of your products, and selling your products on their e-zine. AND You just pay when they can sell. So consider to develop your own affiliate program promotion system. Start your affiliate marketing.....

Now, I suggest you sit down and think thoroughly: The first step of "How to set up your affiliate program?"

YES! You are right.

The first step is to establish a back-end system for running your own affiliate program.

How? You can either buying an affiliate tracking software or employ an affiliate service provider/affiliate network. Both solutions have their merits. You must make your right decision or else your own affiliate program gives you a lot of trouble or even ruins your business.

1. Do I have the capacity and willingness to deal with affiliate administration jobs like signing check and sending check on time for each affiliate? How about accounting?
2. Do I have a budget to sign up tons of high quality affiliates?
3. Do I have the ability to handle customer billing and billing enquiries?
4. Do I want to buy, install, manage and later update software? (It may consume you considerable amount of time)
5. Am I confident enough that my affiliates have trust on me so that they're willing to sign up?
6. Do I have experience in affiliate fraud management?

My SUGGESTION: If most of your answers are YES, THEN BUYING an affiliate tracking software is a good choice. On the contrary, I suggest you EMPLOYING an affiliate program service provider.

Buying Your Own Affiliate Tracking Software

To use your own affiliate tracking software and run your program by yourself, you must install a powerful affiliate tracking software and plan for how to run the back-end administration job. The Pros of this approach is that you only spend a one-time fee to buy a software and install it. The cons is that you need to handle administration jobs like check preparation and etc. It is quite time-consuming and incurs administration cost. However, if you have the ability to do it, GO FOR it.

A good affiliate tracking software must possess the following features:

1. The software provider will maintain and update software for you.
2. The sofware can accurately keep track of affiliate's sales records.
3. The software can show valuable reports to you.
4. It can generate sales reports to your affiliates.
5. A user-friendly web-based administration panel.
6. An easy sign-up affiliate mechanism so that you can recruit affiliates easily.
7. Allow customization of affiliate programs like setting different commission structure, 1 or 2 tiers program.
8. Affiliates can click a button and get their passwords emailed to the affiliates in case they forgot.
9. It allows affiliates using a short URL's for easy ezine, classified ad, and text advertising.
10. The software must allow affiliates using text links & banner links.
11. You can track ads result to examine which ones are profitable and which ones are losing money
12. Adequate security is built in.

The following are some recommended products that can fulfill the above criteria:

ProTrack Affiliate Tracking Software

Protack is a very professional affiliate tracking software. This affiliate tracking software allows you to develop a two-tier affiliate program, perform affiliate tracking and reporting to affiliates with high accuracy. This software automates your affiliates sign-up process. You can also create custom welcome messages to affiliates. In addition, you can create many custom reports to monitor affiliates preformance down to a very detail level. Most importantly, Protrack has a robust database to store information. On contrary to other cheap affiliate program tracking software, you don't have to worry database corruption that kills your whole affiliate program for sure. You can rely your affiliate marketing on ProTrack Affiliate Tracking Software.

Employing Affiliate Program Service Provider

The pros of using an affiliate service provider to handle your affiliate program is that they handle nearly every administration job. These administration jobs are not only tedious and troublesome, but also incur cost. Sometimes, this cost is very high. If you use an affiliate program service provider to handle your affiliate program, you can really spend more time on developing your e-business. A really good affiliate service provider should help you handle check payment & software updates, has a network to help you sign up more affiliates, offer a flexible affiliate program structure, and generate all necessary reports for you and your affiliates. If you have only a small team of employee or even no employee, it is wise to use an affiliate service provider.

For sites selling widely used products or services, an excellent choice would be Commission Junction

Their start up costs are reasonable, it's like taking out an ad campaign. You get complete set-up and support, affiliate payroll, promotion to their huge list of pre-screened affiliate sites, and continuously updated software and systems. I consider them the best of the best in their niche. I know the people. They are very customer service oriented. So don't go it alone. Set-up is extremely simple, and you can be up and running in as little as a few hours. I strongly recommend this as the solution for the vast majority of merchants.

Commission Junction ,launched in November, 1998, is building a rapidly growing, large network of merchants. You can quickly establish a pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale program, and benefit from publicity generated by this prominent affiliate network. Here's the description from the site:

"With a pay-per-lead program", you pay a commission when an authorized affiliate refers a customer to your site and that customer fills out a form or performs another action that allows you to follow up on the sales process.

"With a pay-per-sale program", you pay a commission when an authorized affiliate refers a customer to your site and that customer buys a product or service. The purchase may occur when the visitor is at your site or it may occur at a later time.

Manage affiliate marketing by commission junction is a wise choice.

"Whether you want to start a new program or upgrade your existing program, we can get you started in a matter of days at a price that any organization can afford. We professionally manage all the details of your revenue sharing operations including affiliate sign-ups, approvals, tracking, reporting, and commission payments."

The system appears to work very well. A huge advantage of using a network is that it promotes your program for you. Also, Commission Junction consolidates payouts, making it a favourite of affiliates. If you want to pay someone a commission for taking care of all the details, this is a very good option. Remember: You can save a lot of time for dealing with other important tasks like establishing business parntership with other site owners, website promotion, and etc.. You can save administration cost. Your affiliates will be happy if you choose Commission Junction

Highly Recommended!