Affiliate Programs
One of the best ways to expand your reach to new customers is to offer
affiliate programs. These programs are aimed at encouraging other web site
operators to advertise your products or services on their sites. Affiliates are
encouraged to market your products and services on a profit-sharing basis, as
they are paid either on a per lead and/or per sale basis.
How do Affiliate programs work?
Affiliate programs are a profit-sharing relationship between Advertisers and
Publishers. The Advertisers have products or services to sell and the Publishers
have web sites or email campaigns to reach customers of those products and
services.
Why do they work so well?
By making the sale of your products profitable for other web site operators,
you encourage them to seek out many more niche areas of your market than you
could ever identify or target.Therefore you can increase your reach even further
through the clever ideas and marketing campaigns of your affiliates.
How do I start an Affiliate Program?
There are two ways to offer an affiliate program:
- Join a Program - there are many sites already well established with
thousands of registered affiliates that you could join as an advertiser.
You
do not have to keep track of your affiliates and pay them yourself; you simply
pay the operators and they handle the distribution of payments. This option has
almost no start up costs but you pay a percentage of your affiliate payments to
the site.
- Do It Yourself - you can create your own web interface or there are a
number of software packages that can provide the web interface for you. You also
have to keep track of the payments to each affiliate and have a method of
payment established.
Affiliate Software
If you are planning to run your own affiliates Programs, then we use and
recommend iDevAffiliate from iDevDirect
IdevAffiliate works with these products:
