Setting up Your Own Affiliate Program (part one)

This week we will start the first of a two part series onstarting your own affiliate program. Joining an affiliateprogram is a neat way to make money from your users. Butjust as you can join someone else’s affiliate program, soyou can set up your own program and invite webmasters tosign up.

So…what would that bring you? The same as you’re bringingyour affiliate partners: deals. Every time someone sends youa user who gives you money, you give a portion of that moneyto your affiliate. It’s an easy way to generate traffic andearn cash.

And you don’t need to be a programming genius to set up anaffiliate program. There are a whole bunch of companies outthere that offer entire affiliate kits right off the shelf.

Ultimate Affiliate lets you run a fully featured affiliateprogram from your website. It integrates with virtuallyevery payment method, awards down-line commissions, and canhandle high-traffic websites. You can edit the sign-up formto match the "look and feel” of your site as well as deletesome of the optional fields. The administration area allowsyou to edit affiliates and commissions, create printablereports of money due, export the data to a text file, viewthe traffic through your affiliate program, and much more.Your affiliates can log in at any time and see their trafficand commission statistics as well as change theirinformation and get links and banner code.

Once the program is set up you'll only need to log in once amonth to print out a list of the affiliates, theiraddresses, and the money owed. You can do this quarterly ifyou wish. You can export the payments owed to a text file inPayPal's "mass pay" format and then just upload it to yourPayPal account to pay everyone automatically. Or, you cansimply write your own checks. If you have to pay a lot ofcommissions, there is a check printing service calledqchex.com. Upload the file and they’ll print and mail yourchecks for a fee of about 80 cents each.

Alternatively, Locked Area Pro is an advanced member's areamanagement system offering very good security that’s easy tomaintain. The system provides a huge list of useful featuresincluding automated sign-up, user account validation,optional random password generation and an administrationapprove/decline account feature. It also comes with anextremely powerful control panel with an onlineadministration of users, backup, and full customizationfacilities from the browser. A statistics system is also inbuilt in. What more could you want?5.3 Cooking off the Spam

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely onother signups to generate profits, you will eventually havea problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitablyget it into their head to blitz the Web with unwantedgarbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to takeaction—otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company canboot you off your server and you can find yourselfblacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email fromsomeone claiming they received spam with your URL, then takeit as an early warning. I am not advising you to immediatelyterminate the affiliate’s account, but be sure to contactthem to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate knowyou received a complaint and advise them to remove thisperson from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it’s probably notspam—the complainants might simply have signed up for anemail list and forgotten all about it. You will know whenone of your affiliates is spamming, because you will getanywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day allregarding the same URL. The best thing to do in this case isto immediately terminate or disable the account of theaffiliate URL that was spammed.

This concludes the first installment of my two part serieson starting your own affiliate program. Stay tuned formore.

Best Regards