The Affiliate Marketing Program

For complete details and instructions on using the affiliate program read the full affiliate program help page.

The affiliate program gives you an easy to use interface and programming to run a small affiliate based marketing program for your products or services. Affiliate marketing is a process where people send you customers and you pay them a commission for any sales that result.

If you plan to run a successful program, you will need to go beyond the tools provided and add in details and pages describing the program, terms of use and marketing materials. The more visible your program is, the more it will produce for you. A well built site with detailed information pages and resources for the program is necessary to generate good affiliate and sales.

The main program allows independent affiliates to signup and access linking codes, banners and monitor referrals and sales.

This program operates the same way most other affiliate programs work by setting a cookie in the users browser and matching that referral with any purchase. This same technology is used by large retailers like amazon.com, walmart.com and other well known brands offering affiliate programs. Cookie tracking is the standard in the affiliate marketing industry and is the only suitable method for establishing commission tracking.

When a potential customer clicks in from an affiliate's website, if the linking code is used that customer is credited to the affiliate. If the customer makes a purchase before the cookie expires the sale will be credited to the affiliate.

You can set the cookie expiration between 1 day and 1 year. It is important to use a reasonable referral time to allow visitors purchases to be credited to the affiliates. If the send a person to your website and the person buys a product 2 weeks later, they want the credit for the sale. The longer the referral duration the more attractive your program is to affiliate marketers.

Our program goes one step further by allowing non internet based sales by adding a text box to the checkout page for the affiliate ID. If the affiliate can promise a discount for using the code, the user will surely enter the code to get the discount and the affiliate will get credited with the sale.

Once concept of affiliate marketing is that you may lose money on sales if you pay a 20% commission. However, you gain a new customer and potential residual sales for life.

The affiliate knows that the customer may go directly to your website for the next purchase, so by paying commissions for an extended period makes your program more exciting for the affiliate marketer. However, it also makes it more costly for you and you have to balance commission with the length that you will pay them.

The biggest issue will be how much to pay. The industry runs from about 3% to 20% with the majority of merchants paying between 6% and 10%. Depending on your product cost and the resulting commission you should make the commission attractive. If you sell candles for $1 and pay 5%, not many people will be interested in making a nickle on a sale. But if you sell furniture and the average sale is $100, then a $5 commission is very attractive.

The more you pay, the more likely you will get good referrals from good websites. The less you pay, the less likely people will even signup at all.

The sales are compiled by the month and can be reviewed by the affiliate as well as the merchant. A detailed list of payouts is available in plain text or delimited format for importing to accounting programs like quickbooks.

It is extremely important that you pay your commissions on time and with checks that don't bounce. You can set your own policy and designate minimum payouts and payout dates so you are not always sending people $1 checks. But you must stay on top of the commissions or your affiliates will say very bad things about you and it wont be long before your affiliate program is a complete disaster.

There is obviously a great deal of work to do to manage payouts and post payments and reversed sales. But the ability to have outside websites promoting your products is priceless. A well run affiliate program can be the difference between no sales and a successful active website.

For complete details and instructions on using the affiliate program read the full affiliate program help page.