How To Start An Affiliate Program

If you are a merchant, affiliate marketing is an excellent way to get your product sold. There are millions of people around the world desperately looking to earning money selling other people's products.

So what does it take to start an affiliate program of your own?

Well, here are 7 things to take into consideration:

1. Products

It is important that you offer a quality affiliate product. If you can give some unique advantage to your product, that's not been addressed in the marketplace, you have an even better chance of being successful.

Regardless of other factors that you build into your program the product will be the single most important thing that you provide. 2. Affiliate Recruitment

Affiliate marketers can be found all over the world. There are more and more people looking for ways to make money online and many of them are being directed towards the affiliate marketing route due to how easy it is to get started. It’s therefore important to have a system in place to let people know about your particular program.

One way to do that is to join affiliate networks such as, Commission Junction and BeFree.

If you are providing just information-based products Clickbank is another excellent way to get them sold by affiliates.

3. Affiliate Commissions

If you are going to start an affiliate program this is an area where you definately don't want to cut corners.

Affiliate marketers are greedy bunch. They want to be paid well for their efforts, and can sell anything they want because of all the options available to them so you have to make sure you are paying them a competitive commission.

If you are willing to sacrifice a little bit more of your profit upfront you will find more of your products being sold by a greater number of affiliates. You will make the money back (and then some) very easily just by sheer volume of sales.

This may be a difficult mindset to understand but if you look at the Clickbank marketplace you will see that many of the more successful programs are offering 75% commission to the affiliates. These merchants realize that earning, for example 25% from 100 different affiliates is better than earning 70-80% from just 5 or 10.

4. Affiliate Management & Communication

Before you start advertising your program you will need a system in place to communicate with your affiliates. You can use a CGI script of your own to set up your total system or hire someone to do it for you. A company such as Affiliate Shop will, for a monthly fee, handle everything that it takes to run your program including communicating with your affiliates.

5. Affiliate Tracking & Reporting

Many affiliate marketers love to check their statistics so it’s important that you are able to provide accurate statistics including sales, commissions, hits, visits, and so on. These must be reported in real time if you want to attract the top affiliates.

6. Supported Shopping Carts

Regardless of the type of product you sell when you first start an affiliate program you will need a way to collect the money, and a shopping cart may be necessary depending on the number of products that you offer. This should be integrated into the affiliate’s website, and the money should be collected in a manner that allows you to keep track of the affiliate commissions.

7. Additional Marketing Tools

This is an area where you can really set yourself apart from the competition. Affiliates are looking for marketing tools that they can integrate effortlessly into their marketing business.

Therefore it's important that you offer, well-written sales pages, landing capture pages, graphics and banners, articles, e-mail marketing messages, classified and solo ads, and back end training.

Regardless of what an excellent system and top product you have put together, if you are not able to get that out on the internet you will not make any sales. By providing top affiliate marketing tools with training on how to sell your product, you stand a much better chance of being successful when you start an affiliate program.

Once you get everything set up, and have top affiliates promoting it, an affiliate program you own can be extremely lucrative.