Setting Up Your Own Affiliate Program (part one)

Can you start your own affiliate program without hassle?This is one of a two part series on creating your own affiliate/revenue sharing program.

Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. However much you can join someone else's affiliate program, so you can set up your own and invite webmasters to sign up.

Why not?

You get...... deals.

Every time someone sends you a visitor who pays you money, you give a portion of that earnings to your affiliate. It's an easy way to generate traffic and produce cash revenues.

Crucially (!).... you don't need to be a programming genius to set up an affiliate program in these more competitive times. There are a whole load of companies out there that offer entire affiliate kits.

Ultimate Affiliate lets you run a fully featured affiliate program from your website. It integrates with virtually every payment method, awards down-line commissions, and can handle high-traffic websites. You can edit the sign-up form to match the "look and feel" of your site as well as delete some of the optional fields.

The administration area allows you to edit affiliates and commissions, create printable reports of money due, export the data to a text file, view the traffic through your affiliate program, and much more.

Your affiliates can log in at any time and see their traffic and commission statistics as well as change their information and get links and banner code.

Once the program is set up you'll only need to log in once a month to print out a list of the affiliates, their addresses, and the money owed. You can do this quarterly if you wish. You can export the payments owed to a text file in PayPal's "mass pay" format and then just upload it to your PayPal account to pay everyone automatically.

Or, you can simply write your own checks. If you have to pay a lot of commissions, there is a check printing service called qchex.com. Upload the file and they'll print and mail each of your checks for a fee of about 80 cents.

Alternatively, Locked Area Pro is an advanced member's area management system offering very good security that's easy to maintain. The system provides a huge list of useful features including automated sign-up, user account validation, optional random password generation and an administration approve/decline account feature.

It also comes with an extremely powerful control panel with an online administration of users, backup, and full customization facilities from the browser. A statistics system is also in built in. What more could you want?

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on other signups to generate profits, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to take action-otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted.

Not good for business.

If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning. I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate's account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it's probably not spam-the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL.

The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.

This ends the first installment of two parts!

Chris Ruane

Discover a simple four-step way to get bigger affiliate ccommissions... I'll tell you exactly what those four steps are, and how you can apply this formula right away. http://www.seriousedge.com

Affiliate marketing offers earning opportunities, making it as one of the fastest growing industry in the World Wide Web today. It produces billions of dollars worth of income yearly. That is why many people are getting involved in it.

However, most of them are just getting into the jive of earning money without a concrete plan. You will have no strategies to be implemented, no guidelines to be followed.

In case that you are planning to get yourself involved in affiliate marketing, bear in your mind that it is a serious work. Though it is one of the easier ways of earning additional income, it still requires effort, perseverance, and a clear plan of action from your starting point up to the finish line.

An affiliate site that I highly recommend, that trains you and helps you get a clear plan of action is SITE BUILD IT (SBI). Why?

Here's why.. Many major universities (ex., University of Arizona), and colleges and even MBA programs include SBI! in their curriculum. No other online busineness building program has gained acceptance by the educational sector like SBI!

In addition to universities, stellar companies such as Clickbank and AdBrite recommend SBI! to their hundreds of thousands of affiliates and publishers. The reason is simple. SBI! makes them more effective online.

Only SBI! has garnered this type of support. Because only Site Build It! actually builds online success.

I speak from experience because I'm an owner of an SBI site myself and I can't believe how profitable this site can be. I love the traffic that I get from SBI. Everyone knows that traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Only Site Build It! (SBI!) delivers the holy grail, traffic. Targeted traffic. Motivated, interested, warm, willing-to-buy visitors. That spells SUCCESS!!!