Setting up an Affiliate Program on a budget.

The main incentive for people to join your affiliate program is money. You should give them as big a cut of the sale price as possible. Do not try to cheat them. Pay up on time, with a smile.

You should try to sell expensive items, or very popular ones. Active affiliates mean you can concentrate on improving your web site and product. Advertise your program at listing sites. These are the two most popular affiliate program listing sites:

Be happy to send your affiliates their cheques; they're making you money. They're your commission-only sales-force. Make it as easy as possible for them to sign up, and get the affiliate HTML code (for an example see here). Keep in touch with them, and make them aware of special offers.

Software.

The main trick with affiliate program software is integrating it with your shopping cart.

This is commonly done by making the URL of the affiliate program CGI-script the last link in the shopping cart sale sequence. You 'daisy chain' the cart and affiliate program CGI-scripts. In your cart's set-up section there should be an option to do this.

The affiliate script checks to see if the customer has an affiliate cookie, and if they have, it credits the affiliate with a sale, and then re-directs to its 'thank you' page.

Most shopping carts allow for this to be set up. Just make the affiliate cgi-script URL the last URL the shopping cart re-directs to, after a successful purchase.

11th Feb 2003: IMPORTANT: You must test the software works.

1. Join your own affiliate program. 2. Set your browser to accept cookies, but to notify you of their arrival. (You can do this in Explorer, Netscape and Opera). 3. Click on the affiliate link. 4. Then surf to your cart and make a purchase. 5. Then log in to your affiliate account.

Did you get a credit in your affiliate account?

I have had no end of problems with affiliate software. Sometimes it was my fault, more often the software.

Also, most affiliate program software now logs IP numbers, to stop fraud. Clear the log if you want to keep testing the program.

Other solutions:

The ClickAffiliate PLUS script (about $49.00)

The YourAffiliate scripts from
sunnyscript.com (about $59.00). This is a good script. The manual is confusing, but it's got pay-per-click AND pay per sale. Nice.

All Affiliate Pro. This is a combination pay-per-click and affiliate program set of scripts. Costs $140 at the time of writing.

If you want an easy solution, get The Commission Cart cgiscriptcenter.com ($249), a shopping cart which also functions as an affiliate program.

If you are selling software-based products for $25.00 or under, consider clickbank.com. It has its own affiliate program, and is a highly rated service i.e. I've not heard anyone say anything bad about it, and that is extremely rare on the internet!

16th Feb 2001. If you find a program that has all the features you need, and it costs around $70 - $150, just buy it.

Do not waste your time trying to cobble together an even cheaper solution of your own, from less complete solutions.

You'll waste a lot of valuable time trying to save a few measly bucks, while your competition is getting on with business. This applies to any software you need. By all means, research all the alternatives, but do not settle for a 'cheap-and-nasty' solution.

More: Affiliate software, CGI scripts and others that can help manage your own affiliate program:

NOTE: You can give any web page page an unlimited number of different URL's by putting a question mark and a tracking code after the main URL.

It's the basis, along with cookies and referring URL's, of all internet affiliate tracking systems.

Example: tigertom.com/index.htm?potato987 is a link to the same page as tigertom.com/index.htm as far as a web server is concerned, but the latter link shows up as a different referring URL on your order form.