A great way to gain leverage with your business is to offer an affiliate program. An affiliate program is when you offer a sales commission for any sales that a third parties gets for your products and/or services. The great thing about it is that you only pay commission for actual sales received and may be a cheaper alternative for you, than marketing your business online. However, you should always have a good marketing mix – the more the better!
What affiliate program to choose depends on the type of business you are in, what you want to offer through your affiliate program, how many people you think you can realistically enroll onto your affiliate program and your technical skills.
First you need to decide whether you want to administer your affiliate program yourself, which can be a cheaper option if your budget is tight, but it can also be time consuming, or you can set up your affiliate program on a third party website, which can save you lots of time and the charges do vary, so shop around.
One of the cheapest and quickest way to set up your own affiliate program is through EJunkie. I’ve used this to sell downloadable products in the past and it’s very easy to set up and it only costs $5 per month for up to 20 products and it’s free to set up. You upload your downloadable product to the EJunkie website and they distribute it for you with every sale and then send you the payment directly to your Paypal account. There is a free trial with it, so you have nothing to lose!
Another great affiliate program that you administer inhouse is idevaffiliate which is a downloadable software program that you upload to your website. You then have the control over your affiliate program and can have as many products as you want, pay your affiliates yourself and other than the cost of the software, there is no other charges so it can be very cost effective over time.
As Internet Growth Systems is built on the Joomla platform, I chose to use a Joomla extension for my affiliate program and to administer it inhouse. It’s not perfect as I would prefer a better and more flexible affiliate center, however with 1 payment you get the software and can install it into unlimited Joomla websites, which was just what I was looking for at the time.
So if you are thinking of starting your own affiliate program, decide what your must have features are and then prioritize these features.
lesley….. have you ever used idevaffilates? or do you know anyone that has. It looks a good product
Hi Alix,
I’ve known a few people who have and have seen the backend of it through the eyes of an affiliate and it is a great product. If the Joomla/idevaffiliate extension ever gets better then I would seriously consider swapping over to it.
If you need any help with it, please let me know.