Are You Ready for an Affiliate Program?

If you are a merchant and are currently selling products online you may very well be ready to run an affiliate program. There are several ways to go about it, however it ultimately depends on just one of two options. The two options are to setup, operate and maintain the affiliate program yourself or to allow a subtantiated affiliate management firm to handle it for you.

In considering which of these two options to choose and if you are indeed at the point where this makes sense, the following information may assist you in gaining the appropriate perspective. Keep in mind that you may begin down one path and transfer to the other when the time is right, it all depends on your allowed investment, time or money.

Running your own affiliate program can take a serious amount of time and effort. It can also take more money than its worth in advertising your new program to see a benefit of having it in the first place. Therefore, the first thing to do it to set up anticipated goals.

• What commissions are you going to be able to offer your affiliates?
• What length of time will you offer for leads to become sales?
• Will you be able to offer a datafeed of your products or just banners?

Some of these answers depend on your technical ability, the current configuration of your website, and your desire to make your affiliate program a complete success. Typically, and of course it all depends on your product, affiliates are given 5-25% commissions. Digital products normally have a higher commission.

Typically, leads are tracked with a 30 cookie that resides on the visitors computer. However, some merchants offer up to a lifetime tracking. As a merchant be prepared to have this argued continually. You may wish to consult an attorney to draft language regarding the inability to ensure cookies will remain on the visitors computer for an length of time especially considering the numerous security measures put in place these days within browsers, personal firewalls, and anti-spyware software.

Banner ads have been around for years. Due to this sometimes annoying factor, some of the before mentioned security measuresblock ads from displaying. In addition, user behavior has become more accustomed to ignoring these ads. Therefore, having the ability to offer a datafeed can increase sales and offer webmasters a better way to customize the display of products again increasing sales.

Since many of these topics, and there are numerous others, involve individually serious time investment and knowledge of the interworkings of many aspects of web technology. This creates an overall investment running your own affiliate program to be extensive and can be daunting to say the least.

Now imagine paying a monthly fee to have all of these things managed for you. In addition, imagine the same provider managing all of the marketing of getting webmasters to have the ability to choose your program. There are a few notable entities that do just this.

Of the bunch, and you have by now probably heard their names, Commission Junction, Linkshare, DoubleClick (recently procured by Google), there is one we recommend strongly. You may or may not have heard of Share-a-Sale, but we can ensure you they are the ones to talk to and then compare the rest to.

Share-a-Sale is a webmasters dream. Many of the other programs require special requests, untimely response via email, and just plain frustration when gaining features such as ftp access to downloads or datafeed capabilities. When it comes to actually assisting with code insertions they simply disappear.

To the contrary, Share-a-Sale affiliates, ultimately your clients, experience a webmaster friendly environment. Keeping your account properly funded, allows for webmasters to know you are trustworthy as this information is visible for every merchant they signup for.

Share-a-Sale also provides each affiliate of yours with help guides and even build-a-page environments to easily insert your code into their pages. Each of these efforts means more sales and more publicity for your products. In could prove to be worth the money.

Visit Share-a-Sale now!