An integral part of marketing a pay site, online store, or service successfully is recruiting affiliates to assist in the promotions of your site, for a profit. For amateur sites and mega sites or if you have multiple sites, an affiliate program can help take some of the marketing pressure off of you, the webmaster, and allow you more time and energy for maintenance and quality additions to your site.
But what are the pitfalls and advantages to setting up an affiliate program for your site? How do you go about setting one up and running it successfully? How can you avoid fraud and "bad affiliates"? Who provides the software, cuts the checks, and handles the financial work? There are options to everything and this article is meant to lay them all out and allow you to decide what situation is best for you.
The overall advantage of having an affiliate program is simple: It is an economical and feasible way to avoid high advertising costs by allowing you to create partners who send you traffic under a referral code and you pay per the performance of your ad/site's conversions and retention. Running a pay site is a big job, with so many responsibilities to watch over many webmasters do not end up with much time for marketing. By having hundreds or thousands of affiliates you can exponentially increase the chance for overall success of your site.
The disadvantages are related to lack of control. By having affiliates, especially a large number, you can find yourself losing control over how your site is represented, to what market, and take on the responsibility of not only paying yourself and keeping your site maintained, you are also responsible for getting your affiliates paid. The issue of most concern is chargeback's. If an affiliate is misrepresenting your site and entices a surfer to join, and what the surfer gets is not what they were lead to believe, a chargeback can occur. In the same respect, affiliates can defraud their system by running stolen card numbers through to your site causing a fraud nightmare. Too many chargeback's, and you can lose your ability to process Visa.
Aim for quality affiliates over quantity.
Most credit card and payment processors will include an affiliate program software and service with your account. These companies include top names like CCBill, and IBill. An included revenue sharing program takes out the leg work, however if you do not have the option, external options are available. For instance, TabooTracking will handle not only your software, but accounting and check cutting as well. If you use your processor, checks will be cut to your affiliates by your processor. It is recommended to use your processor, however if your payment module fails, so do your affiliate checks, so make a decision in the best interests of all parties. Remember the more payment options you provide to your surfers that can be tracked using your affiliate program setup, the better your chances to make sales.
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Avoiding fraud and bad affiliates is just a matter of conservatism versus greed. Considering that your affiliate transactions are your transactions, you must scrutinize and consider what affiliates you decide to take on since the quality of the transactions they send can have a direct effect on your merchant status. If you only have a few "applications" per week for new affiliates, see if you can review them each individually before they receive their account setup information. Take a look at their website, consider their geographic location and your ability to convert traffic from that region, if your affiliate program management and accounting system can cut checks to this person or processing transactions from that region (avoid affiliates who drive traffic from regions with high instances of fraud or where chargeback resolution is difficult or impossible), and carefully review their site. When you review a potential affiliates' site ask yourself a few questions: Is this a site I want to see my banners flying on? Do I want my site represented here? How do they represent other sponsors? Check for illegal content and use Google to type in the domain name (with or without the .com) plus an "illegal" keyword like "Lolita" or "Pre Teen", and carefully review the site for illegal content as well. When you maintain high standards for your affiliates the growth may be slower but more controlled and in the long run, more successful.
Your responsibilities as the site owner is to keep your site maintained, updated and introduce new and exciting features your affiliates can promote - be it new content additions to your site or online interactive special features. New banners will help keep new and old surfers interested in clicking on your banners, so good promotional material and tools are very helpful.
So what other components are keys to a successful affiliate program? Good stats, presentation, and billing solution. Make a custom entrance for affiliates to send you traffic. If you have traffic trades, exchanges, stores, or other traffic leaks on your main page that may take away your affiliates chance at a sale. If you must have a links page or other external links on your site, keep them discreet.
Give affiliates incentives. Don't be afraid to reward affiliates for top sales for the month or offer prizes or membership incentives they can promote to surfers. And to keep affiliates happy, keep in contact with them and keep giving them something new to promote, either updates to your site, samples of the content from your latest update or site news. Consider that about 80% of all affiliates that join may never send any traffic or a sale, communication is key. Send out regular mailers to keep new and old affiliates interested in your program.
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