How to Setup an Affiliates Program to Promote your Website

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by Michael Wong

Instead of trying to promote your website by yourself, why get other people to help you? You don't even have to pay them until they pass orders your way. So, how can you do this? With an affiliate program, which is also known as an associate or partner program.

How does it work?
You simply get other websites to place a link on their website that links to yours. When someone clicks on this link and gets transferred to your website, some form of identification code is attached to this visitor. Any subsequent purchases are logged and you simply pay the referring website owner a fixed fee or percentage of the sale. It's like have lots of agents out there selling your products for you.

How do I find these agents?
You can go look for them and have them look for you. First you can advertise the fact that you have an affiliates program on your website, with a link that says something like, "link to us and make money", or "affiliate program, partners wanted". You can list your affiliate program with some of these websites devoted to affiliate programs. You can also look for agents by visiting other people's websites and contacting those you would like links from.

What types of websites should I sign up?
Ideally, they should be websites that compliment yours in some way and not compete directly, i.e. If you sell women's jewelry, then look for websites devoted to women or women's fashion. Check out the website first, before you sign them up. Ask them how many visitors do they get a month. You don't want to waste your time signing up someone who has little or no traffic.

How much commission should I offer?
This is entirely up to you. I have seen websites offer anything from 3% to 50% commission. I would suggest something in the range of 10%-20%. Once the customer has ordered from you, they are likely to come back to you again. Quite often they will return to you directly, which means you don't have to pay the person who referred the customer to you in the first place, a second time. You can offer a different commission rate to each party. Be sure to specify some time limit on the agreement. You may want to renegotiate the percentage when you renew it, or even not renew, if they don't send you a significant amount of traffic. Some stores offer credit as a way of commission for you to spend in their store. I would suggest offering hard cash, as cash is always more attractive, isn't it?

How often should I pay?
That's up to you. You can pay monthly, quarterly or half yearly. Obviously if you pay too often, you can waste a lot of time writing a large number of checks for small amounts. One way of getting around this, is by specifying that you will only send checks for commissions above a certain amount, say $50.00.

How do I set up an affiliates program?
You can set up the affiliate program yourself with one of the many scripts available. You would need some technical knowledge to be able to set this up yourself. However, I would recommend that you use one of these affiliate program hosts that are online. They will publicize your affiliate program for you and the setup procedure is relatively simple.

Many of the big websites have used affiliate programs to great effect and admit that they have contributed a great deal to their success. So why not set one up for your website, today!