Setting up a successful affiliate program can help you sell your products like crazy. The reason is that you can sign up hundreds or even thousands of affiliates, and they will promote your products. You only reward them if they can make sales. Compared to banner advertising and ezine advertising, it is far more effective and cost- justified. At least, You get a team of powerful "pay-for-performance only" sales force. More probably, they will sell your products on their websites by putting a personal endorsement article there, adding a banner of your products, and selling your products on their e-zine AND You just pay when they can sell.

Now, I suggest you sit down and think thoroughly: The first step of "How to set up your affiliate program?"

YES! You are right.

The first step is to establish a back-end system for running your own affiliate program.

How? You can either buying an affiliate tracking software or employ an affiliate service provider. Both solutions have their merits. You must make your right decision or else your own affiliate program gives you a lot of trouble or even ruins your business.

To make a wise decision, you must ask yourself several questions:

1. Do I have the capacity and willingness to deal with affiliate administration jobs like signing check and sending check on time for each affiliate? How about Accounting?

2. Do I have a budget to sign up tons of high quality affiliates?

3. Do I have the ability to handle customer billing and billing inquiries?

4. Do I want to buy, install, manage and later update software? (It may consume you considerable amount of time)

5. Am I confident enough that my affiliates have trust on me so that they're willing to sign up?

6. Do I have experience in affiliate fraud management?

My SUGGESTION: If most of your answers are YES, THEN BUYING an affiliate tracking software is a good choice. On the contrary, I suggest you EMPLOYING an affiliate program service provider.

Buying Your Own Affiliate Tracking Software

To use your own affiliate software and run your program by yourself, you must install a powerful affiliate tracking software and plan for how to run the back-end administration jobs. The Pros of this approach is that you only spend a one-time fee to buy a software. The cons is that you need to handle administration jobs like check preparation and etc. It is quite time-consuming and incurs administration cost. However, if you have the ability to do it, GO for it.

Employing Affiliate Program Service Provider

The pros of using an affiliate service provider to handle your affiliate program is that they handle nearly every administration job. These administration jobs are not only tedious and troublesome, but also incur cost. Sometimes, this cost is very high. If you use an affiliate program service provider to handle your affiliate program, you can really spend more time on developing your e-business. A really good affiliate program service provider can help you handle check payment & software updates, has a network to help you sign up more affiliates, offer a flexible affiliate program structure, and generate all necessary reports for you and your affiliates. If you have only a small team of employee or even no employee, it is wise to use an affiliate service provider except you have the time to manage the administration jobs.

FOR DETAIL of how to choose your affiliate tracking software or affiliate program service provider? Click and read the long version of this article at:
www.addto.com/aff4.shtml?ne

FOR DETAIL of how to promote your program, click and read these two articles:
www.addto.com/ten.shtml?ne
www.addto.com/aff2.shtml?ne