Custom Affiliate System: Guide for Merchants

As a business owner, having your own product or service to sell, you're probably always thinking of ways to grow your business.

In general, the rule of thumb is:

More (qualified) sales people = More sales = Increased profits

The problem is, most businesses are not sufficiently systemized, to go from 1 sales person, to 10, to 100, while effectively managing all teams, watching expenses and turning a profit through it all.

Affiliates are offsite sales people who work on commission only, requiring no training and no management. Affiliates will spend their own money to advertise your business, driving qualified traffic to your website and getting paid a commission only when a referral makes a purchase.

These affiliates will take the time to study your business, your unique selling point and your competition, coming up with different ways to drive business, all on their own dime.

What's the catch?

Affiliates have thousands of products & services they can choose to promote. To ensure they pick yours, you need to:

1. Offer generous commissions (10% to 30%)
2. Have a product/service with high demand.
3. Be competitive in the price or value you deliver to end customers.

What type of businesses use Affiliates?

Just about every company with an online store, offers an affiliate program, paying affiliates a commission for sales they refer. Companies such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, eBay, Yahoo, BlockBuster, PizzaHut and Macys are just some examples of merchants with affiliate programs.

Merchants with affiliate programs range in size from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

How does Affiliate Marketing work?

Affiliates pay Google/MSN/Yahoo to promote your business in the search engines, they buy banners and launch Email Marketing campaigns, all designed to drive qualified traffic to your website.

When a visitor lands on your website, a tracking cookie is stored on their machine to identify the referring affiliate.

From that point on, for a period of 30 days (timeframe can be adjusted), whenever this visitor makes a purchase, your affiliate system will credit a commission to the referring affiliate. Affiliates are typically paid NET+30.

One of the great benefits of using affiliates is that you only pay for results. Affiliates who are not generating any sales for your business, are never paid and you owe them nothing.

Setting up an Affiliate System

An affiliate system is a piece of software that integrates with your website's shopping cart, allowing visitor tracking, reporting and web-based management of all affiliate accounts.

There are three types of affiliates systems you can consider:

1. Standalone Affiliate System: Full-source code, installs on your own server.

Pros: Full control. You can customize ANYTHING
Cons: Long setup time (weeks to months). Runs from your single server. No built-in redundancy, no load balancing

Samples: DirectTrack.com, AFFCommerce.com

2. Affiliate Network: Fully managed service, nothing to install.

Pros: Instant setup, Commissions paid automatically from your account, Managed service, Exposure to super affiliates
Cons: No control, 5% management fee

Samples: CommissionJunction, AzoogleAds, ShareASale and other affiliate networks

3. Custom Hosted Affiliate System: Web-based hosted solution.

Pros: Full user interface customization, Instant setup, Built-in tools for affiliates, Managed service
Cons: Customization required, pay per active affiliate

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Assuming you have a functional shopping cart or lead-capture website, the quickest way to recruit affiliates is, listing your program on Affiliate Networks as described above.

You get instant exposure to all super affiliates in each network and many of those affiliates love to try out new programs.

When you need more control, it's time to look into your own Custom Hosted Affiliate System. Many merchants offer their affiliate program on several affiliate networks as well as an in-house custom affiliate system.

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SoftwareProjects Custom Affiliate System

Software Projects Custom Affiliate System, built on our experience working with merchants in various industries, was designed from the ground up to offer all the control & customization you need, without the hassle of ever having to install anything on your server.

Some of the features, not found in any other affiliate system, include:

* Built-in Affiliate's Contact Manager
* Built-in Affiliate's Email Marketing
* Built-in Affiliate's Analytics
* Cookie-less tracking
* Multi-tier commission structure

Sample Deployment of SoftwareProjects Custom Affiliate System

Affiliates login to the system from a login page on your website:



* All screens and system email messages can be fully customized to match your brand and website look & feel.

Once logged-in, affiliates arrive at a custom back-office that appears as a direct extension of your website.

The affiliate's back-office features: Analytics, a Lead manager, Customer manager, Forums, multiple Landing pages and various performance reports.



You can offer your affiliates up to 50 unique Landing Pages to promote your business. Every landing page is private labeled to the referring affiliate.

In the example below, the unique subdomain 'Joanne_Blaser', tracks all sales to the referring affiliate Joanne Blaser:



All Joanne has to do is promote her unique affiliate link, using PPC, Email, Banners or any other form of advertising.

Users who land on Joanne's landing page will either be redirected to your main website, or presented with a lead-capture form.

In this particular case, the company is using lead-capture pages to qualify leads.

Let's go ahead and signup under Joanne's http://joanne_blaser.Capital4Growth.com page:



As soon as I signup, a special email prepared by our customer goes out to Joanne, letting her know I just signed up under her page:



Joanne has complete visibility into the state of all leads she referred from her affiliate's back-office and Joanne will be notified as soon as the lead makes a purchase, resulting in immediate commission payment to Joanne.