Affiliate Programs - Roll Your Own

By Darcy McDonald
Posted Wednesday, August 11, 2004

There is no better way to bring traffic to your site (other than the search engines) than starting your own affiliate program.

With an affiliate program, you pay money to sites that can send in customers who will purchase your products or services. This encourages your affiliates to make sure your banner advertising and ad copy is displayed in prominent places on their sites - the more people they send to you, the more people that buy, and the more money both you and your affiliate makes! It's truly a win-win situation, and is becoming hugely popular on the Internet today.

Over the next few months, this column will cover the main points of setting up an affiliate program, and some of the pitfalls to watch out for.

The first step is to find some software that will allow you to track your affiliates, so that you can determine who has sent you paying customers, and make sure every affiliate is properly paid for their commissions. We at Babblebot have always opted to build our own CGI programs to do this. It allows for tight integration with our billing system, and it is harder for people to manipulate it for their own good when it is proprietary code. But if you don't feel up to writing your affiliate program scripts from scratch, there's some good news! We recommend you purchase one of the many great scripts found at (http://www.cgi-resources.com). Just go into Programs & Scripts, Perl, Website Promotion, Affiliate Programs, and find one that suits your purpose.

There are lots of companies making this kind of software. If none of the ones there look suitable, just do a search in (http://www.altavista.com) or (http://www.hotbot.com) for "affiliate program software" and all sorts of sites will come up! Take the time to find the right solution for your company. Preferably one
that is cost effective, and performs the necessary functions you need AND offers some support from the seller. You may be able to purchase integration services with the software, allowing you to easily get someone else to set your affiliate tracking up with little difficulty (although this is certainly more expensive).
This step really depends on your skill level or the skill level of your webmaster. If you are really confident you can do it yourself (and maintain it afterwards), build one. If you're in the middle somewhere, buy one and set it up yourself. And finally if you are a hands off person totally, just pick up some software and find an integration specialist to hook it all up for you.

So we have software and it is installed and working. Now what? Your homework for next month will be to create some ad copy for others to use to sell your product/services, gather some testimonials from your site or your customers, and create at LEAST two banner ads (one should be 468x60..normal banner ad, and one should be 88x31 or so). We will show you how to register with some affiliate portal sites, and how to promote your affiliate program on your own site! See you next month!

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About the author:
Darcy MacDonald operates Babblebot, an excellent new site
dedicated to search engine submission, ranking, and
optimization services.

To find out how you can use the new doorway page
generator to get a top ranking position in all the major
search engines, visit (http://www.babblebot.com) today!