Setting Up Your Own Affiliate Program

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Author: Pamela Upshur

Article source: http://www.articledeshboard.com/. Used with author's permission.

By setting up your own affiliate program, you are allowing other people to resell your service or product at their website, to their customer base, through their newsletter or any other ethical way they want to market it on the Internet. You get to set the rules on the ways your resellers are allowed to sell or represent your product. Options include paying affiliates a commission, a flat fee or per click, but this is less effective, and costs can quickly mount up.

Affiliate programs have made a "level" playing field between the big corporations and the small companies. Using Affiliate Programs makes it easy to gain the power of the larger sites and all of their traffic... and it is possible to set up an affiliate program for your own service or product without mortgaging your house!

In addition to helping you sell your products or services, an affiliate program can help to strengthen your link popularity in the search engines by gaining the links that each of your affiliates will place on their Web pages back to your site.

To get started, you will need to create a process for accepting and processing new affiliate applications, come up with eye-catching graphics and links, and develop a system for making payments based on results. To set something like this up from scratch can be a daunting task. Fortunately, there are a number of online services that you can sign up with to get started. One such Web site is Affiliate Shop.com This service won't be free though. As of this writing, Affiliate Shop.com was charging a $45 monthly service fee. For this fee, you get the HTML you need to add to your Web page, along with all kinds of other goodies, like ad tracking, support for an unlimited number of affiliates, and support for a tiered commission system.

Another service to consider is Affiliate Zone.com As of this writing, there is a $149 set up charge and a $34.95 monthly fee for the Affiliate Tracking Network's basic service. The Affiliate Tracking Network offers a number of different affiliate program packages, allowing you to grow your affiliate program to any size.

Yes, you can do it... but it takes an investment of time and a small investment of money to do it right!

Pamela Upshur is the owner of Upshur Creative. Upshur Creative combines fresh, contemporary, fully functional turnkey websites with the best PHP scripts and databases to create the largest and most comprehensive turnkey collection for entrepreneurs. Visit her site at: Turnkey Home Based Business.