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Setting up an affiliate
programme
by Veronica Yuill
An affiliate programme has become a
"must have" feature for any e-commerce site that takes itself
seriously. Put simply, you encourage other website owners to send
you potential customers by paying commission on sales referred by
them. The benefit to the affiliates is that they can add useful
features or products to their site which will interest their
visitors and earn them money at the same time.
A well-run programme will recruit an
army of willing salespeople to promote your products. But the
very success of the affiliate concept means that in any given
market niche there are scores or hundreds of programmes for your
potential partners to choose from. That means you have to make
yours stand out.
- Obviously your product or service has to offer quality and
value so that people will want to promote it.
- You must reward your partners fairly -- don't just treat them
as a cheap way of driving traffic to your site.
- It should be easy for affiliates to link to you and to be
credited for the sales they bring.
- The software you use must reliably track referred sales.
Affiliates will ultimately become suspicious and abandon your
programme if they think they are not being credited properly for
the visitors they send you.
- The programme should allow affiliates to link in ways that
suit them (e.g. banners on web pages, text links in newsletters,
links to specific products).
- Affiliates should be able to check what they are owed
whenever they like.
- You should value and support your affiliates, for example by
rewarding the most active ones with higher commissions, and
sending out a regular newsletter highlighting new addtions to
your site or suggesting ways of improving performance.
Where do I start?
So, setting up an affiliate programme
is a "no-brainer". Having decided, though, how are you going to
implement it? You basically have three choices:
- Use a third party such as Commission Junction or
Be Free.
Advantage: they do all of the setup, administration, and payment
of affiliates so you don't have to worry about a thing except
promoting the programme. Downside: it's expensive (a hefty setup
fee, plus monthly charges and/or commissions on sales) -- and you
have minimal control over the the programme's costs and
functionality.
- Set up your own in-house system. It
will work exactly the way you want it to, and you'll have
complete control over it. It will probably require more time and
effort to set up and maintain though, especially if you write
software yourself rather than buying it in. And you will be
responsible for making sure that it's up and running at all
times. If you only sell a single product that you produce
yourself, you may be able to find a straightforward CGI-type
program that will do the job. A good place to start looking is
CGI-Resources -- search for "affiliate programs".
- Use an "application service provider"
(ASP). Companies providing "bolt on" services for websites via
the Internet are becoming increasingly common. The most popular
are remotely hosted search services like Picosearch or Atomz which
let you add a site search facility to your site without doing any
programming. But this concept has now spread to affiliate
programmes as well, offering a kind of halfway house between the
first two options I mentioned above. You have control over the
working of the programme, administer it yourself, and issue your
own commission cheques, but all the software and affiliate
records are hosted on the ASP's server. It's cheaper than
Commission Junction and Be Free, with no commission to pay to the
supplier, while at the same time relieving you of the
responsibility of installing and maintaining software, backing up
critical affiliate data and so on. The downside: you don't have
total control over functionality, as you would with an in-house
system, and you obviously have to be confident that the ASP you
choose is reliable and responsive.
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Case study
Choosing a programme
When looking for an affiliate
programme for History Bookshop.com, we initially settled on the
first option mentioned above, and approached Commission Junction, the
market leader. But as part of my investigation I signed up as an
affiliate with CJ, and found it incredibly difficult to sign up
with a merchant, get the appropriate linking code, and include
banners on my site. If I as an IT professional can't work it out,
I thought, what chance do our potential affiliates have? One of
our key target markets is local history societies and family
history researchers -- most of these people are maintaining sites
in their spare time, so we needed to make linking as easy as
possible for people who are for the most part not IT experts.
We needed to launch quickly and
didn't have time or resources to pursue the second option -- an
in-house program -- so I set out to look for an ASP. A personal
recommendation landed me at My Affiliate Program (MAP). I took a look around
their site, liked the look of it, and provided my email address
in order to take a "virtual tour" of the programme. At this point
they neatly shot themselves in the foot, because over the next
few days I was constantly bombarded with email telling me about
this, that and the other feature of the programme. In the end I
got so fed up of it I sent them an email begging them to stop, or
I would cross them off my shortlist -- and was disarmed by a
friendly and apologetic reply from a real person! My subsequent
questions and concerns during the evaluation process were all
answered promptly and helpfully and I ended up confident that
they could provide what we needed. They charge an initial setup
fee, then a monthly software rental fee (currently $50 a month)
-- there are no commissions on sales.
Setting up the programme
So, we signed up and within hours had
received a phone call confirming that everything was OK, plus an
email directing us to our password-protected administration area.
All the administration of the programme is done online via a web
browser, with ample online help, and I found the programme very
easy to set up. You can make life easy for yourself by just using
the standard affiliate sign-up pages provided, but we preferred
to integrate them into our site. This was simply a matter of
pasting the code from the supplied pages into one of our standard
page templates and uploading them to our server. I did find a
couple of bugs while testing the affiliate sign-up procedure but
their programmer came up with fixes within hours. The sign-up
procedure turned out to be very slick -- the affiliate fills in
an application form and receives a personalised email within
minutes which includes the exact code that should be pasted into
their pages in order to start earning commissions. MAP's
administration interface lets the merchant easily customise all
the text that appears in emails sent to affiliates.
Detailed instructions for integrating
affiliate tracking into your shopping basket or order form are
also given. These, supplemented with prompt replies from their
programmers to my questions, were enough to enable me to make the
necessary changes to our custom shopping basket -- in fact this
turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. MAP provide
several different methods of tracking orders, which means that
you are bound to find at least one that will work with your
particular setup.
I was also concerned about whether
affiliates could link to individual product pages on the site,
since these are all dynamically generated from a database. No
problem, the programmer told me. I tried it, and he was right.
Overall, it only took me about a day's work to get everything set
up and ready to roll.
Running the programme
So far, we've only used the basic
functions provided by MAP. However, the system also offers a host
of ways of fine-tuning your affiliate programme. You can set up
different affiliate types, paying different commission rates; run
special limited-time promotions which switch themselves on and
off automatically on the specified dates; run a 2-tier programme;
send email to all your affiliates; and create "empowerment
categories" offering affiliates different ways of linking
(including rotating banners and full web pages). All this is
easily managed from MAP's browser-based interface. When it's time
to cut the cheques you simply select an option which runs a
report showing who is due what. You can even export selected data
to your accounting package or any other software that accepts
comma-delimited text files. And add-on features such as their opt-in mailing list software offer you some
powerful ways of generating more traffic and keeping your
affiliates happy.
In fact, I liked MAP so much that I
signed up for their affiliate programme!
© Archetype IT Ltd, 2000
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