An affiliate program allows a company the opportunity to ‘partner’ with other site owners (usually webmasters) in hopes of selling more products and/or developing more leads. Affiliate programs generally offer their affiliates (members of their affiliate program) a percentage of the sale or in some cases a straight fee for leads generated.

Many of the Internet’s largest companies have put their affiliate programs in place and are generating millions in additional revenue as a result. Companies like Amazon.Com have experienced enormous success with their programs (and you can too).

If you are thinking of starting an affiliate program for your company; you will have to consider the following:

1. What are the products that your affiliates are allowed to sell? Some companies don’t have a large profit margin for certain products and prefer not to include them in the affiliate program.
2. What methods of promotion/selling are you willing to allow? For example, some companies will not allow affiliates to promote their products via email for fear of SPAM complaints and others will allow just about any type of promotion ranging from radio to web.
3. How much are you willing to pay your affiliates? This is something that only the affiliate program owner can determine. On average affiliate programs that sell products normally offer from 1% to 5% commissions on all sales, while others simply offer a flat fee for any sales (or leads) generated by the affiliate.
4. What software (see below) will you use to track all affiliate sales? There are various out-of-the-box solutions available to companies like myaffiliateprogram.com, idevdirect.com and many others. Do your research and find the right solution for you.

Developing a good affiliate program can be very instrumental in getting the sales and leads your web site needs to succeed.

Affiliate Software

In order to run your own affiliate program you will need an affiliate software system to power it. Affiliate Software can be set up on your own web site or you can simply use a 3rd party provider to manage the service for you. Below are a few software solutions available online:

Affiliate Software for your site:

• http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/
• http://www.idevdirect.com/
• http://www.affiliateshop.com/

Hosted Affiliate Software

• http://www.affiliatetracking.com/
• http://www.allaffiliatepro.com/
• http://www.allmerchants.com/Tool.Affiliate-Software.cg.38.htm

These are just a few examples (we do not endorse these products) so you can get an idea of the different affiliate software options available. Performing a search on Google for affiliate program software will give you plenty of web sites and products to start your research.

See more about affiliate programs on WikiPedia »