Thread: Starting an Affiliate Programme

Hi,

I have been thinking about starting an affiliate programme and giving a comission for sales comming from affiliate leads.

I was wondering if anyone has run an affiliate programme before and if there are any good tips and tricks.

I have talked to three affiliate networks who wont touch us as we dont deal with the general public so will have to do this alone without a big brand backing us up.

My hope is to get free advertising like banners displayed on wholesale forums and other resources and if people click on the ads we pay the person who displayed them on a performance basis. In theory there is nothing for us to lose as we will only have to pay based on results. I can think of loads of web directories that have a wholesale section that would probably put a banner at the top if they get a comission for sales. It wont cost them anything either so they cant lose too. It seems like a win win all around.

What do you think?

Since I didnt get any response to this thread I have sent the email below to a number of trade websites and forums in my nieche to guage reaction to my idea.

We have been thinking about starting a wholesale affiliate programme and paying for advertising on a results basis. The idea being to get adverts displayed on wholesale and trade related website and pay people based on results - we just don’t have a big enough marketing budget to advertise everywhere we want to.

Before setting out on this adventure I was wondering if you would consider displaying our adverts in an affiliate manner - where by we pay you a percentage of the sales resulting from your website.

We probably wont be go down this route if we cant get an agreement in principal from some of the trade sites we would like our adverts to be on (like yours). So this message is my first attempt to gauge reactions.

Sorry - have only just seen this thread. Have you tried Affiliate Future? They seem to be pretty good, and do deal with smaller advertisers. www.affiliatefuture.co.uk if you want to have a look

Originally Posted by Lorna

Sorry - have only just seen this thread. Have you tried Affiliate Future? They seem to be pretty good, and do deal with smaller advertisers. www.affiliatefuture.co.uk if you want to have a look

Hi Lorna, No I havent. I called Comission Junction and Affiliate Window - neither of them wanted to touch a wholesaler as we dont sell to the general public and dont display pricing, etc. I will give them a call later on.


On another note I have had 2 positive responses to my affiliate advertising email to a couple of the website I would like my adverts on. I am thinking I should run my own affiliate programme at the moment, it would be nice to have a big affiliate network actively marketing for affiliates on our behalf tho so I may change my mind.

I have found that Commission Junction/Buy at only seem to deal with big companies selling to the public. You may have more joy with Affiliate Future as they have a wide range of advertisers. Also have you looked at www.affiliates4u.com/forums - this may be useful for you.

I am glad you have had a positive response from your enquiries so far though!

Originally Posted by Lorna

I am glad you have had a positive response from your enquiries so far though!

Thanks Lorna. I have had three positive responses from sites I would like to advertise on but cant afford too. My boss has also agreed to this in principal but we need to work out the comission percentages, cookie lengths, etc. I think we can go live within 10 days.

I am not sure if it is worth having a big affiliate company behind us as they will already have websites that would go with us so would give us a bit of a push at the beginning, it will cost us a higher comisison percentage tho.

Has anyone ever run an affiliate programme? If so what do you think about the depth of tiers? Is it worth having more than one tier?

OMFG this is hard.

I have installed an affiliate contribution for oscommerce to make life easier. Thats was the plan anyways but nothing ever works out like the plan.

I have something like 80-100 different oscommerce mods and contributions installed. 2 big ones gave me one hell of a time these were the simple template system (STS) and must login to see prices.

1) Oscommerce with STS & OSC Affiliate
The two dont work together out of the box. I have had to trick the STS contribution into displaying the affiliate info box. No biggie but took me a while to figure out. Also the quick help within the new affiliate screens just dont work with sts as the little popup windows get drawn with my huge template that the rest of the site is in. I will fix this one later as I am working on getting it functional and not too worried about cosmetics like quick help.

2) Must Login to See Prices Mod & OSC Affiliate
This one is another biatch, as an affiliate you have to login to get to your affiliate summary screens. On my site you also have to login to the oscommerce shopping cart to see any pricing, minimum order quantities and the like. The problem is that when an affiliate logs in he dosent actually log in to the shopping cart so cant see the comission generated without logging into both. I have has to rewrite the way pricing gets displayed so that when an affiliate is logged in they can see prices regardless.

DOH. I got another biggie.

I have been looking at my mod rewrites and what happens with visitors that follow an affiliate link to my site.

Basically they arrive at a page using non rewritten URL's and get redirected (server side) to the page with rewritten urls but with an appended affiliate id. I think the serach engines are going to go nuts as I now will have an entire version of my site indexed for each affiliate that search engine finds a link for.

Its now been a week since I started considering an affiliate programme. I have done research, lookad at rivals, etc. Got agreements in principle with webmasters of some of the sites I want my banners to be on. I even got my boss to agree.

Now all I have to do is make it work. So far I have rewritten about 50% of the affiliate contribution just to make it work with my other mods.

WHY DID I EVER START THIS? grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

(Ok so I am getting frustrated!!!!!!!)

Don't get frustrated, at least there are no losses.